It’s ironic that a quarter of the way into the 21st century, when studios have seemingly accepted home streaming as their primary means of movie distribution, DP Lol Crawley has earned an Oscar nomination for “The Brutalist,” shot on VistaVision, a widescreen film process developed by Paramount Pictures in 1954 to help lure viewers away from their living room TVs and into the theaters.
Used for such films as John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” VistaVision was designed as a competitor to 20th Century Fox’s Cinema- Scope, which employed an anamorphic lens to compress a widescreen image on to standard 35mm film stock.
“As opposed to pulling the film down vertically in a motion picture camera, it’s actually pulling it horizontally across eight perforations at a time,” explains Crawley. “So you end up with a bigger format, and that means that you’re not forced to shoot on wider angle lenses for a wider field of view.”
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For his Oscar-nominated work on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” cinematographer Greig Fraser used modern digital cameras (Arri’s Alexa Mini LF and Alexa 65) that are certified to be used for a more recent large format exhibition process, Imax. But he used old-fashioned natural light to make the sci-fi epic’s most challenging sequence — a wild sandworm ride, shot over the course of 44 days — feel organic and real.
“You’ll watch a film, and you’ll rarely see somebody front-lit,” says Fraser, who won an Oscar for the first “Dune” in 2022. “You’ll mostly see people backlit, which is a little bit magical, but we do it and we get away with it. For this, it was important that the sun came from one direction, and it’s very clear where the sun comes from because you have a lit side of the sand dune and a shadow side, which means that we could not cheat this placement.”
First-time Oscar nominee Paul Guilhaume designed his lighting scheme for “Emilia Pérez” to support the narrative arc of the film’s title character. In the first act, he bathed scenes in darkness to match the state of mind of drug lord Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), who wants to disappear and undergo gender reassignment surgery. When the transition process begins and the cartel leader begins her new life as Emilia (also Gascón), the lighting becomes brighter, reflecting her empowerment and optimism. In the third act, the film descends into darkness once again.
In director Robert Eggers’ gothic retelling of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic “Nosferatu,” Oscar nominated cinematographer Jarin Blaschke used camera movement and lighting effects to make viewers feel disoriented and unsure of what they’ll see next.
In the scene that first introduces Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), “we’re using great distance and darkness outside the staircase, and he’s fragmented,” says Blaschke, who was previously nominated for Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” in 2020. “Then we come up, he’s gone again. Then you see him as a true silhouette against the fire.”
For Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” about the final weeks of legendary soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), nominee Edward Lachman used a fluid camera and a variety of film stocks (35mm color for the main narrative, 35mm black-and-white for her memories and 16mm for her imagination) to evoke the over the-top drama of an opera production.
“As she even states in the film, ‘Opera doesn’t have to be realistic. It’s about the emotion,’” says Lachman, who has three previous nominations and no wins. “What I tried to do in the color and in the movement was create a heightened reality in the storytelling, so you felt like you were in her world.”