When cinematographers become auteurs

The idea of the director-cinematographer is not new — Nicolas Roeg, Néstor Almendros, Barry Sonnenfeld and Wally Pfister all crossed the line before the current generation — but the past five years have produced an unusually rich crop of cinematographers who are taking the director's chair without leaving the camera behind. The trend is worth watching, because it produces films with a specific kind of internal logic.

Bradford Young, Reed Morano and Rachel Morrison have all moved into directing with varying degrees of success. The best of these transitions share a common trait: the director-cinematographer is unusually disciplined about what the camera is asked to do. There is less coverage, longer takes, more precomposition, and a stronger sense of where the eye should be during any given beat. It is a way of making cinema that puts the frame ahead of the shot list.

The most interesting recent example is Tunde Kelani, whose new film sees him back behind the camera at seventy-eight. The film is uneven, but the visual literacy is undeniable — he stages a family dinner as if it were a landscape painting, and cuts to close-up only once in the whole scene. Younger Nigerian directors should be studying this the way Wong Kar-wai studied Yasujirō Ozu.

The counter case, of course, is that the great directors have always been fluent visualists — Kubrick, Hitchcock, Kurosawa — without ever having been cinematographers by trade. Directing is a different discipline; being good at one is not a prerequisite for being good at the other. Fair enough. But the DP-director model produces a specific texture that is worth noticing when you see it.

What the trend also does, quietly, is shift power inside the industry. When cinematographers can direct, their above-the-line rates rise, their agents get more leverage, and the department itself gets pulled further up the credit hierarchy. That is a healthier equilibrium than the one where the DP is treated as a technician for hire. Watch the next five years — this is the story to follow.