Early this year, Rachel Morrison became the first woman to receive an Oscar nomination
for Best Cinematography: a historic achievement.In this video essay we will try to analyze her
work through three fundamental keys.
In the first years of her career, Morrison
shot several documentaries. Reaction, reality, natural light…
Today, we will not necessarily
find these elements in all her films, but if you watch some of them, you will have
the feeling that her images always tell the truth. There is always this feeling of captured
reality, the truth filmed by the camera and projected in front of your eyes.
Rachel Morrison herself has recognized that all the documentaries that she made were a great school for her.
Above all, Morrison is a portraitist of emotions.
She can do it with close shots… or with
wide open shots that connect to the exact emotion of the narration at that precise moment.
Always with emotion as her guide, Morrison understands her work as a collaboration, and
that is why it is so complicated to find two films in her career with the same visual style.
Morrison belongs to a generation of DPs that understand that everyone in the
crew must share the same vision. It is something that can also be found in DPs like Matthew
Libatique or Bradford Young, among others.
Take a look, for example, at the difference
between the two films she has made with Ryan Coggler: ‘Fruitvale station’ and 'Black Panther'.
Anyway, in her works lighting and framing always
depend on the emotional needs of the scene. For example, in 'Mudbound,' look at how she lights
the ideal America... and the real America.
As a young cinematographer, Rachel Morrison
is used to working with digital cameras, but she has great respect for film.
Speaking to FilmComment, Morrison said that having filmed ‘Mudbound’ digitally, in retrospect,
she would have filmed all the daily work on film and only night work in digital. She
also added that as a painter, you want to have oil paintings and watercolors, and losing
any of them would be devastating... It's certainly important that young filmmakers like Rachel
Morrison also defend the survival of film.