FREE CINEMA NOW

#InformedImages is a Free Cinema Now series that studies and brings to light influential films and other examples of moving images that informed and inspired specific visuals in later works. Roger Deakins may very well win his first Oscar this Sunday March 4th at the 90th Academy Awards ceremony for Best Cinematography for his work in Blade Runner 2049 . Deakins has never won an Academy Award before -- even though he's been nominated fourteen times -- and industry insiders are predicting that he'll finally get his due this year. (Not that he needs a statuette anyways, since his body of work is staggering and exceptional.) So, for this installment of #InformedImages , I took Deakins' photographic work in Blade Runner 2049 and studied its images closely, to see where its DNA came from. The early scenes definitely evoke Tarkovsky and in specific, his final film The Sacrifice  -- which is interesting when you consider how much that film's protagonist Alexander ( Erl...

#InformedImages is a Free Cinema Now series that studies and brings to light influential films and other examples of moving images that informed and inspired specific visuals in later works. By the time Terrence Malick 's first feature film Badlands debuted in 1973, Andrei Tarkovsky had already made Ivan's Childhood (1962),  Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972). It's obvious that Malick was one of several 1970s filmmakers who came up on Tarkovsky's work, no doubt influenced and moved by the Russian auteur's moving images. Badlands  (and Malick's follow-up film Days of Heaven ) had a meditative and introspective quality that was elevated by stirring images of the natural world -- a Tarkovsky concoction if there ever was one. Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror was a turning point for both the filmmaker and the films it would influence going forward, since The Mirror broke the rules of what a traditional narrative should look like and how a story could ...