Even if you’re not on board with the plotting or certain dialogue when it comes to the films of Denis Villeneuve, it’s hard to deny the thematic impact his compositions and visual schemes convey. Certainly true with his most recent feature Sicario, which we named it one of our favorites of last year, Roger Deakins helped paint a world of light vs. dark in numerous striking ways. Today we have a video essay which looks at how this approach to cinematography paints a mirage of a moral world.
Coming from Digging Deeper, it lives up to their name, as they argue, “Sicario invokes the idea that the conceptual dividers that we use to categorize and classify the world — particularly in regard to notions of morality of good and evil — that these boundaries are not only fragile and fluid, they may be ultimately meaningless. It uses the visual tools of color, light, transparency, and translucency to explore the relationships between concepts of good and evil, destabilizing their paradigms, calling into question their fallacies and allusions, to remind us that the realities of the world are so very infrequently simple issues of black and white.”
Check it out below (with a hat tip to our friends at No Film School) along with our in-depth discussion if you missed it. One can also read our in-depth interview with Roger Deakins here.
What do you think of the video essay?