Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Cinema Comes Full Circle

Cinema Comes Full Circle

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, in the way its subject matter inspired its cinematography, seems to have completed the circle of photographic evolution. Begun as an outgrowth of the realist painter’s movement, cinema has now—with the digital grading of every single frame of Middle Earth—come to the point where filmmakers can achieve precisely the “painterly effect” that makes their movies look more like grand panoramas of canvas than filmed reality.