Review of Cinematographer Style (2006) by Rainer K — 10 Feb 2013

Cinematographer Style starts of with an introduction of all the great people who participated in the project. From Remi Adefarasin to Vilmos Zsigmond, the who is who of the cinematographer world is shown in alphabetical order and everyone is allowed to say his name.

Then, I waited for the film to begin, and I waited, but it never really happened.

For about ninety minutes the film went on to show us short interview clips from these 100+ (!!!) masters of their art. Without ever letting one of them finish their thoughts or expand and dive into the material.

It's mostly a down-edited disaster which collected short anecdotes about various cinematography-related topics and edited them together without much coherence.

Even more astonishing, is the fact that the film never shows any of the film material they're talking about. I'd say that especially a film that tries to tell us what cinematography is all about should heavily rely on film examples or sequences to show the audiences what they're intending to say.

Director/Cinematographer Jon Fauer, who is himself one of the interviewees, avoids that and presents us an endless number of snippets which aren't exactly what it'd talk to analyze the interesting topic in depth.

Sure, it will certainly give you some new insights in the field of cinematography and certainly increased my knowledge about the subject matter but I learned considerable more about film when I actually worked on a film set (or during the four-hour car drive with the cinematographer afterwards).

Cinematographer Style, just was too big in scope too succeed. I guess Fauer called all of his buddies to participate and was overwhelmed when all agreed. He did his best, but what came out at the end is nothing more than a boring mess. What could have been a fascinating examination of the craft/art is just a challenge for your attention span.