Best Cinematography of the 1990's

Rating: 8/10 (12 November 2017)

Brooks' release from Shawshank is considered as one of the most brilliant moments in the Visual of Emotions. - Brooks, one of the oldest inmates at Shawshank is led out on parole after 50 years terrified at the prospect of freedom. Now, Pay attention to how the filmmakers visually communicate isolation

.................... -In a sequence that ends with the words "Brooks Was Here" permanently etched into the very rafters from which he hangs, doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is a sequence about recognition of one's existence in an uncaring world or rather the lack thereof. Now, we've got the music, we've got the heart wrenching voice of narration, we've got James Whitmore's (Brooks) expressive face. But even if you take that all away, Frank Darabont (The Director) and Roger Deakins (The Cinematographer) are still saying something on the screen, and while we love the shot of an absurdly big halfway house room swallowing Brooks up in the Loneliness of too much space. And the shot of him hanging himself from a symbol so immediately obvious. I'm willing to break the rule of not dissecting symbols because films aren't Da Vinci Code ciphers, They're emotional experiences we're looking at. Which strikes his most clever is how Darabont and Deakins managed to make Brooks and us as the audience feel alone in a crowded space. -In a shot he's absolutely boxed in by background actors every single one of them is pointed away from him with their eye lines pointing outwards such that he is compositionally surrounded by their backs. In fact, this visual trope holds true for almost the entire sequence. You can see it when he was about to bump into a car and the man yelling at him in the car is kept off the screen. And established in the quite literal turning point when he left the prison. Another scene from the manager of the supermarket only turns his body towards him to scold Otherwise, It's all backs. And in the bus scene if we rotated the heads of the actors in the background towards Brooks. I mean it's not exactly a pleasant emotion, the actors all have relatively negative expressions but it's certainly not isolating or lonely anymore, we'd go with persecuting and accusatory and with a small edit we've changed this entire feeling of the scene in a single frame which says a whole hell of a lot about how much these little details can matter, we're not even focused on these other actors, you have to point us to an emotion in an instant which isn't always easy to do. In precisely staged images can be evocative of mostly nothing but carefully planned imagery can save volumes simply by something as simple as the way a person is pointed in the background which is exactly why I think Shawshank gets this moment exactly right.