We’re nearly fifteen years into the 21st century and despite the frequent predictions of the implosion of cinema, the industry and medium is still going strong. While much has been made recently about the end of celluloid, a great deal of the best cinematic work in the past decade has been captured photochemically in addition to digitally as a new video on Vimeo can attest.
Edited by Erick Lee, this roughly six-minute long video pays tribute to some the best cinematographers working today. In an attempt to maintain uniformity throughout the video as well as not wishing to crop any of the images, Lee culled shots from films with an aspect ratio of 2.40:1 by luminaries that include Christopher Doyle, Pung-Leung Kwan, S. Ravi Varman,Frank Giebe, John Toll, Wally Pfister, Roger Deakins, Anthony Dod Mantle, Paul Cameron, Emmanuel Lubezki, J. Michael Muro, Robert Richardson, Florian Ballhaus,John R., Leonett, Bruno Delbonnel, Dion Beebe, Slawomir Idziak, Claudio Miranda, Fabio Zamarion, Jeff Cronenweth, Janusz Kaminski, Matthew Libatique, Oliver Wood, Mitchell Amundsen, Bill Pope, Adam Stone, Tom Stern, Chris Menges, Newton Thomas Sigel, Rodrigo Prieto, Sean Bobbitt, Robert Elswitt, Robert Yeoman, Dariusz Wolski, Philippe Le Sourd, Jo Willems, Barry Ackroyd, Seamus McGarvey, Linus Sandgren, Shane Hurlbut, Benoit Delhomme and Don Burgess. Damn.
Watch the video below to try to see how many movies you can recognize and let us know what other cinematographers you think have done outstanding work this century.