TIME Magazine Asia February 20, 2017 Back Issue

MOVING PICTURES
Because we Tend To Think of film as a director’s medium, cinematographers the craftspeople who understand that visual textures and moods can affect moviegoers deeply and mysteriously don’t get much love. The director cinematographer union is one of the most essential partnerships on any movie, but it’s also something of a secret puzzles. The most astonishing feats of cinematography are also sometimes among the least flashy, essentially the result of putting technical skills to work in the service of synesthesia. Science and numbers are enlisted in the service of color, light, feeling. How do you convey, for example, the very texture of the air? In 17th century rural Japan, no less? That’s what cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto pulls off in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a picture that, by all reasonable logic of how movies get made these days, shouldn’t even exist.