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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Cinematography, the Oscars and "Tree of Life"

January 25, 2012 by Scott Timberg

AS everyone in Los Angeles knows well, Oscar nominations were just announced today. I’ve written about some of the films nominated, including The Artist, which drew 10 nominations.

One article I’ve not posted, because I can’t seem to find an online link, was a story in which I spoke to cinematographers from five films: My Week With Marilyn, The Descendants, Drive, Margin Call and The Tree of Life. Emmanuel Lubezki of Tree of Life was just nominated for an Academy Award which he seems to have a good shot at.

(The Mexican-born Lubezki, by the way, also shot Children of Men, The New World, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Ali.)

Whatever you make of this film — which has become the love-it-or-hate-it movie of the last year — it’s visually distinctive, from its verdant recollections of 1950s Texas suburbia or its more cosmic sections that recount the history of the universe.

Here’s a bit of what he told me — the full story is in AwardsLine‘s Issue 5.

Though the film has been compared to “2001: A Space Odysssey” and Renaissance painting, Malick’s edict was that the film capture the chaos of life itself. “He wanted the film to feel found, not rehearsed, not designed,” Lubezki says. “You had to wait for a moment that felt real, before you rolled the camera. We could not control the butterfly that flew by, or the wind, or what a baby might do: It’s watching, helping Terry and everybody else get to these moments that felt almost like an accident.”

Filed Under: film, Los Angeles, photography, the Oscars

Comments

  1. nicoleshe says

    August 29, 2012 at 4:12 am

    Respect for imparting this article. It’s really timely for the this website reason that I’m living difficulties similar to it, and I’m actually intending testing this myself.

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

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My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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