best cinematography shots without people

She throws up her arm one last time and the tape pauses, as if to stretch the moment just a little further. We scroll backward though images that will appear later in the movie-a chess game, a parasailer gliding above the ocean, a pair of legs stretching out toward a swimming pool-and arrive at a particularly poignant bit of tape-slash-memory: Sophie getting on a plane as the camera watches from a distance, playing hide-and-seek around the airport columns, waving goodbye, disappearing, and then popping back out to say goodbye again. (She’s also visible at the very beginning of the film, although almost impossible to see unless you know what to look for.) She gets up off the couch, moves toward the screen, and then the image jumps, becoming a jagged, pixelated blur. But it’s essential to understanding how the movie is put together, and especially to grasping the full impact of its ending, which climaxes with one of the most devastating final images I’ve ever seen.Īs Sophie finishes her interview, the image freezes, and as something moves on top of it, we realize that what might have seemed like a flaw in the video footage-the glare of sunlight on the lens, or just the inevitable decay of magnetic tape-was actually the reflection on a TV screen of the person watching it, who we can just barely discern as a short-haired woman.

If you’re seeing Aftersun for the first time, you might not catch what happens at the end of this brief preamble, and even if you do, there’s a good chance it will slip away, whether it’s because of the fluid and associative way the film moves through time or simply because by the end you’re too gutted to think straight. There’s some loving banter, and then she decides she’s going to interview him, asking, “When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?”

The first thing we hear over the opening credits is the clank and whirr of a videotape going into a camcorder, followed by an exchange between young Sophie, who’s apparently holding the camera, and her father, who’s on the verge of his 32 nd birthday. Even without that extratextual verification, Aftersun has the feeling of a story plucked from memory, sifted and reordered by time.

Best cinematography shots without people