The Cinematography of Natasha Braier

I started discussing awards where the glass ceiling is still very much intact one of last month’s New Shows + Movies by Women. One of these is cinematography, where only one woman has been nominated by the Oscars. That’s only one nomination since the award was first given out in 1929.

That nomination went to Rachel Morrison for “Mudbound” in 2017. It was well deserved for a beautiful looking film. Morrison’s also been cinematographer for “Black Panther”, “Dope”, and “Fruitvale Station”.

It’s one thing to say more women have deserved this or that award. That’s obviously a true statement, but it fails to highlight the specific people who deserve it. So let’s do that, starting with my favorite cinematographer: Natasha Braier.

Argentinian cinematographer Natasha Braier is as dynamic as I can name. She filmed “The Milk of Sorrow”, a painterly Peruvian film that was my choice for Best Film of the 2010s. She shot “The Neon Demon”, a film that might best be described as sumptuous toxicity. She filmed “The Rover”, an Australian movie that treats the apocalypse as a banal descent into violence where only systems survive.

She has a rare eye for those scenes when a private moment for a protagonist meets the gaze of those who will never recognize how crucial it is. That private moment becomes something held between the character and audience. She highlights raw performance as a moment to find what’s common between actor and viewer, to hide both in that space even as the world around it continues in a clinical, procedural way. She makes scenes into air bubbles, the only place character and viewer alike can breathe. She does this in wildly different ways, across an incredible range.

The Milk of Sorrow

The opening two shots of “The Milk of Sorrow” might be my favorite in cinema.

We hear singing over a black screen for the first minute. When we finally see someone, it’s an elderly woman in bed. The age lines are highlighted on her face as she rests on a faded, floral-print pillow. The edge of it is worn, the seam folded near coming apart. The paint on the headboard behind her is webbed with cracks. It rests against a faded, floral-print wallpaper. As the camera ever so slightly tilts up, the edge of the wallpaper gives way to blank wall, the seam coming apart

This woman sings about the trauma she sustained in civil war – her rape and the loss of her husband. She pauses for just a moment, long enough for us to worry about whether she’s still alive. It’s just enough time for a second voice to join. It’s that of her daughter, Fausta. The timing of Fausta’s voice suggests that it’s the daughter’s devotion keeping her mother alive. It’s enough to re-spark the mother’s song again.

We cut to the second shot. We see the open window of the bedroom, the town beyond, a hill beyond that, the mountains further, a corner of sky. The empty space in the upper right is reflected here as well. The camera slowly dollies in, as if the universe knows what’s about to happen before Fausta does. She crosses from her mother’s side of the bed to the window side, singing as she does. She prompts her mother again: just Fausta, the window frame, and the town beyond in shot now.

The story of “The Milk of Sorrow” involves Fausta taking work in order to pay for her mother’s funeral, having done something medically horrible to herself out of fear of her mother’s songs, and having her art stolen through colonialism that still oppresses the indigenous population of Peru.

“The Milk of Sorrow” examines how trauma echoes itself into new generations. Everything in the first shot, that fractal repeat of age to flowers worn at the edge – serves as a metaphor for where the film delves.

Fausta’s crossing from her mother’s side to the open window, a life she’s been sheltered from waiting with all the fear that’s been drilled into her, tells us about her character and describes the story we’re about to witness.

Everything in “The Milk of Sorrow” is like this – thick with description and a quickly established visual metaphor that increasingly veers into magical realism. The experience of watching a film so thick with detail evokes reading a novel.

Obviously, this isn’t all a result of Braier’s cinematography. It owes to writer-director Claudia Llosa first and foremost. It owes to art directors Patricia Bueno and Susana Torres. It owes to Magaly Solier, one of the most overlooked actors working today.

Yet there’s an eye that brings it all together, that captures the edges that need to be caught, the corners that need to be seen encroaching, the natural light that gives it all context. That slow dolly as dramatic irony, telling us of the mother’s death right before Fausta realizes, immediately describes an authorial tone. “The Milk of Sorrow” wants us to know we’re being told a story, not pretending to “witness” one. In doing so, we’re not part of Fausta’s story, and we’re asked not to pretend as if we are. We’re part of that world outside. We’re that horror in layers, taught by story and song, waiting alongside the author for Fausta to realize what we already suspect.

Throughout “The Milk of Sorrow”, Braier’s camera makes us part of that outside world even as it lets us into Fausta’s guarded inner world. It makes us question what parts of our culture justify Fausta’s fears and colonize Fausta’s world.

The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn’s “The Neon Demon” is a completely different experience, a giallo/commentary about an underaged model who becomes the sexual target of seemingly everyone in the industry. Its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival simultaneously received a chorus of boos and a standing ovation. Based on the history of the festival, it’s fair to wonder if the boos were because they thought it was a bad film or because they felt specifically called out.

It’s a film that takes pains to be consciously obvious with its style, and in so doing achieves a dreamlike state where timing feels off. Dialogue can feel noncommital, characters often talk past each other to no one in particular. Environments are either frozen in time or so overtly slick they become wildly off-putting.

Much of this giallo-style is due to the Italian filmmaking that first propelled the genre in the 1960s and 70s. Actors often came from various European countries – this resulted in many reading lines in languages they didn’t know (the most famous example of this is Dario Argento’s 1977 film “Suspiria”.) They often didn’t know precisely what they were saying or what was being said to them. A dialogue could feel like two people awkwardly giving each other space for their intersecting monologues. Art design and gruesome set pieces were prized above dialogue scenes, complex sets needed to be filmed from certain angles creating a stagy feel, different countries censored a variety of scenes from many giallos, and dubbing in that era was often cheap and unfeeling.

The genre started off interested in unsettling atmospheres and surreal expressions of violence – all these technical issues only served to make the experience of watching them even more dreamlike. That’s what a modern giallo like “The Neon Demon” pursues with elements of deliberate line-reading, over-pronunciations, over-repeated reaction angles, intentionally disruptive visual and audio interludes, and editing that can sometimes feel like a scene has been prematurely cut. We often see a dialogue scene evolve through shot choice to bring us closer or further from the characters across a scene. “The Neon Demon” and giallo as a whole undermines many of those typical comforts. If actors don’t take that last step on making a character feel natural, if we don’t get the in-scene shot and editing evolution we expect, then we’re left with something we as viewers need to start defining or trying to place context onto. That can vary by viewer and that involvement in trying to define the surreal, organize the disconnected, and make what’s unnatural feel natural is what gives us that out-of-place, dreamlike feel.

That can offer the misconception that giallo is then easy to accomplish – just do a slightly bad job at everything. Yet it takes very conscious choices and technical coordination to create this off-putting environment in a way where what’s unsettling is consistent for two hours at a time. Everyone needs to be contributing to what feels unreal in the same way.

Refn is famed for his visual sensibilities and experimental storytelling, while also being justifiably criticized for prioritizing those visuals over any real storytelling. I find Refn’s ego and taste dominate his films and often obscure their points. “The Neon Demon” can walk a line where you’re not completely sure if it’s criticizing certain things or taking part in them.

It obviously calls out a largely male-run modeling industry’s targeting of underage models. Elle Fanning (17 at the time it was shot, playing a 16 year-old) essentially plays prey, a target moving through the film who everyone else is relentlessly focused on.

There are moments where it pointedly highlights the portrayal of dead women in high fashion as selling a social fantasy about the murder of women. If fashion photography idealizes the portrayal of women as gaunt, starving, unhealthy, and suffering violence, all without commentary, then fashion photography communicates this as a desirable norm. Refn makes this the other part of his target, ostensibly in a film about violence toward women.

This gets us into the territory any modern giallo like this faces – in a genre that’s historically relied on plots about violence aimed at women, how do you present a modern version? It’s crucial that Braier is the cinematographer here. This would have been a mess with a male cinematographer sexualizing the moments where Fanning is perused and assessed by others. Instead of observing those making the assessments, we would have been observing her, taking part in what the film seeks to criticize in the first place.

Giallos have often been a place where technical crew are highlighted – art directors, costume designers, choreographers, cinematographers. When some elements are made to feel underbaked or over-deliberate, it puts the onus on other elements to succeed at taking huge risks. In “The Neon Demon”, Braier presents a stunning, giallo-esque film world without losing track of women’s perspectives in it.

“The Neon Demon” becomes less about the violence itself – a place where Refn is happy to get lost and treat as thrilling in many of his other films. Uniquely in his repertoire, it becomes a reflection of what it’s like to fear that violence, to recognize the impending nature of it and progressively lose yourself either in legitimate, constant fear of it or by normalizing its presence in order to cope. Ultimately, the world of “The Neon Demon” is one where many of the women learn to normalize the presence of that violence, to redirect it at others in order to preserve themselves, and in so doing to enable it or even take part in it as the cost of having a successful career.

CW for following scene: off-screen sexual assault

The most unforgettable moment in “The Neon Demon” involves Fanning’s Jesse narrowly dodging a sexual assault simply because she gets to her deadbolt in time. She then overhears the man – a co-worker – choose the neighboring room instead. She overhears his assault of the 13 year-old staying there. That pan across the mirror is haunting because of what it says about Jesse’s experience being reflected back at her. Her silhouette listens at the wall, growing distant, fading at the experience. There’s something rarely captured about the feeling of trauma in this moment, and Braier’s work thankfully keeps it close to Jesse’s perspective.

Braier creates a darkly-lit, off-kilter giallo environment – an environment that’s often been predicated on and defined within the genre by the sexualization of violence toward women. She’s able to visually remove precise elements from that for criticism, while shifting the perspective away from the sexualization of violence to a fear of both that violence and the normalization of it. If this were easy, it wouldn’t be such a major component of giallo to begin with. If this was purely due to Refn’s work, then he wouldn’t be Refn to start with. He obviously does a ton of work on making the movie what it is, but it’s Braier doing the heavy lifting on the film’s perspective and how the film is coded.

It’s important to note that “The Neon Demon” is Refn’s 10th feature, but just the first one on which he’s worked with a woman as cinematographer. I don’t think there was another option if he wanted to do this remotely right, and that speaks to just how much Braier had a hand in shaping the film.

“The Neon Demon” is still controversial, because it participates in much of what it’s criticizing in order to make that criticism. There’s a tightrope to walk – don’t make it all the way, and elements that are meant to critique misogyny risk simply presenting it. “The Neon Demon” goes pretty far in making that critique, but whether it lands that last, most important step is a legitimate debate.

The Rover

Finally, you have Australian slow apocalypse film “The Rover”. As the world falls into disrepair and depression, a gang of thieves run their truck aground. It belongs to Guy Pearce’s Eric. He’s obsessed with getting it back. He chances into one of the thieves’ brothers – Robert Pattinson’s Rey. The younger man gradually becomes worshipful of Eric’s misanthropic attitude and violence. He idealizes Eric, even as Eric has nothing in particular to live for past getting his car back.

It’s a short story premise writ long in curt but meaningful conversations, in memories of a world that will never return, and in finding granular purpose when you know what you do no longer matters. It’s written and directed by David Michod. Its cut-out-the-heart prose is directed beautifully, and Pearce and Pattinson both gave Oscar-worthy performances in it.

It’s Natasha Braier who paints its diminishing world. She films Eric like he’s moments from becoming part of it, in sharp contrast to Rey’s verve, fright, eagerness, everything felt as much as possible. Pearce plays Eric as all but gone, Pattinson plays Rey as desperately wanting to mold himself after anyone, and Braier films each speaking to the other across an achingly large divide in a dying world. The only time Eric is lit more brightly than Rey is when Rey looks at him, engages him, sees this dangerous shell of a man as an icon. These are the first 11 minutes of the film.

Every exterior is too much light, washed out, dusty. Every interior is dim, shadowed, worn. Every time we see the outdoor world through a window, violence descends. It’s a film about men murdering the hope within themselves, within each other, and Braier knows how the world looks at them – as acts of violence that never see accountability, that when recognized are idolized. Her slow apocalypse doesn’t look that different from now when it’s just more of the same.

The visuals of “The Rover” might get dismissed as being dusty and dreary, but it’s the most practical and realistic presentation of an apocalypse I’ve seen. Michod’s screenplay sees systems survive even if humanity doesn’t, our trying to keep hierarchy and order over caring for others. It sees humanity in everything but people. Braier matches that. Where she presents fear, colonization, authorial presence in “The Milk of Sorrow”, where she connects on wild visuals and perspective-switching re-codifying of a genre in “The Neon Demon”, here her cinematography is patient, still, systematic, documentarian without playing at verite.

In just these three films, she is three completely different cinematographers, three completely different creative voices working within genres as opposite as could be. She gives voice to three extremely different directors by developing separate visual codes for each.

Natasha Braier also shot “Honey Boy”, “Gloria Bell”, “XXY”, and a number of other films. She’s shot music videos for FKA Twigs, Rihanna, The Weeknd, David Byrne & St. Vincent.

She deserves Oscars. She deserves the analysis and discussion that moves film ahead, and if we fail to recognize and listen to women when we move art ahead, then we’re not really moving it much of anywhere. I don’t want to highlight her as a woman cinematographer, I want to highlight her as one of the best and most overlooked cinematographers, period – but the reality is that she isn’t valued as much and we don’t get to see everything she can do because women cinematographers aren’t celebrated, recognized, sought out.

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Half-Year Awards — Best Screenplays, Director, and Film

You know the preamble. Let’s just dive right in:

Best Adapted Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel, Noah

A lot of people hate the story in Noah. It’s too bastardized, they say. Damn straight, I say. The story of Noah doesn’t belong to the Bible. It was around long before, transmuted into a plethora of different stories across different cultures that highlight contrasting details. Noah never adopts an orphan in the Bible. This is a reference to Korean flood mythology. There are no giants in the Bible’s Noah. This is a Midrashic conceit that belongs to certain sects of Judaism. Noah doesn’t contemplate exterminating his grandchildren in the Bible. This sequence combines reflections of other Biblical books – the jettisoned baby in Exodus, the crisis of faith in Job, and most importantly the tale of Abraham in Genesis.

There are countless other details from a variety of other religions folded into Aronofsky’s retelling of Noah. It creates a Frankenstein’s monster of a myth, housing itself inside Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions alike and vibrantly socially aware of the moment in time it arrives in our world.

Feel free to hate it for not being accurate to your interpretation of Noah, but Noah was never yours to begin with. Neither is it Aronofsky’s or Handel’s, and their patchwork retelling reminds us that it’s not so much the detail in the story that’s important – those details are completely different for everybody – but it’s the common meaning those various interpretations seek to teach us that is crucial.

The narrative details aren’t sacred. They’re just as bastardized in the Bible as they are out of it. The meanings are sacred. The world’s done a horrible job of getting this through its head. We argue about the length of Noah’s ark and its width and what wood it was made from and how he fed the animals while we ignore that in all those stories, God sends down the flood because we were annihilating each other and so lost in petty bickering we ignored the needs of the helpless among us. Understand that before you come at Noah complaining it’s not accurate enough.

Devoutness of detail can often be a useless habit. Give me a new interpretation that reminds me of the old meaning any day of the week.

Best Original Screenplay: Joel Edgerton & David Michod, The Rover

We so rarely get short stories on film anymore. Our movies today sprawl, like labyrinths meant to make the biggest and most widely talked-about mark on our social calendars. Every character gets his or her own realization mid-plot, so we can check the character development box off the list and justify a dozen different character-specific posters. Even in our blockbusters, two sides aren’t enough anymore. I like my seven-sided, choatic end-battles, believe me, but there are only so many writers and filmmakers who can truly hack that.

What about the short story? What about visiting a time and place for just a moment, getting just a glimpse? What about leaving us wanting to know more? Many of our works of art have forgotten how to shield their characters from us. Characters are thrown at us with gadgets and costume changes and sidekicks for spinoffs. That’s fine…so long as we don’t forget those other movies, the ones that contain characters we should never want to see again, or that we should wish to save, or that we should pity, or that we should hate. Sometimes all at once. The Rover visits a time and place we should never want to see and delivers characters we should never want to meet. It stays long enough so that we begin to care what happens anyway, that we begin to understand why someone might be a way we never could be ourselves, and then it exits gracefully.

Like The Proposition a decade before, which also starred Guy Pearce, it crafts a haunting story from an elegant blend of poetic dialogue, stark visual, and simple structure. In a short story, every word matters. So, too, in The Rover. Every word, every shot, every cut matters, and builds to a whole at just the right moment – the second before the credits roll. It forces you to take a piece of that time and place you’d never visit back with you into the real world, to contrast the two, to be terrified at their similarities and joyous at their differences. It’s a staggering work that demands tears and silence and reverence. The Rover is a fire-and-brimstone sermon in the church of film.

Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

My choice for this at the end of last year was Alfonso Cuaron for his pioneering work in Gravity. At least until I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. But that’s another essay. This year, it’s the polar opposite of those two directors. Instead of Cuaron’s painstaking cinematic techniques, so groundbreaking they demanded new inventions, and instead of Wong Kar-Wai’s precise, artistic framing (nearly every shot is so painterly it’s worthy of its own essay), Glazer is much more hands-off. He gathered a wild array of fringe talent and let them go wild.

In various Guardian articles, and in my own interview with author Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which the film Under the Skin is based, Glazer’s loose, guerrilla approach to filmmaking began to take shape: Conversations with passersby recorded on hidden camera. Covert microphones hidden in umbrellas picking up stray conversation on the streets of Edinburgh. An FX studio let loose to envision an alien’s digestive tract in visual metaphor. Documentarian shots of both nature and civilization. An experimental rock musician asked to score it all.

What Glazer does is invite chaos into his movie, trusting himself enough to shape it. The result is a mash of experimental techniques fused into a powerful whole. These diverse technical experiments shine through so much that you can even see how contributors’ interpretations agree and disagree. It’s rare that so loose and experimental an approach results in a film so tight and complete. The most difficult part of directing is knowing when to control chaos and knowing when to unleash it. For mastering the balance, at least for this film, Glazer does something just as impressive as inventing new technologies or framing everything with painterly perfection.

Best Film: Under the Skin

Any other year, this wouldn’t be a contest. It would be The Rover with nothing else close. But Under the Skin is the best film we’ve had in many years, the most challenging, the one that does something film is very often incapable of doing. Many films put you in someone else’s shoes. Almost none trick you into filling out the shoes of a sociopath and rapist. The film has such command of allegory, it truly makes you stop and contemplate a perspective that’s (hopefully) completely alien to you, and it transports you very uncomfortably outside of your own realm of sensation and experience.

Also take a look at our Half-Year Technical Awards and our Half-Year Acting Awards.

The Good, The Bad, and The Australian — “The Rover”

It felt like the summer needed to take a breather. Between the superhero movies and animated sequels and giant monsters, we needed a week off from visual effects, especially with the looming cloud that is a fourth Transformers movie on the horizon. This made it a very strange summer weekend at the movies. Nothing major opened – only a by-the-book comedy sequel and a classy but cliché-ridden band backstory.

It’s a perfect opportunity to highlight a smaller film, in this case a post-apocalyptic vengeance tale out of Australia called The Rover. It stars Guy Pearce, a veteran of these kinds of bloody art films, and Robert Pattinson, of Twilight infamy.

Its story is simple. A global collapse 10 years ago has left Australia a third-world country. Three bandits argue about leaving one’s younger brother behind, and crash their truck. They take a car belonging to Eric (Pearce), who finds that younger brother, Rey (Pattinson), and uses him to track down the car.

Why is Eric so intent on getting his car back? He’s left with the bandits’ better, faster truck. It’s at the core of the story, but for a long time, it becomes secondary to Eric and Rey’s journey. In an American film, the two would be good guys. They’d start at each others’ throats but through witty banter and close calls they’d grudgingly learn to work together. Not so in The Rover.

Eric makes it clear early: the two are not friends. The more we learn about Eric, the more we realize he’s got very little soul left. He’s vicious and remorseless, and would sooner kill than be cornered into a conversation. Rey is slow, perhaps even mentally handicapped. In him, we see an impressionable boy who lacks the tools for this world. Rey’s growing loyalty to Eric breeds in the boy a growing need to commit violence. Drawing a parallel between Rey and the Elliot Rodgers and Dylan Klebolds of the world isn’t difficult – these aren’t murderers created by music or movies, they’re murderers created through misguided loyalty to someone who teaches them hate.

Australian movies have a habit for removing the usual gloss of Hollywood filmmaking. There’s far less violence in The Rover than in a single action scene of any of this summer’s blockbusters, but when it does happen, that violence is raw, quick, and brutal. Characters don’t get slow-motion death scenes with an orchestral crescendo; they get left in the dust with the buzzards. There’s eloquence in its hideousness, though. When there’s no room for escapism, the viewer is confronted by what a film has to say, and The Rover traps you in a corner.

Director David Michod and cinematographer Natasha Braier create a bleak and broken landscape – even the sky is sand colored. Yet the film always stays visually arresting. Scenes start at odd angles to where they’ll take the story; they don’t telegraph moments beforehand.

Pearce’s performance is stunning. At one point, he thinks it’s all over for himself, that he’s going to jail for the rest of his life. He speaks with the knowledge that this is long overdue. It’s almost a relief to be caught. It’s a chilling moment, watching something so dead and soulless speak. Yet there are other times when the shreds of Eric’s remaining humanity peek through, brief moments when his eyes come to life just as quickly gone.

None of this should overshadow Pattinson. I’ve never held the Twilight franchise against any of its actors. (If you paid me a hundred million dollars to stare off-camera and look pained, I’d be there early every day.) But Pattinson is a revelation in The Rover, the best performance of the year so far. Rey is a character who could easily go off-the-rails into lampooning territory, but he never does. You can see him processing the world around himself, violence becoming easier, changing from a danger to a solution.

And then there’s the ending – unexpected, taut, graceful, tender. It changes everything that’s come before. “The Rover” asks challenging questions without offering answers. It’s a cynical reflection of all the hope we have in our cinema today. That hope – costumed heroes saving the world – is important to cling to. It’s crucial, but so are films like The Rover. They’re a worst case scenario – what if that hope doesn’t work out? A necessary question, though not one many viewers may wish to face.

The Rover is rated R for language and violence.