Through my eyes...

My top favourite written score from James Horner,

  Way back in the first week of 2013, I was doing a photojournalistic assignment for Wawatay. It was my third week, the damped winds smothered us on Victoria Island relentlessly, and a bus load of people from Six Nations pulled up by the campsite to visit the Chief.

  During my assignment, the only way to stay on the island was to volunteer– I was a fire keeper. After chopping a few dozen logs, I carried them out to the community fire, and there was this elderly man warming his hand drum. I suggested he should warm his hand drum at the sacred fire, not the community fire, and he looks up and gives me a puzzled look.

  "Young man, all fires are sacred," he said.

  "Not this one," I quickly replied, and tossed the heavy logs onto the ground.

  "What make you say that?"

  "Well, I built this fire for––"

  "Doesn't matter, all fires are sacred," he shouts, and waves his drum stick in the air.

After that, he gives me this ten minute teaching of why this fire is so sacred, and another ten minute lecture of why us "young people" should listen more, than speak out against their elders.

  "–– You're blind, son, listen with your heart," he exclaims.

I smoothly lit my cigarette with a match, "I hear you, but I guess you don't mind people throwing their trash into this 'sacred fire', do you?" 

The elder gives me another puzzled look, "How come you didn't tell me!?"

  "I tried, but you keep cutting me off. 'You're blind, son, listen with your heart," I smiled.

Prepare yourself for a little bit of gore, but make sure you don’t miss this one. Clocking in at under six minutes long, Martin Scorsese’s 1967 experimental short, The Big Shave is an amazing little film. Set to the sentimental jazz notes of Bunny Berigan’s 1937 rendition of “I can’t get started” (a Ziegfeld Follies number with Gershwin lyrics), a young man enters the bathroom for a shave, only to nonchalantly gouge at his skin with progressively violent strokes of the razor. The resulting imagery is hypnotic.

Scorsese wrote this piece in the depths of a depression when he had difficulty shaving himself, and while it’s a simple enough concept, it was written as a fairly explicit political statement. Alternately titled Viet ‘67, the film was produced as a metaphorical protest against the Vietnam war–part of a weeklong production, “The Angry Arts Against the War.”

The best works of Roger Deakins.

My favourite cinematographer/Director of Photography of all times.

The one cinematographer you simply don't question.

-Stanley Kubrick

  -Richard Avedon, "Light and Darkness" documentary film