YOUR FAVOURITES

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES” VS. “THE AVENGER

The recent comments by Wally Pfister—Christopher Nolan’s director of photography from “Memento” through the Batman trilogy— shouldn’t be ascribed to sheer jealousy over the fact that “The Avengers” has taken in one and one-half billion dollars at the box office while “The Dark Knight Rises” got stuck just over a billion. There’s a real question of principle at stake in Pfister’s the remarks to Carrie Seidman, of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, regarding Joss Whedon’s Marvel reboot (as posted here by Jim Emerson, who took a screen shot of the remarks before they were taken down from the newspaper’s Web site):

What’s really important is storytelling. None of it matters if it doesn’t support the story. I thought “The Avengers” was an appalling film. They’d shoot from some odd angle and I’d think, why is the camera there? Oh, I see, because they spent half a million on the set and they have to show it off. It took me completely out of the movie. I was driven bonkers by that illogical form of storytelling.

Pfister’s cinematography is indeed a key aspect of Nolan’s films—not least, of their sententious and unintentionally comical earnestness. Or, to put it differently, his images might seem beautiful to those who also find Nolan’s films substantial. “The Dark Knight Rises” may stage a version of revolution in New York, but its politics are still less significant, its implications less resonant than those of “The Avengers,” yet the droningly dun palette conveys Nolan’s belief that he’s making a grand statement. Rule of thumb: when a filmmaker or critic begins to talk about “reality,” it’s a boast about the righteous intentions of a political statement that go beyond so-called storytelling—and that’s just what Pfister does in this interview, when discussing his background as a documentary cinematographer: “Working with reality helps reduce the amount of artifice in your work and that is the style of film I appreciate.”

It’s worth adding that Pfister admits that he’s “not a big super hero fan. In terms of the movie-going experience for me, I love the realistic stuff because it’s just that much less formulaic.” That may indeed be so—yet Joss Whedon gets far more nuanced emotion from his characters and situations (and, for that matter, more interesting political allegory) in “The Avengers” than Nolan does in “The Dark Knight Rises,” and, as impressive as some of the on-set tricks of “Inception” were, none evoked the joyful awe of Iron Man’s climactic rocketing through the atmosphere near the end of “The Avengers.” Whedon, who surely is a big superhero fan, is therefore able to take it more seriously—he finds more imaginative exhilaration, feeling, and importance in superhero movies than those who work on them with long tongs.