The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers, writing with his brother Max, shot on black and white 35mm Double-X 5222 at an aspect ratio of 1.19 to 1. The cinematographer Jarin Blaschke chose it because it frames the vertical tower better, isolates each man, and traps the two together whenever they share the frame. It is the instrument, not decoration, and the first thing a cropped copy destroys. The lenses were a set of 1940s Baltars, and a filter built to order by Schneider cut every wavelength beyond 570 nanometres. That gives panchromatic film the look of old orthochromatic stock: with red gone, skin darkens and every pore and blemish reads. Shooting ran thirty five days on Nova Scotia’s coast, and by Robert Pattinson’s account everything but the camera was real, every structure built for it. Eggers wrote after reading Melville, sailors’ dictionaries and Sarah Orne Jewett, who set down Maine speech from interviews. The film played the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and took the FIPRESCI prize; its single Academy Award nomination was Blaschke’s cinematography, and Roger Deakins won that for 1917. A good fit if you stay with Dafoe’s period tirades even when a first hearing does not decode them. Not for anyone who wants the island explained at the end, because the gull, the mermaid and the light all stay unexplained.