About the Journal

The Journal:

The Cinematography in Progress Journal is the first of its kind to bring cinematography to the academic context. Although it is fair to assume a cinematographer can greatly affect the images of a film, and therefore its meaning, cinematographers and the impact they have on that film’s meaning are often underestimated. Instead, they are considered to be “merely undertaking the will of the director” (Williams, 2011, 10). Yet, as the famous philosophical cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, AIC, ASC, once said, “photography means light-writing, cinematography means writing with light in movement". Cinematographers are authors of photography, not directors of photography. We are not merely using technology to tell someone else’s thought, because we are also using our own emotion, our culture, and our inner being (quoted in Bergery, 1989, 70). As Storaro quite rightly points out, lens-based art forms like cinematography are non-linguistic literacy forms, sometimes called visual literacy, or as Scorsese suggests, just ‘literacy’ (Maddock & Redulla, 2019). This journal is desperately needed because, as Bender points out, when non-literary forms of communication and expression are discussed academically and critically, it is often through the lens of a cultural studies analysis that focuses on narrative and ideology (Bender, 2012).

Within cinema, this amounts to a study of the content in the screenplay, an approach which often disregards the form of filmmaking: mise-en-scène, editing, sound design, and of course, cinematography, among many other filmmaking art forms (Maddock, 2018). Our aim with the publication of this journal is to help demystify the language and capacities of cinematographic images. To facilitate the understanding of cinematographers as not just purveyors of technique, craft, and technology, but also as artists and communicators, authors of images. We therefore note that “...cinematography is more than the mere act of photography. It is the process of taking ideas, words, actions, emotional subtext, tone, and all other forms of nonverbal communication and rendering them in visual terms” (Brown, 2012, 2). The project’s aim is therefore to provide, for the first time, an interdisciplinary and intersectoral research publication platform that focuses on visual perception, figurative composition, filmic technique, conceptualization of storytelling, film technology, visual language, and cinematographic history, whilst also broadening the scope into new and unimagined research investigations.

We facilitate and promote research into the different aspects of cinematography, especially its role in narrative fiction film. As the art and craft of cinematography is little understood we want to research the storytelling capacity of moving images, and this to promote visual literacy. In this fast-paced age, the hunger of how to create emotion-evoking and how it is perceived is big.

A key objective is to build a bridge between film practice and film studies. The argument for tapping into the knowledge of cinematographers lies in the simple fact that, since the existence of cinema, cinematographers, or camerapersons as they were first known, have always been there. Cinematographers have been there since the inception of the motion picture. Cinematography does not limit itself to technique but includes the "development of the eye", film history, the study of art history, optics, and established techniques alongside the effects of digital workflow and other more recent developments in the digital domain. We want to investigate the link between the creation, the projection, and the perception of visual media and its communication.

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, cinematographers and scholars are increasingly faced with complex challenges. Cinematography in Progress offers a vital platform to critically engage with these emerging issues, which are likely to deeply impact the art and craft of our field. In this journal, we aim to embrace the full breadth of the cinematography field.

To that end, we have established four dedicated sections: Student Corner, Practice-Based Research, Technical Corner, and Teaching Cinematography. Together, these sections reflect the diverse dimensions of cinematographic activity, encompassing both pedagogical approaches and practical applications.

Reference List:

Bender, S. (2012). Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. (Doctor of Philosophy). Murdoch University, Retrieved from https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Eph5AQAACAAJ

Bergery, B. (1989). Reflections 10: Storaro, ASC. American Cinematographer, 70(8).

Brown, B. (2012). Cinematography: Theory and Practice (Second ed.). Waltham, Massachusetts, United States of America: Focal Press.

Maddock, D. (2018). Reframing Cinematography: Interpreting Cinematographyin an Emerging Virtual Practice. (Doctor of Philosophy). Griffith University, Australia. Maddock, D., & Redulla, M. (2019). The tenth muse: The art of visual film making. Australian Art Education, 40(2), 207-224.

Williams, T. R. (2011). Tricks of the Light: A Study of the Cinematographic Style of Emigre Cinematographer Eugene Scufftan. (Doctor of Philosphy). University of Exeter, United Kingdom.