Great Hollywood films are like symphonies: their intimate grace notes take on greater significance against grand orchestral backdrops. It’s fitting, then, that a cinematographer like Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who excels at composing images for music videos, is the eye and steady hand behind Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the year’s most polyphonic genre experiment, and a movie whose intimate emotions are as pulsing as its most grandiose set-pieces.
In keeping with the musical metaphor, Arkapaw is also partially responsible for teaching general audiences how to read the sheet music of cinematic texture. The lead-up to Sinners’ theatrical arrival saw widespread conversations about different film formats, and a greater hunger for the 70mm IMAX canvas, on which she painted some of the year’s most resplendent frames. In a 1930s Mississippi juke joint, sweat becomes an intoxicating aroma as it glistens off Black skin, while dim amber conceals and reveals horror in equal measure; the undead threaten the living, and their sense of life and community.
Drawing from Westerns and musicals alike, Sinners digs deep into African American history and creates an inviting temporal continuum through its meticulous unbroken takes, as the spirits of past and future materialize within the moving pictures. Taking a step back, it’s hard not to see this artistic marriage between director and D.O.P. as entirely destined. Although Arkapaw and Coogler had intended to work together a decade prior, on the boxing drama Creed, their first partnership would end up being a year-long shoot on Marvel’s land-and-sea epic Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Given this lengthy collaboration, Sinners would become an inevitable evolution.
The film also, fittingly, evolved in the process of meeting the technical challenges of shooting two Michael B. Jordans. Its scope would expand from a 16mm period piece to a grand-scale historical epic rooted in raucous entertainment, and combining numerous celluloid formats. The result speaks (and sings) for itself, in the form of indelible images whose transformative impact won’t soon be forgotten.