The beauty of Rodrigo Prieto's cinema
Tuesday, August 11, 2020 at 11:58PM 
Our look at 2005's Best Cinematography Oscar nominees continues. First, we explored the filmography of Australian wonder Dion Beebe, and now it's time to shine a light on another master cineaste, this one from Mexico.
Throughout his career, Rodrigo Prieto has worked with a variety of artists and projects, spanning from independent shorts to internationally acclaimed auteur cinema, from pictures full of Oscar buzz to Taylor Swift video clips. His big breakthrough came in 2000 with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Amores Perros and, since then, he's become a name known to any cinephile worth their mettle. In those early projects, Prieto's style was mostly identifiable by a passion for high-contrast imagery with coarse, grainy textures, but, over the years, he's evolved into a creator of sober imagery that's more interested in evoking a severe elegance than dazzling with aggressive stylings.
Here are 10 highlights from Prieto's enviable filmography…
25TH HOUR (2002)
After the breakthrough of Amores Perros, Prieto wasted no time in getting into North American cinema and expanding his filmography in new bold ways. In the same year he captured Detroit's battered soul for 8 Mile, he made post-9/11 New York into a tempest of bright colors and shadows so deep they look like they can swallow the world whole, for 25th Hour. Spike Lee's heady montages are of particular visual spectacle, exploding the movie with grit and grain, blinding light, and saturated brushstrokes of eye-popping shades. It's perhaps Prieto's most memorable lensing.
25th Hour is available to stream on Hoopla. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
FRIDA (2002)
2002 wasn't just a year for urban portraiture and evocative cityscapes when it comes to Prieto's cinema. Along with 25th Hour and 8 Mile, he also shot Julie Taymor's Frida Kahlo biopic, subverting his style to the demands of the painter's iconography. The result is an intoxicating blend of surrealism, painterly colors, and the sculpting shadows of celluloid theatre. [More on Frida]
Frida is available to stream on Netflix and Hoopla. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)
The ultimate softening of Prieto's usual style, full of sharpness and bold visual aggression, happened when he worked alongside Ang Lee. For the director's Brokeback Mountain, Prieto turned in a masterclass of splendorous landscapes and suffocating domestic spaces. One need only look at the images to understand the love of Ennis and Jack as well as their need to escape the heteronormative lives which have entrapped them. For this glorious feat, Prieto was nominated for his first Oscar but lost to Dion Beebe for Memoirs of a Geisha. [Prieto also appeared on-camera in Brokeback Mountain]
Brokeback Mountain is available to stream on Peacock and DirecTV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
BABEL (2006)
Before Iñárritu became enamored with Emmanuel Lubezki, Rodrigo Prieto was his cinematographer of choice. Babel was their third collaboration and came at a time of transition in Prieto's approach to filmmaking, something that comes through in the project's finished look. Shooting four storylines in three continents and three different mediums, Prieto is subtler than usual here, delineating lighting motifs and color narratives without ever calling attention to his craft. The Japanese portions, with their colorful nights and chilly surfaces, are the best of the lot.
Babel is available to stream on Netflix. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
LUST, CAUTION (2007)
Just as he had done in Brokeback Mountain, Rodrigo Prieto brings a heady mix of erotic elegance and indoor suffocation to Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Shooting Tang Wei like the heroine of some forgotten 40s noir, the cinematographer also evokes a cosmos of insidious mystery, pretty surfaces, and hot flesh. The sexual encounters of the main characters, a game of dangerous duplicity on both parts, are Prieto's best moments.
Lust, Caution is available to stream on Netflix. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
BROKEN EMBRACES (2009)
By 2009, Rodrigo Prieto was amassing an impressive list of big-name directors in his filmography. There was Iñárritu, Taymor, Hanson, Stone, Spike Lee, and Ang Lee. That year, he added Almodóvar to that list, a director with a bold style to which Prieto took as a duck takes to water. With blindingly bright colors and industrial doses of retro glamour, Prieto made Broken Embraces into one of the Spanish auteur's most ravishing creations, a meditation on melodrama and cinema history whose beauty inebriates the viewer. Penélope Cruz has never looked better!
Broken Embraces is available to rent from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
BIUTIFUL (2010)
The last collaboration, to date, between Iñárritu and Prieto isn't a film without its fair share of problems. Still, while I'm not a big fan of Biutiful, it's impossible to deny its visual sophistication. Prieto mixes a gritty sense of realism with dreamy visions, impressionistic memories, and mournful tableaux whose morbidity both enchants and repulses.
Biutiful is available to stream on HBO Max, Kanopy, and DirecTV. You can also rent it from Google Play, Youtube, Vudu, and others.
THE HOMESMAN (2014)
If this is what a Rodrigo Prieto-shot western looks like, I want more. Tommy Lee Jones' The Homesman is an impressive bit of genre revisionism, varnishing a patina of mournful severity and elegiac ardor over the iconography of the western. Prieto makes it all look beyond beautiful with his 35mm cinematography and images that are as harsh as they are painterly. I'll never forget some of these sights, like Hilary Swank's body breaking the horizon line or a wooden hotel burning against the night sky.
The Homesman is available to stream on Hoopla, FXNow, Tubi TV, DirecTV, and Pluto TV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
SILENCE (2016)
Since 2013, Prieto has become Martin Scorsese's go-to cinematographer, having shot most of the director's projects, both on the big and the small screen. Of their numerous collaborations, Silence shines bright as their greatest achievement. It's a love letter to the visual idioms of post-war Japanese cinema, from its celebration of the natural landscape to the tracking shots that make the screen unroll like painted scrolls. For this excellence, Prieto received his second Oscar nomination but lost to La La Land’s Linus Sandgren. [More on Silence]
Silence is available to stream on Crackle, Popcornflix, and GuideDoc. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
THE IRISHMAN (2019)
The latest Scorsese/Prieto teaming isn't nearly as dazzling as Silence, but it contains great beauty nonetheless. Exploring a severe palette and the chiaroscuro possibilities of digital photography, Rodrigo Prieto lit The Irishman in sober tonalities, every interior a wake and every exterior a funeral march. The last hour of the picture is especially noteworthy, with the Death-obsessed imagery coming to its full expression. One of the picture's ten Oscar nominations was for Prieto's work, his third nod overall. He lost to Roger Deakins, for 1917. [Read TFE's interview with Rodrigo Prieto about The Irishman]
You can stream The Irishman on Netflix.
What's your favorite work of Rodrigo Prieto? Do you prefer his early poppier work or the digital polish of his recent movies?
Reader Comments (9)
Curious, I recently watch Fibra Óptica (Optical Fiber), I found It quite interesting because of the narrative and the beautiful cinematography which is preciselly from Rodrigo Prieto and I could add the title to this list.
But his best work is Amores Perros by a mile. His camera evoques the 'dirty' and heavy ambient that can be feeled in low class neighbourhoods full of smog from México City. When I watched the movie I thought: THAT'S how a mexican barrio looks.
This post is probably going to lead to an overdue Silence rewatch. I remember being floored by the imagery.
Brokeback Mountain is my favorite of his by a lot, although Broken Embraces has quite the look.
Brokeback Mountain and Broken Embraces.... the range.
I'll admit I'm excited about his newest collaborator: Taylor Swift. I love when the girls direct and she could not have selected a better artist to help expand her range.
Not a well-loved picture, but I praised Oliver Stone’s Alexander for its visual achievements (especially Pietro’s cinematography) and Vangelis’s score. I love this series, Cláudio! I think you should make a special with Adriano Goldman. He is doing an amazing job in The Crown and needs to go back to cinema and to the Oscar’s radar.
Not a big fan of the movie but the way he shots Barcelona in Biutiful is just amazing.
Lust, Caution, Abrazos rotos... woof!
Silence was the first time I ever noticed him and I was completely floored by what he achieved there. Will always be annoyed that movie didn’t get its due with Oscar but I’m happy they singled him out. Love his work for Amores Perros and 25th Hour, and mostly like what he did for Brokeback and Irishman. I had no idea he shot Lust, Caution and am now more excited than ever to finally watch it.
he's the most underrated DP working today, sure, the incredible amount of great directors he's worked with speaks volumes, but most of people barely notice his work and he should be in the 7-8 Oscar nominations range by now and have the same kind of recognition others like Deakins, Lubezki or Richardson have
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