The beauty of Dion Beebe’s cinema
Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 3:00PM 
Despite some dubious victors, the 78th Academy Awards honoring the films of 2005 had many great lineups filled with splendorous movies. Later this month, Nathaniel and his guest panelists will take a look at the Best Supporting Actress category. Before that, however, I invite you to bask in the beauty of that year's Cinematography nominees. Specifically, we'll be taking a look at each of the five nominated cinematographers, their filmographies, and characteristic style. First up, we have that year's winner, Dion Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha). The Australian filmmaker is a master of color, always up to play with wild palettes and shadow games which make bright pigments look even bolder. His best achievements tend to avoid naturalism in search of something more unreal, be it the metallic sharpness of a Californian thriller or the spectacle of Cinecittá.
Here are ten highlights from his filmography…
HOLY SMOKE (1999)
Jane Campion's riotous upending of gender expectations and patriarchal systems is one of her most odd-looking features. Painted in bright, often garish, variations of radioactive orange, sky blue, and piss yellow, Holy Smoke turns the Australian desert into a high-contrast hallucination. The sort of stylized photography Beebe indulges in this picture won't be for everyone's taste, but it's awe-inspiring nonetheless, as fearless in its style as Campion's script is with its psychosexual themes.
Holy Smoke is available to stream on Hoopla. You can also rent it from Vudu, Amazon, Apple iTunes, and the Microsoft Store.
CHARLOTTE GRAY (2001)
In an industry where it's normal for people to spend their entire careers without ever working with a female director, Dion Beebe spent the 90s and early aughts collaborating with many women cineastes. In 2001, the cinematographer would go on to work alongside Gillian Armstrong in a historical drama about a Scottish woman who joins the French Resistance during World War II. More than most of Beebe's work, Charlotte Gray trespasses a grand idea of classic filmmaking, with him shooting Cate Blanchett like a goddess of Old Hollywood glamour. He frames her hair with golden backlighting, sculpts her face with a soft diffuse glow, and contrasts the star's pallor with bright backgrounds. Even in peril, she looks divine.
Charlotte Gray is available to stream on Vudu Free. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
CHICAGO (2002)
Dion Beebe's first Oscar nomination came for Rob Marshall's Best-Picture winning musical adaptation. Alternating period drama with burlesque spectacle in a flurry of sequins, plumes, and torn nylons, Chicago has plenty of razzle-dazzle to offer its audience and the cinematography is a good part of it. While the more naturalistic passages have a certain icy appeal, they are uncontrovertibly overshadowed by the plays of theatrical lighting and deep penumbra that Beebe magics up for the musical numbers. The glow in the dark effects of "We Both Reached for the Gun" and the pyrotechnical excess of the "Hot Honey Rag" is especially memorable.
Chicago is available to stream on HBO Max, Hoopla, Showtime, and DirecTV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play, and others.
IN THE CUT (2003)
It's quite strange that Dion Beebe only worked with Jane Campion in what turned out to be her most widely divisive, somewhat derided, films. Still, just as it happened with Holy Smoke, the second collaboration of Campion and Beebe is an inspired bit of transgressive cinema. That's true of the narrative and the visual language, full of fuzzy colorful abstractions and glistening tableaux that verge on kitsch. In the Cut turns New York into a half-remembered dream, a fragmented memory painted in the colors of bruised peaches and dead flowers, skin and flesh, cum, and blood. I consider this to be Beebe's greatest triumph.
In the Cut is available to stream on fubo TV and DirecTV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
COLLATERAL (2004)
The early days of digital cinema were a minefield for even the most talented filmmakers. Sticking out in that collection of risk-taking movies, we find Michael Mann's Los Angeles-set thriller, Collateral. The reasons for its notoriety are positive rather than negative. Dion Beebe found a way of making digital video into a beautiful, expressive tool. To this day, almost no other movie has filmed nighttime in the city quite as Beebe did in Collateral, even capturing that sickly glow that domes over the urban skyline. His images are steely sharp, full of rich color and the textures of cold metal, glass, concrete, and a beaten-down taxi.
Collateral is available to stream on DirecTV, TNT, and Sling TV. You can also rent it from Google Play, Youtube, Amazon, and others.
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (2005)
Rob Marshall's problematic love letter to the glamour of the geisha and their iconography earned Dion Beebe his only Oscar. It's not one of his most daring exercises nor does it inspire the awed admiration some of his other films do. However, it's impossible to deny the movie's beauty, which encompasses a variety of settings, color schemes, and lighting techniques. In the same sequence, one can experience the opulence of Hollywood-made Japanese theater, a look at the fine texture of hand-painted kimonos, and see Kyoto lit by soft sunlight philtered through silk. It's gorgeous.
Memoirs of a Geisha is available to rent from Amazon, Vudu, Redbox, Apple iTunes, Google Play, and others.
MIAMI VICE (2006)
Mann and Beebe's second foray into the hellscape of early digital cinema wasn't as successful as their first. Miami Vice saw the director revisiting the universe he had first touched on the small screen, melting the conventional plotting into a fever dream that's often as exhilarating as it is dumbfounding. Beebe's lensing summarizes the movie's best and worst elements, resulting in an odd sort of ugliness that's also beautiful, a festering wound whose colors paint a pretty picture.
Miami Vice is available to stream on Starz. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play, and others.
NINE (2009)
Rob Marshall's adaptation of the Maury Yeston's musical doesn't have a lot to recommend it for. There's Marion Cotillard's committed performance, the slinky designs of Colleen Atwood, and, of course, Dion Beebe's show-stopping cinematography. Circling between overt theatricality in a conjectural performance space, full color, and grainy black-and-white, shaky cam, and smooth swooping movements, Nine looks expensive. Beebe's work does more to evoke a Fellini-esque circus than anything else Marshall himself comes up with.
Nine is available to stream on DirecTV.
EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014)
In the past decades, many a filmmaker has tried to funnel the language of video games into cinema. Few have been as successful as Doug Liman with his bombastic Edge of Tomorrow. Moving through cyclical battle scenes and a labyrinth of militaristic space, the movie's an action triumph that Beebe shot to look equal parts first-person shooter and fantastical character study. While the big set pieces are impressive, one shouldn't dismiss the cool precision with which Beebe lenses the quieter scenes.
Edge of Tomorrow is available to stream on DirecTV and the USA Network. You can also rent it from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.
THE SNOWMAN (2017)
Few things show off a craftsman's excellence better than the ability to find greatness within utter shite. Pardon the crudeness, but The Snowman is a disaster on almost every level. Still, amidst its incomprehensible incompetence, one element shines bright like a lighthouse in a dark storm – Dion Beebe's lensing. His cinematography imbues chilly elegance to the grotesque story of murder and misogyny, turning the images into icepicks that pierce the audience's consciousness, rattling them as much as they dazzle. At moments, like when the headlights of a car paint a brushstroke of white in the blue endlessness of the night, Beebe is even able to find beautiful abstraction.
The Snowman is available to stream on DirecTV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play, and others.
What's your favorite Dion Beebe movie?
Reader Comments (15)
When I saw Memoirs of a Geisha for the first time, I thought it was the most beautiful film I'd ever seen. It still might be, and a lot of that is thanks to Beebe.
CHARLOTTE GRAY is supremely underrated! Cate Blanchett is fabulous in it.
Claudio you write so beautifully... ugh.
And you mention it but it's worth repeating Dion worked with female directors consistently and that is not to be taken lightly.
More Mann less Marshall. I'll never grasp Rob Marshall having a film career while George C. Wolfe barely pulls in television gigs.
Claudio I think your wrong about MOAG,it's beautiful and his best work and the film is fantastic too,i'd have it in my BP line up.
His work on In the Cut and Edge of Tomorrow is so unbelievably stunning. There’s enough gaps in his filmography that I don’t think I could call favorites, but your article reminds me that he’s way more versatile than I normally credit him for. Lovely writing as always.
"Memoirs of a Geisha" is a stunning looking film and his work on "Chicago" is also outstanding
Collateral is his best work. He still shouldn't have won for Memoirs of a Geisha as how in the hell did that film beat the brilliance that is Chivo for The New World and Rodrigo Prieto for Brokeback Mountain?
He's one of my favourites. COLLATERAL and IN THE CUT would be two of my favourite works of cinematography... the rest are all stunningly beautiful. too. I remember being very surprised NINE didn't get an Oscar nomination. His early Australian work is also worth seeking out (beyond HOLY SMOKE and CHARLOTTE GREY, of course). Movies like PRAISE, GODDESS OF 1967, WHAT HAVE I WRITTEN and VACANT POSSESSION.
Thank God you didn't include Into the Woods.
My favourite is Chicago.
His latest film is I Am Woman, the biopic of Helen Reddy.
I think Meg Ryan should have gotten more Oscar attention for IN THE CUT. She is also amazing in IN THE LAND OF WOMEN where I would ha e given her an Oscar nomination for sure!
Claudio, thanks as always. NINE is one of the most gorgeously shot films of that decade. The way it evokes the look of Italian cinema from the 1950s and 60s, but also contains the theatrical excesses necessary for a musical...just breathtaking work from him.
Come on Beebe bring it, for Cameroon bring it
Face, face, face, I give face
Beauty face, you can't take? It's ok
Watch my body go insane
The most striking thing to me about this filmography is that if you've worked with Dion Beebe once, you want to work with him again. That means he's both an artist and an excellent co-worker. And it also proves that even if you're movie is falling apart and makes no sense, the cinematography is not going to be the problem!