The Film Experience

Director Shaka King (left) and Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (right)

Sean Bobbitt started as a news camera shooter, a photojournalist more than a cineaste. His first feature was Michael Winterbottom's 1999 Cannes Competition entry Wonderland, an auspicious beginning to what would become a splendorous filmography. The collaboration with British director Steve McQueen came to define the cinematographer's career, their work running the gamut from commercials to museum installations and award-winning films like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. Despite all this, Sean Bobbitt has never been nominated for an Oscar. Thanks to Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, that sad state of affairs may be about to change…

Overall, I wouldn't classify myself as a fan of Hollywood's latest attempt at portraying radical politics and revolutionary ideals. Judas and the Black Messiah feels oddly toothless, scared of engaging with the realities of its complex premise, as well as weighted down by biopic conventions. Not all of it disappoints, of course. While the whole left me cold, many of its separate components impress. One thinks of the supporting cast's riveting performances, the ominous sonority, the picture's memorable look which extends from conference stages to cramped cars glittering like black diamonds in the Illinois night.

Regarding this last facet, it cannot be overstated how important Sean Bobbitt's cinematography is to the relative success of Judas and the Black Messiah. Before facing the challenge of the shoot, the DP did his fair share of research both to familiarize himself with Fred Hampton's story and the visual specificities of Chicago in the late 1960s. Bobbitt's homework was concentrated on photography from the period, using over 300 photos as well as documentary footage to understand how Fred Hampton and William O'Neal were framed.

The luminous quality from those photographic examples manifests in the final picture even though Bobbitt avoids direct pastiche. Judas and the Black Messiah doesn't look like a document from the 1960s neither does it appear as a rose-colored remembrance. It's something more complicated than that. According to interviews, King and Bobbitt initially considered shooting the film in black and white but quickly discarded the idea. Ironically enough, had they gone for a more overt invocation of old film styles, an Oscar nomination might have been locked. After all, there are few things the cinematographers' branch of the Academy loves more than silvery monochrome.

As it stands, there's a green tint to the sets and even the light, a cold coppery hue that makes the film look a bit like cheap jewelry. I mean this in the best way possible. The metallic tonalities, this bronze appearance, imbue the movie with an idiosyncratic aesthetic that renegades the golden nostalgia of other, less visually interesting, period works. The past epoch Bobbitt and King envision is no idealization nor is it a perfect reproduction of history. Somewhere between a Hollywood dream and a gritty docudrama, that's where Judas and the Black Messiah truly lives.

To be fair, the filmmakers aren't allergic to some myth-making visuals and some heavy metaphor. Think about the way O’Neal is continuously obfuscated by reflections, lost in multitudes of out-of-focus individuals. Notice the subtle differentiations in the way the camera regards Hampton. In public, Bobbitt often shoots him from beneath, finding the monument, the icon. In more intimate settings, the observation is less reverential, more attuned to his presence as a private person rather than as a leader. This contrast is one of many in Bobbitt's approach to the film and one of the details he got from archival photography.

The best example of the dynamic is seen in the starkly disparate shooting styles that come with Hampton's release from prison near the end of the flick. With his girlfriend, space becomes abstract in intimate observation, quiet pictures painted out of their shared moments. When he returns to public life, however, the camera follows Hampton as he climbs up the stairs of a church, going from the shadow into the light, from being alone to having to share himself with a passionate crowd. The movement of the Steadicam speaks of nervous urgency, while the framing defines the multiplicities in Hampton's persona.

Always behind him and low, the camera crystalizes the idea of a man whose importance transcends his human condition, whose greatness is bigger than himself. Such are the photographic distinctions that separate the man from the historical figure. Crowd scenes like that are also fascinating in how they negotiate the collective and the individual experience. This relationship of opposing visual ideas bleeds into the social hierarchies and segregated realities seen in the course of the story. In other words, Bobbitt shoots the Panthers and their FBI enemies as visual antagonists.

There's a lived-in vitality to the scenes focusing on the Black activists that's conspicuously absent from the ones centered on the government agents. The world of revolutionaries is made of rooms stuffed with people, the sun blasting through windows, and lighting schemes that posit light sources up top so that everyone is visible. The authorities, on the other hand, are shown in colder hues, their staging more theatrical and staler, less egalitarian in how it spotlights each player. Even tableaux of warm domesticity feel more rigid in White spaces. It's the difference between a house party and a mausoleum.

It must also be said that, in an industry where many a filmmaker is incapable of capturing the difference in deep skin tones, Bobbitt has made a career out of capturing the nuances of Black people. Judas and the Black Messiah showcases this beautifully, and, even when Bobbitt plunges his actors in darkness, one can see the distinctions of each individual, the gradations of black and brown, azure reflections, red blood coursing beneath dark skin. Nobody is washed out in greyish light which isn't always a guarantee in Hollywood. Here, all the actors look amazing, especially Dominique Fishback whose emotional close-ups are some of the most impactful images in the feature.

For some awards obsessives, the words "career Oscar" sound dirty and unpalatable. While acknowledging this, one must admit that some cases demand exemptions from judgment. Some careers have earned golden recognition, even if the film that gets them there isn't the best. Arguably, that's the situation Sean Bobbitt encounters himself this year. Judas and the Black Messiah isn't close to representing the totality of his talents, but it's solidly elegant work that's still better than a lot of Cinematography nominees of recent vintage. To underline and justify this argument, here's a collection of frames from the man's awards-worthy filmography, none of which have earned him a well-deserved Oscar nod: