Why Barry Jenkins Makes the Most Beautiful Films in Hollywood
2024-10-18 · 5 min read
Barry Jenkins makes films that look like memories feel. His visual style, characterized by intimate close-ups, shallow focus, warm color temperatures, and a camera that moves with emotional rhythm, creates images so beautiful they border on overwhelming. But the beauty is never decorative. It's always in service of genuine human feeling.
Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 and deserved it. The film tells the life of a Black queer man in Miami across three chapters, and Jenkins shoots each one with a distinct visual palette reflecting the character's emotional state. The dinner scene, the beach scene, the diner scene. These are moments cinema was invented to create.
If Beale Street Could Talk adapted James Baldwin's novel with a reverence for the source material that bordered on devotional. The golden-hour cinematography by James Laxton made Harlem look like a painting. The love story is filmed with such tenderness that the camera itself seems to be in love with its subjects.
The Underground Railroad on Amazon Prime was Jenkins' most ambitious project. The ten-episode series featured some of the most stunning television cinematography ever produced, with each episode adopting the visual language of a different state and historical period.
Jenkins' collaboration with cinematographer James Laxton, composer Nicholas Britell, and his ensemble casts creates a consistent artistic language across projects. Britell's scores complement Jenkins' visuals to produce a sensory experience that's distinctly cinematic.
What makes Jenkins' beauty meaningful is its insistence on showing Black life with the visual grandeur historically reserved for white stories. His camera treats Black bodies, Black neighborhoods, and Black love as inherently worthy of the most exquisite cinematographic attention. That's not just aesthetic. It's a political statement through pure cinema.
