Watch: Bar­ry Jenk­ins in Colour

To cel­e­brate the release of Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ mirac­u­lous new fea­ture If Beale Street Could Talk, we asked video essay­ist Luís Azeve­do to look back over the Amer­i­can filmmaker’s career – start­ing with his 2008 debut Med­i­cine for Melan­choly – to explore the evo­lu­tion of his dis­tinct visu­al style.

Here’s what Azeve­do had to say about the project:

“You could look at the most recent work of Bar­ry Jenk­ins and intu­itive­ly under­stand how pre­cise­ly he paints with a cam­era, yet you don’t need to. Jenk­ins first spelled out his deep inter­est in light, colour and the incep­tion of images in a 2011 short. The first sen­tence of Chloro­phyl explains the mechan­ics of the green pig­ment: ​‘Its main func­tion is to absorb light’.

“The par­al­lel with cin­e­ma is obvi­ous: light trav­els through the cam­era until it is absorbed by the chem­i­cal coat­ing on film. Despite rely­ing in dig­i­tal cam­eras, espe­cial­ly the Alexa, the work Jenk­ins devel­ops with long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor James Lax­ton is hyper-con­scious of the intri­ca­cies of film and atten­tive to impact of sub­tle –and not so sub­tle – colour nuances.

“Their first col­lab­o­ra­tion, My Josephine is awash in green, as if the images were spun in an emer­ald-sock-taint­ed wash­ing machine. When pur­ple invades the frame in Moon­light it’s not only the result of mix­ing red and blue, but the com­bi­na­tion of trau­ma and years of reflec­tion. And we don’t quite know if when the most­ly black-and-white Med­i­cine for Melan­choly finds colour in its ulti­mate instances, we’re enter­ing or leav­ing a colour/​colourless haze.

“More than an under­stand­ing of the mechan­ics of light and the com­plex­i­ty of the Arri Alexa 65, the work of Bar­ry Jenk­ins denotes a unique emo­tion­al intel­li­gence in the way he approach­es pic­tures. He’s one of the few bold yet per­son­al styl­ists that came out of the blue, ful­ly-formed since his film school days – per­haps since he was rocked in the cradle.”

Watch Bar­ry Jenk­ins In Colour below and share your thoughts with us @LWLies