The Light Touch

By Hollywood’s current rules, the Oscar-nominated film Silence shouldn’t have gotten made. How Martin Scorsese and Rodrigo Prieto did it anyway.

- Stephanie Zacharek

BECAUSE WE TEND TO THINK OF FILM AS A DIRECTOR’S medium, cinematographers—the crafts people who understand that visual textures and moods can affect moviegoers deeply and mysteriously—don’t get much love. The director-cinematographer union is one of the most essential partnerships on any movie, but it’s also something of a secret puzzle, a dialogue in a language that can slip between the cracks of words. The most astonishing feats of cinematography are also sometimes among the least flashy, essentially the result of putting technical skills to work in the service of synesthesia. Science and numbers are enlisted in the service of color, light, feeling. How do you convey, for example, the very texture of the air? In 17th century rural Japan, no less?

That’s what cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto pulls off in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a picture that, by all reasonable logic of how movies get made these days, shouldn’t even exist. Scorsese wanted to turn Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence into a film when he first read it, in 1989. Stories about the suffering and spiritual crises of Portuguese missionaries ministering to persecuted Catholics in Japan weren’t an easy sell then, and they’re even less so now. But for Scorsese, who grew up Catholic and has always in one way or another tackled spiritual themes in his work, the idea of turning Silence into a movie was like a talisman carried in a pocket, an idea he carted around with him through the years and more than two decades’ worth of films.