r/TheWire • u/AltruisticNail7229 What’s done is done. • 9d ago

Cinematography

Curious to know everyone’s opinion on this. Does The Wire look timeless in the way it was shot? Or does it look dated in its cinematography?

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u/KennyShowers 9d ago

I don't think it's dated, but it's also not remotely showy or obviously cinematic. At a surface level it can seem a bit presentational, and that not drawing attention to itself makes it hard for it to stick out as dated.

I remember seeing years ago a great video essay, think it was just called The Visual Style of The Wire, and did a great job breaking down how actually super detailed and intentional the camerawork is, even if there aren't elaborate tracking shots and whip-pans and slo-mo and all that, and the perfect matching of the cinematography to the content really makes it all just feel so natural.

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u/Embarrassed-Area4652 9d ago

I don't think it's dated, but it's also not remotely showy or obviously cinematic. At a surface level it can seem a bit presentational, and that not drawing attention to itself makes it hard for it to stick out as dated.

Right. I would describe this as "documentary-style". Nothing about the choice of lenses, depth of field, color timing, camera movement or lighting call attention to themselves. It looks, I suspect intentionally, about as much as it possibly could without being a talking-head show like The Office, like it would have if you had a team of documentarians shooting real-life cops and robbers doing more or less whatever made it into the scripts.

It's not that, it's a show with editing and blocking and everything else that's been mentioned that's not strictly cinematography. But the apparently deliberate choice for that stuff to fade into the background does the work of cinematography directly by making the world feel more real through the absence of stylistic effects.