Of all the CineTributes I have planned for this month, today's is one I've been particularly looking forward to. In the past 40+ years, Lee Ping Bin has established himself as one of the foremost visual artists not only of our time but of all time in cinema. He has a Technical Grand Prize from the Cannes Film Festival, an award from the American Film Institute, an Asian Film Award and four Golden Horse Film Awards. He has been the subject of a documentary. He has a book published of his cinematography. He has, shockingly if not surprisingly, never yet been nominated for an Academy Award (though he is an AMPAS member). And it's that quality - the lack of Oscar recognition - that qualifies him for his special series, shining a spotlight on cinematographers I consider to be underrated or under-appreciated.
Lee's unparallelled use of natural and ambient light, his smooth, gliding, Ophuls-esque long takes, his rapturous use of colour - all have marked him out as an artist of both uncommon natural talent and exceptional skill. His work with Christopher Doyle on In the Mood for Love might be his best-known, and most-awarded, but it's his 35 year-long collaboration with fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien that has been his most fruitful artistic endeavour, culminating most recently in 2015's The Assassin - to my mind perhaps the most beautiful film in history. Enjoy watching the video, because I certainly enjoyed putting it together!
Films featured
The Time to Live and the Time to Die, 1985
Dust in the Wind, 1986
The Puppetmaster, 1993
Goodbye, South, Goodbye, 1996
Flowers of Shanghai, 1998
The Vertical Ray of the Sun, 2000
In the Mood for Love, 2000
Millennium Mambo, 2001
Springtime in a Small Town, 2002
Cafe Lumiere, 2003
Three Times, 2005
Flight of the Red Balloon, 2007
Air Doll, 2009
Norwegian Wood, 2010
Renoir, 2012
The Assassin, 2015
Crosscurrent, 2016
Eternity, 2016
Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache, 2019