Many times something I love to analyze in a film is the cinematography, hence commentary tracks would be a logical thing to look for. . .but they don't seem that common.
Anyway, I was just wondering if there were any DVDs with commentary tracks by the Director of Photography.

Not exactly high art, but the Charlies Angels disc has a commentary with McG and Russel Carpenter, who was D.P. and I believe an Academy Award winner for Titanic. It's actually a great commentary, albeit dominated by McG, but I went in to it wanting to hate his guts and he won me over, and went out of his way to praise Carpenter, and he gives him ample room to explain his ideas, motivations as well as problems and motivations in photographing the picture. I"m in agreement though, I would like to see the D.P.'s get more love. It's too bad we couldn't get D.P., art director and the editor all together, even if for one combo track on most film releases.

Glengarry Glen Ross has a selected-scenes commentary from the DP. Unfortunately, it plays over the pan & scan edition of the movie on Disc 2. D'oh!

Some notables:

Haskell Wexler - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Roger Deakins - the upcoming special edition of Fargo and there's a long interview with him on The Man Who Wasn't There.
Matthew Libatique - Requiem for a Dream
Ernest Dickerson (with others) - Do the Right Thing

"In this scene, I tried to get a shot that looked good."


Repeat to yourself everytime the scene changes.

Voila! Instant cinematographer commentary!

The great Michael Ballhaus commentates on his first great work of cinematographic brilliance: RW Fassbinder's "WHITY".

This anamorphically-enhanced DVD not only features the Ballhaus yak-track (with Fassbinder regular, Ulle Lommel), but is also technically worthy of Ballhaus' work. IMO, two years after it's release, this DVD is still a reference quality transfer for 70s art cinema. Very highly recommended.

On the American Beauty DVD, director Sam Mendes discusses the photography aspect quite a bit in his commentary track, and is joined by DP Conrad Hall for commentary on the extended storyboard feature.

Also, check out Medium Cool directed by (and of course, photographed by) Academy Award winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who does a great commentary track. He also participated in the commentary track for In The Heat Of The Night, and is the sole commentator for Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.

I forgot to mention, there is a very interesting featurette on the Criterion "Rashomon", discussing the 2 or 3 D.P.'s Kurosawa used in his Mifune years. And included are clips from what was apparently an hour long Japanese documentary on Kurosawa's shooters that was incredibly engrossing in snippets, and I'd really love to track down as a whole piece. Maybe Criterion can get some rights to it and slap it an upcoming Kurosawa release, or release a version of the "Kurosawa" documentary from a year or three ago and combine the Cinematographer documentary as sort of a catch all extras disc on A.K.

The ones that come to mind are

Charlie's Angels
A Nightmare on Elm Street

There is a good feature on Barry Sonnenfeld on the Miller's Crossing DVD.

The great Vilmos Zsigmond on the surprisingly good THE SADIST.

Shallow but still .

Artisan's Requiem for a Dream has a commentary track by DP Matthew Libatique.

Criterion's release of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing includes a commentary with DP Ernest Dickerson.

Criterion's George Washington (David Gordon Green/2000) includes a commentary with Green and DP Tim Orr.

Fox's available-by-mail-in-offer-only Sunrise (1927) has a great commentary by cinematographer John Bailey (though he was obviously not the DP on this film; Karl Struss died in 1981, at the age of 95). Highly recommended.

For a good academic commentary on camera technique, check out Marian Keane on Criterion's issue of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935).

The late Conrad L. Hall is one of the participants on the Incubus commentary track.

DJ

I find commentary tracks worthless. They seem to barely care about what they are saying. It would be better to have a Mystery Science Theater 3k type of track IMO, or in some other languages like Swahili for fun.

Peter Suchitzsky:

Dead Ringers CC
eXistenZ (Canadian version)

That's my favorite cinematographer commentary track, too! Thanks for contributing!

DJ

His father and fellow D.P., Wolfgang Suschitzky, is on the Get Carter track.

djtoell, sorry my lordship for expressing my thoughts w/o your consent - breath in, breath out, say to yourself "it's just a point of view" lol

Another great cinematographer commentary! Thanks again!

BTW, Steven Soderbergh was his own DP for Traffic, Full Frontal, Ocean's Eleven, and Solaris, so his commentaries on those DVDs would presumably count, too.

DJ

The Ebert track on Citizen Kane also is very informative as to camera techniques.

Perhaps your "thoughts" would have been better recieved had they actually been funny, your apparent intent. If you don't like commentaries, fine. But don't come and mess up this thread.

Not nearly as worthless as a threadcrap.