Of course, none of these people are household names. There's a common perception that the cinematographer is nothing but a technician, just another in the long list of award recipients who go largely unnoticed during the Oscars. The great cinematography documentary, Visions of Light (one of the best documentaries about the craft of filmmaking ever made), traces that notion to the workmanlike attitude of many of cinema's earliest practitioners of the craft. But great cinematographers blend their role as technicians and engineers with true creative artistry to aid their directors in visual storytelling.

What stands out about the collaboration between Nolan and Pfister is how close the philosophies of these two men are in terms of both the technology and the art of filmmaking. Both men are adamant that film, not digital video, remains the most versatile and responsive medium for motion pictures. They're also both vehemently opposed to 3D. If Warner Brothers had any hopes of squeezing extra money out of The Dark Knight Rises with the surcharge on silly glasses, those hopes were quickly dashed: Neither of these two would submit to making a film in 3D.

IMAX, though, is another story. Both Nolan an Pfister obviously love the crisp image and epic sweep of the large format, as well the challenge of shooting large portions of a movie using the unwieldy equipment necessary for IMAX photography. As a result, The Dark Knight Rises features more than an hour of often breathtaking footage shot in IMAX, more than twice the amount of its predecessor in the series.

That love of IMAX isn't really a shared embrace of something new, though. It's evidence of an abiding love of classical technique. IMAX is the modern equivalent of 70mm filmmaking, a format that had its heyday in the 1960s with visually striking classics like Laurence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. One gets the feeling watching the collaborations between Nolan and Pfister, particularly after their first, more modest work on Memento, that they want everything they do to feel as big as those films.

Now that Pfister is hanging up his light meter and in favor of the director's chair, that means that Nolan will need to find another cinematographer not just of similar talent, but with similar aesthetics and technical passions. He might still issue the same instructions about how he wants a scene to look, but that's no guarantee he'll get the same result. Sit Van Gogh and and Gauguin in front of the same landscape, and you'll get radically different paintings. As it is with the brushes of different painters, light just looks different refracted through the lens of different cinematographers.

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