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If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there will never be a definitive list of the greatest cinematography, but for our money, one of the finest polls has been recently conducted on the matter. Our friend Scout Tafoya polled over 60 critics on Fandor, including some of us here, and the results can be found in a fantastic video essay below. Rather than the various wordless supercuts that crowd Vimeo, Tafoya wrestles with his thoughts on cinematography as we see the beautiful images overlaid from the top 12 choices.

“I’ve been thinking of the world cinematographically since high school,” Scout says. “Sometime around tenth grade I started looking out windows, at crowds of my peers, at the girls I had crushes on, and imagining the best way to film them. Lowlight, mini-dv or 35mm? Curious and washed out like the way Emmanuel Lubezki shot Y Tu Mamá También,...

In the decades of cinema that have transpired since Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura, one cannot overlook its seminal status not only within the auteur’s own priceless filmography, but as a milestone in developing cinematic language. Greeted with a divisive response at the Cannes Film Festival, where a group of thirty-five renowned critics were able to turn the cultural tide after the film’s second screening (in that influential way that criticism can’t quite muster in contemporary arenas), it would go on to be awarded the Jury Prize, tying with Kon Ichikawa’s Odd Obsession, and beaten out by Fellini’s iconic La Dolce Vita. It’s hard to believe that such titanic masterpieces were competing against one another, all relishing unprecedented renown in the years to come. Antonioni’s is, truly, the harder film to love, its grasp residing somewhere within its own banality as an...