The Cinematography of Mátyás Erdély

The Principle

Mátyás Erdély HSC is the cinematographer who made BLUR a moral and aesthetic statement. His collaboration with László Nemes on Son of Saul (2015) produced one of the most formally radical films in the history of cinema — a Holocaust film that takes place almost entirely in shallow-focus close-up, the camera locked to the back of the protagonist's head, the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau existing only as out-of-focus shapes, muffled sounds, and peripheral nightmare at the edges of the frame. The world beyond the protagonist's immediate physical reality is DENIED to the audience. You see what he sees. You see ONLY what he sees. And what he sees is mostly the next step forward.

This approach is not a stylistic choice. It is a philosophical position. Erdély and Nemes argued that the Holocaust CANNOT be represented through conventional cinematic means — that wide shots of atrocity, clear images of suffering, the panoramic view of the death camp, all risk turning unimaginable horror into consumable spectacle. By restricting the image to the narrow, shallow, claustrophobic field of Saul's immediate perception, they made the film about the EXPERIENCE of being inside the machinery of death rather than the OBSERVATION of it from outside. The audience is not permitted the comfort of distance. The blur is not a technical limitation. It is an ethical boundary.

Erdély's subsequent work — Sunset (2018) with Nemes, and The Brutalist (2024) with Brady Corbet — has extended this investigation of restricted vision and subjective camera. Sunset applies a similar shallow-focus, following-shot approach to Budapest in 1913, the world teetering on the brink of war just beyond the protagonist's field of vision. The Brutalist shifts register entirely, using large-format VistaVision cinematography to create monumental compositions for a story about a Hungarian-Jewish architect in postwar America. Erdély is not a one-technique cinematographer. He is a thinker about the relationship between what the camera shows and what the audience is permitted to know.

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Light

The Sonderkommando's Light — Son of Saul

Son of Saul (2015, Nemes): Saul Ausländer works as a Sonderkommando — a Jewish prisoner forced to assist in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria. Erdély lights the death camp with the light it would actually have: the cold, flat grey of Polish overcast for exteriors, the dim yellow of bare electric bulbs for the underground chambers, the orange of the crematorium fires reflecting on concrete walls. The light is never dramatized. It is FUNCTIONAL — the minimal illumination required for the machinery of death to operate. The crematorium fire is not cinematic fire; it is industrial fire, utilitarian, its light falling on Saul's face as he works.

Because the focus plane is so shallow (Erdély shot on 40mm at wide aperture, approximately T1.3-2.0), the light behaves differently than in conventional cinema. Out-of-focus light sources become large, soft, SHAPES of luminosity rather than defined points. The crematorium becomes an orange glow. The searchlights become white smears. The world beyond Saul's immediate focus dissolves into an impressionist field of light and shadow. This is not beautiful. It is the visual representation of a mind that cannot — must not — process what surrounds it.

The Fading Empire — Sunset

Sunset (2018, Nemes): Budapest, 1913. Erdély applies a similar subjective camera to a different historical moment — the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The light is warmer here — the amber of gas lamps, the warm daylight of a Central European summer — but the technique is the same: shallow focus, following shot, the world beyond the protagonist's perception dissolving into luminous blur. The hat shop where Írisz Leiter seeks her family's legacy is lit by the soft daylight filtering through display windows, the interior warm and golden, the world outside a bright, indistinct haze.

Monumental Light — The Brutalist

The Brutalist (2024, Corbet): A radical departure. Erdély shot on large-format VistaVision, embracing deep focus, wide compositions, and the monumental scale of brutalist architecture. The light becomes architectural: hard, geometric, defined by the concrete forms it illuminates. László Tóth's buildings are lit by the qualities of light they were designed to control — shafts of sunlight through narrow apertures, the diffused glow through translucent panels, the hard shadow lines that the architecture INTENDS. For the first time, Erdély pulls back from the face and photographs SPACE — but space conceived as an extension of the character's inner life.

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Color

The restricted palette of perception. In Son of Saul, color is almost absent. The image exists in a narrow range of grey, olive, concrete, and the orange of fire. This is not a post-production desaturation — it is the consequence of the actual lighting conditions and the physical environment of the camp. Concrete is grey. Uniforms are grey-green. Skin under insufficient light is sallow. The only strong color is flame, and flame in this context is not warmth — it is the crematoria.

The amber of empire. Sunset operates in a richer but still controlled palette: the amber of gas light, the warm brown of wood-paneled interiors, the muted cream and gold of Habsburg-era commercial display. The color conveys the deceptive warmth of a civilization about to destroy itself — beautiful, refined, and fatally blind to the catastrophe just beyond the frame's focus.

The brutalist grey. The Brutalist embraces the material palette of its subject: raw concrete, steel, glass, the austere chromatic discipline of mid-century modernism. Color arrives through the human elements — skin, fabric, the materials of domestic life — set against the monochromatic severity of the architecture.

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Composition / Camera

The following shot. Erdély's signature: the camera fixed to the back or side of the protagonist's head, moving WITH them through space, the focus plane locked to their face while the world beyond dissolves. In Son of Saul, this is executed almost entirely in long takes — extended, unbroken following shots that track Saul through the camp, through the chambers, through the forest, without releasing the audience from his perspective. The composition is LOCKED: Saul's head or shoulders fill a consistent portion of the frame, and the camera adjusts to maintain this relationship as he moves, turns, stumbles, runs. The audience is handcuffed to the protagonist.

Shallow focus as moral choice. The depth of field in Son of Saul is approximately 12-18 inches at the working distance. This means that a face in focus has a background that is COMPLETELY dissolved. This is not typical shallow-focus aesthetics — it is RADICAL shallow focus, where the relationship between sharp and unsharp is so extreme that the image becomes almost two separate realities: the narrow plane of the protagonist's immediate experience, and the incomprehensible blur of everything else.

The 4:3 frame. Son of Saul is shot in the Academy ratio (1.37:1), which compresses the peripheral vision — the edges of the frame are closer to center, eliminating the wide-screen panoramic view that would contextualize the horror. The narrow frame mimics tunnel vision. The audience literally cannot see to the sides.

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Specifications

1. Restrict the depth of field. Shallow focus is not an aesthetic — it is an epistemological position. What the character cannot perceive, the audience cannot see. The blur beyond the focus plane is the boundary of permitted knowledge.
2. Follow, don't observe. The camera is attached to the character. It moves when they move, turns when they turn, stops when they stop. The audience does not get an establishing shot. They get the character's trajectory through space.
3. Functional light, not dramatic light. The light serves the SPACE, not the narrative. A crematorium is lit like a crematorium. A hat shop is lit like a hat shop. The light reveals the environment's reality, not the filmmaker's commentary.
4. The narrow frame. When the subject demands subjective restriction, consider the Academy ratio. The narrower frame eliminates peripheral context and forces the audience into tunnel vision.
5. Blur is content. What is out of focus is as important as what is in focus. The shapes, the movement, the light in the blur — these tell the audience what SURROUNDS the character without permitting them to examine it. The incomprehensible background is the film's subject as much as the sharp foreground.