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The look is what Marty brings to the table, with vivid vision. Exciting is probably the best way to describe the experience Scorsese creates for viewers. The so-called MTV aesthetic that is so often attacked by the critical establishment is turned on its head in this movie that takes the term Motion Picture to heart. Scorsese never stops moving the camera. If Jagger is rushing down the stage, Scorsese either has the camera rushing toward him or alongside him. If Keith Richards is playing a guitar solo, the camera crawls up the guitar neck, or along Richards' own time-worn neck. In one of the many visual motifs that remind the audience that this is a film from a director who built his aesthetic in the 60s and 70s documenting a band who developed their sound in the 60s and 70s, there is no shortage of zooms in and out, whip pans, and all manner of camera work that today is frowned upon as being part of some bygone era. And it is beautiful.
Marty makes it all feel fresh and moving and relevant. Robert Richardson (Kill Bill) shot the hell out of this thing, working with a team of camera operators who have done important work in their own right as cinematographers: Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men), Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), John Toll (The Thin Red Line). The list literally goes on and on. It's like an all star team of cinematographic minds. It is as if Marty said, "Okay, who has shot the most beautiful films of the last 20 years? Okay, let's hire all of 'em."
The editing work, credited solely to David Tedeschi, is no less stunning. Every cut is a match on action, eyeline, a smile, a pointed finger, a lighting change, a song development, a camera move, or a dance step, or just plain ol' breathing, shouting, clapping, stamping and dancing. The whole picture moves so well because it is edited in such a way that makes every single shot part of a unified whole. The close ups on guitar string strums, drum stick twirls, and lip curling choruses turn the viewer into museum patrons who occasionally step closer and squint at a painting, studying the details, looking for clues, looking for technique, looking for the magic. Looking for God in Man.
Shine A Light is a film that is wholly contained, even when, in the final moments of the movie, the camera exits the theater, Marty yelling at the invisible camera operator to go, "Up! Up!" And the camera does go up. Up, up and away, into the sky, resting on the New York skyline with a near-full moon looming in the background. It is the exact same shot, with the exception of time of day, that Scorsese uses for the establishing shot in Gangs Of New York. What's it mean? I don't know. But I liked it.