BEHIND THE SHOT
A year since One Hundred Years of Solitude brought Gabriel García Márquez’s novel to the screen, the series returns to Netflix for its second and final chapter. Directed by Laura Mora and Carlos Moreno and filmed entirely in Colombia, Part Two sees the town of Macondo entering a new era of modernisation. In some ways, it continues the visual style set out in Part One , but cinematographer Camilo Monsalve (episodes 3, 4 and 7) wanted to progress the lighting and textural feel. The first part leant on full-frame and wide shots, favouring Cooke Anamorphic Special Flare lenses with a fast T1.8 aperture, while in Season 2 they changed glass, using ARRI ALFA 2x anamorphics for a more landscape-oriented feel. They also set themselves the challenge of more continuous shots, often with wide lenses and complicated camera moves through houses and stretches of Macondo. For Monsalve, who usually works on feature films, joining
forces with other DOPs for a series was a completely new experience. “It was totally different but super cool,” he grins. “We had this collaborative conversation, bringing our own ideas and looking into the world of the other DOPs, trying to carry their ideas into our episodes and also add our own.” Top priority was that the look moved on in line with the story and time period. The advent of electricity in episode 3 allowed the cinematographers to introduce new visual components, while the arrival of the train in episode 4 brought smoke and pollution. Episode 7, meanwhile, was unique for including a torrential downpour. Getting the rain right was important for Monsalve: “Normally when people think about rain, they visualise European or American rain, but in
Colombia, it can be different; almost foggy. I wanted the audience to feel the humidity, the swelling. It was a good challenge to create this texture and aesthetic, so it felt more like tropical rain.” They realised that vision in a standout nighttime sequence that follows José Arcadio running towards the train in a single, unbroken shot. The camera
begins on a Scorpio 45 crane before being handed off, at the precise moment of a lightning strike, to a second operator on the ground and then
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