A Film Canon

As Michael Mann's first film to be shot exclusively on high-definition digital cameras, as well as his first film to be shot exclusively at night, Collateral presents high-def as an exquisite sensitivity to all the shades, nuances and gradations of artificial light - and, more specifically, as the forensic cinematography required to reveal enough light pollution to light a film, as Mann paints a portrait of LA lit exclusively by the net light wastage from laptop monitors, cell phones and other mobile communication devices. This creates something like an artificial daylight, or a conflation of daylight with mobility, as if LA had moved from a diurnal to cathemeral ethology, internalising, commodifying and recirculating daylight to suit whatever activities might require it; islands in a shallow sea, similar to the photograph of the Maldives that cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) keeps under his visor. This serves as his safe space when Vincent (Tom Cruise), his first fare of the evening, turns out to be a hit man, demanding that Max take him from an African-American nightclub, to an Hispanic-American nightclub, to an Asian-American nightclub, in pursuit of a light source that's not merely deregulated but deracinated, and a series of eyewitnesses lit less by artificial light than by artificial whiteness. If Taxi Driver was already torn between looking at and through windows, or between the reflective and refractive indices of glass, then Collateral moves even further in this direction, evoking such a complex, mobile network of interfaces that to look at any is simultaneously to bask in the cold warmth of the rest, producing something like the unusual, shallow focus that comes from having a computer monitor in the foreground, with a picture of the background on the screen. More than any of Mann's previous films, it envisages LA as an astronomical co-ordinate, the mere sheen on the undersurface of a helicopter, with the spatial differences that would make depth of field meaningful calibrated against "millions of galaxies and billions of stars".