Barry Jenkins

Abstract This introduction to the Moonlight case studies describes how the film takes its protagonist through three stages of development—boyhood, youth, and early manhood—so that the filmmaker must “announce” Chiron, played by three different actors, three times. This aspect of the film offers invaluable insight into some of the approaches and means by which the filmmaker might introduce (or announce) their main characters. The following chapters explore each of the relevant sequences through a shot-by-shot analysis that reveals Jenkins’s filmmaking art. With scenes set “on the block,” in Black, working-class homes, in a high school, and at a diner late at night, the movie evokes an everyday world of compelling immediacy, yet the filmmaker’s cinematic artifice—largely invisible to the audience—proves on close inspection to be meticulous. An art that largely conceals art, Jenkins’s discourse also incorporates shots so precisely crafted that they take root in the audience’s cumulative memory and so come to constitute memes in the filmmaker’s visual storytelling. The agile aesthetics of Jenkins’s movie are both practical and elegant, proof that a poetic sensibility vested in the visual can be both a functional element in a filmmaker’s storytelling and a source of profound emotional resonance. Differences between the published screenplay and the film usefully point to the filmmaker’s creative process while offering the reader principles of the creative process from conception to physical production to editing.