On the cinematography of The Tree of Life and what Emmanuel Lubezki was doing with the handheld camera.

The Tree of Life uses handheld cinematography in a way that is the furthest possible from the shaky-cam aesthetic of action films. Lubezki's camera in this film is in constant gentle motion, but the motion is never agitated — it's more like breath than anxiety.

The camera moves toward and away from its subjects with the curiosity of a consciousness trying to understand what it's looking at. It doesn't hold for the conventional duration of a shot; it lingers or moves on as the rhythm of the scene suggests, rather than as the grammar of editing requires.

This quality of movement is appropriate to the film's subject: memory and loss as experienced by a consciousness that is also in motion, that cannot quite hold its subjects still.

The creation sequence — the nearly twenty minutes of cosmic imagery that interrupts the film's domestic narrative — is Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Dan Glass working at a different scale entirely, moving from the domestic to the cosmological with a visual continuity that the handheld camera's organic rhythm has made somehow possible. The two registers are connected because both are shot with the same quality of attention.