On the role of weather in film and why it's more important than most formal analysis acknowledges.

Weather in film is rarely analyzed but is constantly doing work. The rain in Seven is not atmospheric: it's communicating a quality of persistence, of relentless moral dampening, that the narrative is also about. The wind in Wuthering Heights adaptations is doing what Brontë's prose does: it externalizes interior states.

Akira Kurosawa was the master of weather as grammar. The battle in the rain in Seven Samurai is raining because the rain is both spectacularly cinematic and morally appropriate: the final battle is also the burial of the world the film has built, and the rain is grief.

The snow in Fargo is not just setting. It's a visual argument about blankness, about what happens when a violent event occurs in an environment so white and flat that it should be unambiguous, but isn't.

Vilmos Zsigmond's fog in Heaven's Gate is one of the great controversies in American cinematography: Cimino's insistence on shooting in real fog conditions created images that are extraordinary and a production that was catastrophic. The images survived the production. The studio didn't.