Sam Taylor-Johnson - Defining Beauty Through Movement, from Budding Photographer to Rising Film Director

For my research project, I looked back at the career of Sam Taylor-Johnson, a British filmmaker and photographer from Surrey, England who has had a surprisingly fast transition from a relative unknown who remains part of a group of then young artists in the 90s called Young British Artists to a now established, mainstream film director, having worked on only two feature films, one of which a large blockbuster based on a popular erotica novel, "Fifty Shades of Grey," in 2015. The argument that I make is that in these twenty odd years of her career, Taylor-Johnson has always remained a purely visual artist whose primary focus has not always been the narrative so much as it has been capturing the "raw emotion" or beauty of movement made by the human body or other entity. Movement has always been somewhat of a central theme of her work, her music video UBerlin a documentation of physical movement of the human body, her short film A Little Death about the movement of decay via elapse in time, and her feature film directorial debut Nowhere Boy about cultural movement with the recreation of John Lennon and the Beatles' budding popularity in their early, developing years as a band and the eventual culture shock they delivered across the world.

*Natural transgression from short experimental film work to Hollywood blockbuster

A Little Death (2002)

"Brief Applause: Artist Sam Taylor-Wood" (2008)

Nowhere Boy Official U.S. Trailer (2009)

R.E.M.'s "UBerlin," starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (2011)

Fifty Shades of Grey Official Trailer (2015)