Melina Matsoukas came up making music videos and it shows: she lights Black faces properly, puts the performer in the middle of the frame and composes every shot like a still. How that eye serves a long story is the open question.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing to notice in the opening episode of Insecure (2016) is that you can see everyone's face. Matsoukas directs the pilot and sets the look, and with Ava Berkofsky on camera she lights dark skin so it reads warm and detailed rather than dropping into shadow. Night is orange streetlight and blue car interiors. Ten minutes in we realised we were looking at people rather than at lighting, and it took us a moment to work out why that felt unusual on television. It should not be rare. It is.
She trained as a cinematographer, which explains a good deal, and she began directing music videos in 2006, working with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Solange. Formation (2016), for Beyoncé, is the one most people know. Then television: eight episodes of Insecure between 2016 and 2021 as director and executive producer, and two of Master of None, including the 2017 'Thanksgiving' episode written by and starring Lena Waithe. Her first feature, Queen & Slim (2019), was a road film about police violence and Black love, written by Waithe again. The Changeling (2023) is a fantasy series she directed and executive-produced. We have reviewed only Insecure, so the features and the later series are named here and not judged.
What she does is consistent across all of it. Colour is saturated, the performer sits in the centre of the frame, and costume and set are attended to as if every shot might be printed. In the Insecure pilot that care shows in the flats, Issa and Lawrence's looking rented and Molly's looking paid for, and in the clothes, oversized shirts for Issa and dresses on Molly that fit like a job description. Raphael Saadiq's score is bass and warm keys. The songs under the closing credits have plainly been chosen by someone who watched the episode first. None of this is showy. It is the difference between a programme that looks like television and one that looks like it was made by somebody.
The question with any director who comes from videos is whether the frame is the whole of the talent. Matsoukas has said she loves "to challenge the authority and the norms", and her work does keep coming back to Black lives and to people pushing against the people in charge of them. A four-minute video can carry that on image alone. A series or a feature needs the image to serve a story for a long time, and Insecure is the case we can speak to: there the look is in service of Issa Rae's writing and of the friendship at the centre, and it works. Whether it works as well when the story is hers to carry we will say when we have seen more.
Biography
Melina Matsoukas is an American director of music videos, television and film. She was born on 14 January 1981 in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. She studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and completed an MFA in cinematography at the AFI Conservatory.
Matsoukas began her career directing music videos and won two Grammy Awards for Best Music Video, for Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Beyoncé’s “Formation”. She directed episodes of the series Insecure (2016) and Master of None (2015), serving as an executive producer on the former. Her feature directorial debut was Queen & Slim (2019). She has also contributed to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and directed episodes of The Changeling (2023).
