Steve Hoffman
07-02-2003, 10:11 PM
This is from Salon.com today.
Film's not dead, damn it!
Interviews with some of today's leading cinematographers -- the real
magic-makers of the movies -- suggest that George Lucas' overhyped "digital
revolution" is mostly marketing buzz.
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By Stephanie Zacharek
July 3, 2003 | The way we see movies is about to change -- tomorrow. Or
maybe the day after that. Then again, it might not happen until sometime
next week. But according to what we've been told -- by the media, by some
filmmakers and, perhaps most significantly, by the people who actually
manufacture the necessary equipment -- we do know for sure that digital
technology is poised to revolutionize the moviegoing experience.
But not many people have asked the essential question: How are these movies
going to look?
The best people to ask are the ones who have the most at stake, the people
who have built careers and reputations on knowing what it takes to make a
movie look just so. Cinematographers are at the vanguard of the changing
technology; many of them are familiarizing themselves quite rapidly, and
happily, with digital editing processes, for one thing, particularly in the
case of movies that feature lots of special effects.
But last summer a controversial, and not exactly astutely researched, Los
Angeles Times article depicted contemporary cinematographers as a bunch of
aged Luddites quaking in their boots as they face an onslaught of bright
youngsters brandishing fancy new digital cameras. At the center of the
article was "Star Wars" emperor George Lucas, who had invited a group of
big-name directors -- among them Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Zemeckis,
Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg -- to his private screening room to sell
them on the wonders of digital technology.
The article was essentially just another version of the "Film is dead"
rallying cry -- a triumphant shout that's been around for so long now that
it's more like a feeble cough. Film isn't dead, although it is of course
changing, and changing fast. But the Los Angeles Times article, and others
like it, suggested that today's cinematographers are nervous about those
changes, when in fact, they'd be the first to acknowledge that staying on
top of them is part of their job. How many photographers, of any stripe, do
you know who don't jump at the chance to fool around with new equipment?
The cinematographer's artistry depends on knowing what tools to use --
digital or otherwise -- and when to use them.
Steven Poster, a former president of the American Society of
Cinematographers, calls it a kind of alchemy. "It's what we do, the magic
of deciding, 'I'm going to use this kind of film stock for this, or this
kind of digital camera, or this kind of technology or technique. I'm gonna
use these lights, I'm gonna make it look like this.' We have to stay
abreast of these developments at all times. There's constant learning
within the field, of knowing what our tools are capable of."
The problem isn't that cinematographers don't like digital technology; it's
simply that they know what its current limitations are. There has been
plenty of hype surrounding digital technology as it's been used in
filmmaking. And there are certainly pictures, like the first two entries in
the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, that wouldn't look half as beautiful as
they do without the use of that technology.
But remarkably few people have bothered to ask cinematographers -- the
people who should know best -- what the technology's current strengths and
limitations are. People like George Lucas like to think they're on the
vanguard of these new methods and modes of filmmaking. But it probably
hasn't occurred to most moviegoers that the "Film is dead" movement may be
more strongly driven by forces in the marketplace than by artistic
considerations.
In other words, there are some big corporations that would like us to think
that digital filmmaking is ready for prime time. And cinematographers may
be the last line of defense between those massive marketing forces and the
rich visual heritage of movies. Even though most moviegoers think they know
what cinematographers do, it's likely they don't even know the half of it.
But in the rapidly changing world of filmmaking, their role as
preservationists -- as preservationists of the quality and vitality of
images -- is more important than ever.
When Terri Gross interviewed cinematographer Gordon Willis for her National
Public Radio program "Fresh Air" last fall, she introduced him by playing a
few clips from movies he'd worked on: Marlon Brando's opening scene from
"The Godfather"; an exchange between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in "Annie
Hall" that captures the sparks flying between their his-and-hers non
sequiturs.
You'd think that audio clips would be the worst window into the work of a
cinematographer. The surprise lies in how vividly we can see those scenes
just by hearing them. You can't hear Brando's voice in that clip without
picturing the hollows of his eyes, both as empty and as full as undersea
caves. And the mere sound of Keaton's and Allen's tentative chatter
resurrects visions of a muted '70s New York skyline cloaked in smog and
romance -- we can't distinguish one from the other, which is precisely the
point, their commingled beauty is so intense.
You can't take the measure of a cinematographer's work just by listening to
it. But if a sound clip can serve as a miniature testimony to the resonance
of a cinematographer's images, it can also heighten the ways in which
moviegoers sometimes take the cinematographer's job for granted. In one
sense, cinematography should be invisible, since it exists mainly to serve
the story that's being told. But movies don't shoot themselves. Unless a
movie features lots of pretty natural scenery, moviegoers -- and sometimes
even people who are themselves involved in the making of movies -- don't
always recognize how much thought and care goes into making the kinds of
images you can actually hear on the radio.
"Even within the enlightened community of fellow filmmakers who are not
cinematographers," says cinematographer John Bailey, "there has been this
confusion or misperception of cinematography as pretty pictures." Bailey's
30-year career has included numerous collaborations with the director Paul
Schrader, among them "Cat People," "Mishima" and 1999's lovely but
little-seen "Forever Mine." Bailey says viewers tend to be most easily
impressed by the prettified Ivory-Merchant aesthetic: "I'm not picking on
Ivory-Merchant, but they're kind of a shorthand example -- in other words,
period films, beautiful costumes, lush landscapes and impressive exterior
photography."
But, Bailey says, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with
cinematography, other than the fact that you put a camera there and capture
the whole thing on film. "I think a cinematographer's foremost requirement
is to use all of the visual aesthetic skill that he or she has to find a
style," he says, "a combination of aesthetic and technique to enhance,
enlighten and expand the dramatic, emotional and narrative momentum of the
screenplay. In the same way that the screenwriter uses words to tell the
story, and the director uses the performances of the actors to reveal the
subtext and the nuance of it, the cinematographer uses all of the tools
that he or she has, focused through the lens of the camera, to reveal and
enhance and expand the story."
In other words, it's a job that requires an unusual amalgam of technical
prowess and visual artistry -- in addition to management and diplomacy
skills, not to mention knowledge of equipment, lighting, film stock and
postproduction processes. That may or may not explain why directors of
photography don't surface much in media coverage of new pictures. Actors,
directors and screenwriters are interviewed all the time, but no one ever
thinks to talk to cinematographers, maybe because they're perceived as
eggheads who just want to talk about lenses and film speeds.
When you sit down and actually talk to one, you realize that
cinematographers mostly just want to talk about movies -- not just about
the techniques used in making them, but also about the ways their visual
textures and moods can affect us so deeply and so mysteriously. You can get
a sense of that simply by watching Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and
Stuart Samuel's superb 1992 documentary "Visions of Light," a beautifully
detailed thumbnail history of cinematography. "Visions of Light" isn't
noteworthy so much because it explains precisely what cinematographers do
(you'd probably need 10 two-hour documentaries for that) but because it
captures so perfectly what the legacy of their profession means to them.
The cinematographers featured include just about everyone's favorites:
Conrad Hall ("In Cold Blood"), Vilmos Zsigmond ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller"),
Lászlá Kovács ("Shampoo"), Haskell Wexler ("In the Heat of the Night"),
Vittorio Storaro ("The Conformist") and Néstor Almendros ("Days of
Heaven"). It's telling that many of them seem more interested in talking
about their colleagues' work than their own, and especially about the work
of the great directors of photography who came before them -- people like
Gregg Toland ("Citizen Kane"), James Wong Howe ("From Here to Eternity")
and Russell Metty ("Touch of Evil").
For people who spend so much of their time considering how things are going
to look on film, cinematographers seem surprisingly good at talking. "Most
of the directors of photography I know and associate with are more like
Renaissance men than people from any other parts of the business that I
know," says Steven Poster, whose own credits include two very
distinctive-looking recent releases, "Donnie Darko" and "Stuart Little 2."
"We need to be able to take a space or a room or a large expanse and create
the type of lighting that will indicate a mood and allow the actors to move
within that space and be lit at any given spot that will tell the story."
At the same time, cinematographers are also busy being managers. "We're
managing relationships, we're managing budgets, we're managing equipment,"
Poster says. "And we're managing egos of many other people. It's a
multifaceted job. What we really are is Tom Sawyers getting people to
whitewash our fence, so we can be off doing the art that we love to do.
That's our little secret."
We've all been trained to be skeptical of anyone who's involved in the
making of Hollywood films who actually uses the A-word. Given the state of
the movie industry today, it's easier for most moviegoers to be cynical
about Hollywood than charitable toward it. We've convinced ourselves -- and
unfortunately, too often the movies themselves have proven us right -- that
movies are made by committees whose sole aim is to make money, instead of
by people with eyes and ears, brains and hearts.
Cinematographers seem to be the antidote to Hollywood cynicism -- not
because they don't have to finesse their share of studio pressure (there
are certainly times when they do), or because they claim that every movie
they work on is going to be a lasting contribution to the canon (they
don't), but because they believe so wholeheartedly in doing the best work
they can on each given project.
After a screening of the recent stinker "The Recruit" (shot by Stuart
Dryburgh), I remarked to a colleague how good it looked. "It's amazing how
much TLC goes into crap," he said, and he's right. Forget plots that don't
work or performances that fall flat: Someone still had to figure out the
best way to capture the je ne sais quoi of a particular car chase, or to
light, say, a bridge in a way that captures the essence of bridge-ness.
Beyond that, flexibility has to be part of the cinematographer's art. Every
collaboration between a director and a cinematographer is different; what's
more, cinematographers may do two or three pictures a year, working in
different styles with different directors. Poster likens the process of
making a movie to entering a marriage, complete with a courtship, a
honeymoon period, the actual work of the marriage and an eventual breakup.
Even if you work with the same director on another picture, the new
marriage will have different characteristics.
In writing about movies, most critics consider the director to be the guy
or the gal holding the bag -- not necessarily because they believe the
director is the sole and exclusive author of the work but because it's a
kind of shorthand. If you're trying to describe what action was taken to
make a movie move or feel or read as it does, you need a noun to go with
your verb, and in most cases, the director is your noun. As a colleague of
mine once explained it, the director's vision is the one through which all
other visions are filtered, which is as good an explanation as I've ever
come across.
I suspect that directors get most of the credit for the success of a
picture (or lack thereof) precisely because movies are such a collaborative
process. Sometimes it's easy to separate the strands of who deserves blame
or praise; but in many cases a great moment on film that we automatically
give a director credit for may very well be the result of some sort of
communication, spoken or un-, between a director, his or her D.P., a
production designer, a costume or makeup person and any of the actors
involved -- all of whom are working off a script by one or more
screenwriters, who may also be on hand. And don't forget about producers,
people whose degree of hands-on involvement in a picture can vary from not
much to a whole lot.
It always feels corny to talk about the magic of movies, but
cinematographers don't seem at all uncomfortable with the word. "It seems
like magic to us, too, to actually do it," Bailey says. He compares looking
at a finished film with what a composer like Gustav Mahler might have felt
when he finally heard one of his complex, conflicted and infinitely layered
symphonies played by actual musicians. "How awesome it must have been! In
filmmaking, there are so many dozens, if not hundreds, of people involved
in making a film who, in the right environment, where the producers and the
directors give them the opportunity to really express themselves and put
themselves into it, can create this incredible thing. When you go and see
the finished film, it has an existence of its own, somehow beyond you. It's
so much different than, say, writing a book or a play."
Meanwhile, film -- the medium in which cinematographers have been working
for some 100 years, a medium that in its relatively short history has given
most of us more joy and pleasure than we can possibly measure -- is dead.
Or at least, people like George Lucas would have us think so.
Every now and then, a major news outlet will run a feature sounding a tinny
but trumped-up death knell for film as we know it. Last summer, Los Angeles
Times staff writers P.J. Huffstutter and Jon Healey jumped on the
bandwagon, detailing the way Lucas had tried to convince his colleagues of
the supremacy of digital technology by holding that powwow in his private
screening room. He showed them two identical clips from "Monsters, Inc.,"
one completely electronic (in other words, stored on digital tape and run
through a digital projector), the other on a reel of film that had already
done four weeks in a local multiplex.
The electronic clip, the story noted, "looked less like a motion picture
and more like an open window onto a real world." Compare that with the
jiggly, scratched-up image that limped onto the screen via the poor,
pathetic stepcousin known as film.
Lucas had gathered his colleagues, ostensibly, to issue a warning: It was
time to leave film behind, or get left in the dust. Lucas, after all, had
broken some ground of his own with "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the
Clones," which was shot entirely with high-definition digital cameras --
that is, a new breed of cameras that record images on videotape instead of
35-millimeter film, but with crisper detail and a wider range of color than
video cameras have traditionally been able to capture. "Attack of the
Clones" was also edited with digital equipment and, in the relatively few
theaters equipped to do so, projected digitally.
So because he'd been able to make a stiff, crummy-looking, overblown
faux-epic on a new plaything, Lucas felt completely justified in
foretelling the death of film. The L.A. Times article played right into his
phony argument, in language that sounds borrowed from that most filmic of
news sources, a World War II newsreel: "Lucas' blunt message stands at the
center of a schism in Hollywood over the fate of film in the film business.
New high-definition video cameras and digital editing equipment challenge
the longtime supremacy of film. They are cheaper and more flexible. But
they also frighten directors and cinematographers who understand every
nuance of film. A creative misstep can tarnish a career, so many of those
established in the film industry blanch at the thought of showing their
inexperience with the latest technology. A colossal mistake, seen by
millions of fans, might reveal that they are passé storytellers -- easily
replaced with younger, cheaper and more tech-savvy rivals."
Aside from a quote or two from cinematographers Roger Deakins ("With
digital, it's all very businesslike. We're not businessmen. We're artists
and magicians") and Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot portions of Michael Mann's
"Ali" using a high-definition camera ("This is different from film. Not
better or worse but different"), cinematographers were woefully
underrepresented in the piece. Considering these would be the guys who'd
understand better than anyone the potential advantages, or lack thereof, of
digital video, it undoubtedly seemed more convenient to not even bother to
ask them.
One of the chief problems with the Times article -- and with Lucas'
argument in general -- is that it makes no distinction between the various
uses of digital technology. As Poster explains it, "One of the things
journalists and the public are confused about is that when you use the term
'digital cinema,' you lump it into one kind of thing, but it's really three
things: It's image acquisition, it's postproduction and it's exhibition."
Digital applications are currently most widely used in postproduction, the
steps taken at the end of the moviemaking process before the definitive
print -- called the answer print -- is struck. That's the stage at which
cinematographers color-correct the film, which generally means sitting down
with a lab technician and making sure every frame looks the way it's
supposed to. "Stuart Little 2," for example, included lots of special
effects that had to be added during postproduction. The entire film -- even
those portions of it that didn't feature special effects -- was digitized,
and Poster used some new digital tools to complete the color correction
before transferring the whole thing back to film.
"We edit digitally, we do visual effects digitally, and now we're starting
to finish the film digitally," Poster says. "The tools are tremendous, and
it's just developing into something that's going to become ubiquitous
within the next year or two. Finishing a film digitally will be the norm,
not the exception." That's a case of the technology being used to make the
process more efficient, but it also, of course, works in the service of
maintaining the visual integrity of a film.
Poster is less enthusiastic about digital technology as it has so far been
applied in terms of exhibition -- that is, projection. As moviegoers, we've
all seen our share of dingy prints at the multiplex: By the time a picture
has been shown five or six times a day over a period of several weeks, any
print is going to show some wear and tear. No D.P. likes to see that happen
to his or her movie. But there are still too many variables involved in
digital projection to make it an immediately viable solution, Poster says,
no matter how "clean" Lucas' digitized "Monsters" may have looked.
For one thing, there's no worldwide standard for digital exhibition of
movies. "Film is a worldwide standard," Poster explains. "You can send a
35-millimeter film to Bangladesh and get it shown." But various different
standards are competing in the digital realm, with no single version in a
dominant position.
Also, the cost of equipping a theater to project movies digitally is still
prohibitive. Poster puts it at around $150,000 per screen, and because the
technology is changing so rapidly, the equipment could become obsolete in
as few as five years. (Whereas a regular old motion picture projector costs
around $30,000 and might last 20 years.) And how will people be trained to
maintain digital-projection equipment and play digital movies so they look
as good as they should, when most of the big movie chains have done away
with most of their union projectionists? "It's a much more complex
technology than we're ready to deploy," Poster says.
On a more fundamental level, Poster also says we don't really know how
images shown on film, as opposed to those captured or projected digitally,
affect audiences on a subconscious level. He wonders if maybe there isn't
"a perceptual quality to motion pictures that exists maybe because of the
flaws of motion picture film." The very slight "jiggle and weave" of film,
as opposed to the much-touted steadiness of digital images, may have
something to do with why we respond to movies as we do. "There's the
granularity of film, which changes on every frame. There are all these
perceptual components, which create a hot medium for the audience. It
engages the audience in a way."
The point isn't that Poster and his colleagues are resistant to digital
technology. They want to make sure any new technology they adopt is better
than what they've already got, in subtle ways as well as obvious ones.
Today's cinematographers see what's coming in terms of technology and
equipment. When it's good enough for them to use, they say they'll be
ready. We're still in the infancy of "high-definition technology" in the
movie business, Poster explains. "But high-definition technology, which has
been said to be the death of film, the be-all and end-all, is in a
rudimentary form that is rapidly changing. So this technology that was
supposed to replace film is, within the next year, going to be the old
technology."
It's crucial to note, though, that the term "digital technology" doesn't
mean much all by itself. Cinematographer Wally Pfister's credits include
"Memento" and "Laurel Canyon," but because he began his career as a news
cameraman in the early '80s, he knew how to shoot on videotape long before
he ever shot a frame of 35-millimeter film. As much as he loves working
with film, he's convinced that within 15 to 20 years, electronic media will
replace it. But for now, he says the quality of digital images is nowhere
near that of images recorded on film, in terms of resolution, richness or
subtlety.
Pfister believes that large electronics corporations are using the term
"digital" to sell the idea of something revolutionary and hot, even though
this "new" technology, at least at this point, is no improvement on the old
one. Sony and Panasonic both manufacture high-definition cameras, and have
a stake in getting their products used and accepted (not to mention plugged
by Lucas), whether they produce satisfactory results or not. It's easy to
see how a multinational entertainment conglomerate like Sony -- which owns
Columbia Pictures -- would benefit if its equipment became the standard
among filmmakers.
"The buzzword is 'digital,'" Pfister says. "It's the same buzzword that's
used in the consumer world -- the same word that was used to sell CDs and
DVDs and anything for home computers. But it's not an accurate way of
describing it. The images are collected and processed digitally, but
really, it's videotape. It's a video camera, and the images are recorded
onto a video chip." Yet the companies that make this gear, he notes, are
trying to act like they've invented "a whole new device."
In fact, Pfister is enthusiastic about the fact that digital technology
could help democratize the world of filmmaking. "Anyone who wants to tell a
story can afford to," he says, "by picking up a camera for $1,000 and
buying computer software for another $1,000. That basically allows them to
write, produce and edit films entirely on their own." Pfister, Poster and
Bailey all note that there are instances where the new high-definition
cameras can be put to good use, particularly in episodic television -- the
image quality looks just fine on TV.
The problem, Pfister says, is that digital technology is being pushed for
theatrical exhibition purposes even though it's still an inferior medium.
Manufacturers of digital filmmaking equipment are hoping to take advantage
of the fact that the technology is changing so rapidly -- today's
top-of-the-line high-definition camera is sure to be tomorrow's garage-sale
Brownie. Obsolescence guarantees a steady revenue stream, as most of us
know from having to replace our computers every other year.
At the moment, for the serious cinematographer's craft, Pfister says,
high-definition cameras are simply not the best option. "It's like asking
us to work with crayons rather than oil paints. You can do some incredible
works of art with crayons. But with the current videotape format, you're
never going to capture the textures, the depth, the richness, be able to
see into the absolute subtleties and the shadows, that you can with
35-millimeter film.
"Most cinematographers, we have a great passion for the artistry involved
in our jobs. And what we love the most is painting with light. If somebody
tries to tell us that the paintbrushes that they have are better than the
ones that we're using, we're gong to be leery. And we're going to be the
ones to decide whether those paintbrushes or that particular paint is as
good as it should be. Because we know it better than anybody else does."
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John Bailey says that a few years ago at the Sundance Festival, when one of
the "film is dead" factions of young directors was making itself rather
noisily heard, he decided to shoot something on digital video, just to find
out what it was like. He thought he might end up doing a small project, a
10- or 15-minute student-type film. Then Jennifer Jason Leigh approached
him to shoot the feature she was making with Alan Cumming, "The Anniversary
Party."
"So I decided to really embrace the D.V. aesthetic and make it as much like
a film looks as I really could, given the technology and the equipment,"
Bailey says.
In retrospect, Bailey says, both he and Leigh realize there was no reason
not to have shot "The Anniversary Party" on 16-millimeter film and then
blown it up to 35-millimeter, given the time, effort and cost of doing the
project digitally. But the experience of making "The Anniversary Party"
helped him define some of the difference between film and video. He
realized that there were some independent features -- he cites Neil
Berger's "Interview With the Assassin" -- that have really benefited from
embracing new technology.
Digital technology and celluloid technology have also converged in recent
years, he says, "to create images and propel stories in a way that was
impossible even six or seven years ago." We're seeing more and more images
that are being created completely through computer-graphic technology --
images that couldn't possibly exist in the real world.
"This kind of incredibly rich, complex and highly artistic image creation
on computers becomes sort of a new norm and expectation, sort of an image
default position," Bailey says. "It has the possibility to desensitize our
ability to look at beautifully captured, real, natural images.
"I'm not trying to pick on any particular film, but I'm thinking of a film
like 'The Two Towers,' or even the first one ['The Fellowship of the
Ring'], where there's just so much incredible stuff that's created only on
computers. There are now studios that are thinking about going and shooting
in New Zealand. Admittedly, New Zealand is incredibly beautiful, and those
movies had some wonderful natural landscapes. But those studios are going
there looking to capture images that were captured only on computers."
In other words, they want to shoot on location in Middle Earth.
"It's a very exhilarating time and also a very anxiety-inducing time for
all filmmakers and especially for cinematographers," Bailey says. "I've
been joking to a lot of my colleagues that I think given the surfeit of
energy and speed and lushness in films today, the most revolutionary and
the most daring images you can create are very simple images, very directly
captured images." Bailey recently had another look at a 1966 Tony
Richardson film, "Mademoiselle," shot by David Watkin (in widescreen
black-and-white, something of a rarity in itself), in which Jeanne Moreau
stars as a sexually repressed schoolteacher who wreaks havoc in her small
village, poisoning wells and burning things down.
"It's incredible, but the fascinating thing about it is there's not a
single camera movement in the entire film," Bailey says. "All the action
happens within a static frame. This film is, like, two hours long, and it's
absolutely riveting. It's so unlike anything that you would ever see now."
If you spend enough time going to the movies, you begin to realize that you
never quite know what's going to inspire the filmmakers, the
cinematographers and the screenwriters of tomorrow. In 10 years, will every
mainstream Hollywood feature look like "The Matrix Reloaded"? Is that what
audiences will expect and demand?
Maybe. But for every movement, every trend, there's a backlash. For every
10 kids who decide they want to be filmmakers after seeing the Wachowski
brothers' action-fest, there might be one strange little tyke who manages
to catch "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Vertigo" or "Night of the Hunter" or
"Blue Velvet" and decides she wants to make a movie that looks like that.
Change is coming, as it invariably does, and the only hope for people who
love movies and care about their future is to bet our money on the strange
ones. The revolution will not be televised. No matter how it plays out, it
will be coming to a movie screen near you.
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About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.
Film's not dead, damn it!
Interviews with some of today's leading cinematographers -- the real
magic-makers of the movies -- suggest that George Lucas' overhyped "digital
revolution" is mostly marketing buzz.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Stephanie Zacharek
July 3, 2003 | The way we see movies is about to change -- tomorrow. Or
maybe the day after that. Then again, it might not happen until sometime
next week. But according to what we've been told -- by the media, by some
filmmakers and, perhaps most significantly, by the people who actually
manufacture the necessary equipment -- we do know for sure that digital
technology is poised to revolutionize the moviegoing experience.
But not many people have asked the essential question: How are these movies
going to look?
The best people to ask are the ones who have the most at stake, the people
who have built careers and reputations on knowing what it takes to make a
movie look just so. Cinematographers are at the vanguard of the changing
technology; many of them are familiarizing themselves quite rapidly, and
happily, with digital editing processes, for one thing, particularly in the
case of movies that feature lots of special effects.
But last summer a controversial, and not exactly astutely researched, Los
Angeles Times article depicted contemporary cinematographers as a bunch of
aged Luddites quaking in their boots as they face an onslaught of bright
youngsters brandishing fancy new digital cameras. At the center of the
article was "Star Wars" emperor George Lucas, who had invited a group of
big-name directors -- among them Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Zemeckis,
Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg -- to his private screening room to sell
them on the wonders of digital technology.
The article was essentially just another version of the "Film is dead"
rallying cry -- a triumphant shout that's been around for so long now that
it's more like a feeble cough. Film isn't dead, although it is of course
changing, and changing fast. But the Los Angeles Times article, and others
like it, suggested that today's cinematographers are nervous about those
changes, when in fact, they'd be the first to acknowledge that staying on
top of them is part of their job. How many photographers, of any stripe, do
you know who don't jump at the chance to fool around with new equipment?
The cinematographer's artistry depends on knowing what tools to use --
digital or otherwise -- and when to use them.
Steven Poster, a former president of the American Society of
Cinematographers, calls it a kind of alchemy. "It's what we do, the magic
of deciding, 'I'm going to use this kind of film stock for this, or this
kind of digital camera, or this kind of technology or technique. I'm gonna
use these lights, I'm gonna make it look like this.' We have to stay
abreast of these developments at all times. There's constant learning
within the field, of knowing what our tools are capable of."
The problem isn't that cinematographers don't like digital technology; it's
simply that they know what its current limitations are. There has been
plenty of hype surrounding digital technology as it's been used in
filmmaking. And there are certainly pictures, like the first two entries in
the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, that wouldn't look half as beautiful as
they do without the use of that technology.
But remarkably few people have bothered to ask cinematographers -- the
people who should know best -- what the technology's current strengths and
limitations are. People like George Lucas like to think they're on the
vanguard of these new methods and modes of filmmaking. But it probably
hasn't occurred to most moviegoers that the "Film is dead" movement may be
more strongly driven by forces in the marketplace than by artistic
considerations.
In other words, there are some big corporations that would like us to think
that digital filmmaking is ready for prime time. And cinematographers may
be the last line of defense between those massive marketing forces and the
rich visual heritage of movies. Even though most moviegoers think they know
what cinematographers do, it's likely they don't even know the half of it.
But in the rapidly changing world of filmmaking, their role as
preservationists -- as preservationists of the quality and vitality of
images -- is more important than ever.
When Terri Gross interviewed cinematographer Gordon Willis for her National
Public Radio program "Fresh Air" last fall, she introduced him by playing a
few clips from movies he'd worked on: Marlon Brando's opening scene from
"The Godfather"; an exchange between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in "Annie
Hall" that captures the sparks flying between their his-and-hers non
sequiturs.
You'd think that audio clips would be the worst window into the work of a
cinematographer. The surprise lies in how vividly we can see those scenes
just by hearing them. You can't hear Brando's voice in that clip without
picturing the hollows of his eyes, both as empty and as full as undersea
caves. And the mere sound of Keaton's and Allen's tentative chatter
resurrects visions of a muted '70s New York skyline cloaked in smog and
romance -- we can't distinguish one from the other, which is precisely the
point, their commingled beauty is so intense.
You can't take the measure of a cinematographer's work just by listening to
it. But if a sound clip can serve as a miniature testimony to the resonance
of a cinematographer's images, it can also heighten the ways in which
moviegoers sometimes take the cinematographer's job for granted. In one
sense, cinematography should be invisible, since it exists mainly to serve
the story that's being told. But movies don't shoot themselves. Unless a
movie features lots of pretty natural scenery, moviegoers -- and sometimes
even people who are themselves involved in the making of movies -- don't
always recognize how much thought and care goes into making the kinds of
images you can actually hear on the radio.
"Even within the enlightened community of fellow filmmakers who are not
cinematographers," says cinematographer John Bailey, "there has been this
confusion or misperception of cinematography as pretty pictures." Bailey's
30-year career has included numerous collaborations with the director Paul
Schrader, among them "Cat People," "Mishima" and 1999's lovely but
little-seen "Forever Mine." Bailey says viewers tend to be most easily
impressed by the prettified Ivory-Merchant aesthetic: "I'm not picking on
Ivory-Merchant, but they're kind of a shorthand example -- in other words,
period films, beautiful costumes, lush landscapes and impressive exterior
photography."
But, Bailey says, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with
cinematography, other than the fact that you put a camera there and capture
the whole thing on film. "I think a cinematographer's foremost requirement
is to use all of the visual aesthetic skill that he or she has to find a
style," he says, "a combination of aesthetic and technique to enhance,
enlighten and expand the dramatic, emotional and narrative momentum of the
screenplay. In the same way that the screenwriter uses words to tell the
story, and the director uses the performances of the actors to reveal the
subtext and the nuance of it, the cinematographer uses all of the tools
that he or she has, focused through the lens of the camera, to reveal and
enhance and expand the story."
In other words, it's a job that requires an unusual amalgam of technical
prowess and visual artistry -- in addition to management and diplomacy
skills, not to mention knowledge of equipment, lighting, film stock and
postproduction processes. That may or may not explain why directors of
photography don't surface much in media coverage of new pictures. Actors,
directors and screenwriters are interviewed all the time, but no one ever
thinks to talk to cinematographers, maybe because they're perceived as
eggheads who just want to talk about lenses and film speeds.
When you sit down and actually talk to one, you realize that
cinematographers mostly just want to talk about movies -- not just about
the techniques used in making them, but also about the ways their visual
textures and moods can affect us so deeply and so mysteriously. You can get
a sense of that simply by watching Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and
Stuart Samuel's superb 1992 documentary "Visions of Light," a beautifully
detailed thumbnail history of cinematography. "Visions of Light" isn't
noteworthy so much because it explains precisely what cinematographers do
(you'd probably need 10 two-hour documentaries for that) but because it
captures so perfectly what the legacy of their profession means to them.
The cinematographers featured include just about everyone's favorites:
Conrad Hall ("In Cold Blood"), Vilmos Zsigmond ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller"),
Lászlá Kovács ("Shampoo"), Haskell Wexler ("In the Heat of the Night"),
Vittorio Storaro ("The Conformist") and Néstor Almendros ("Days of
Heaven"). It's telling that many of them seem more interested in talking
about their colleagues' work than their own, and especially about the work
of the great directors of photography who came before them -- people like
Gregg Toland ("Citizen Kane"), James Wong Howe ("From Here to Eternity")
and Russell Metty ("Touch of Evil").
For people who spend so much of their time considering how things are going
to look on film, cinematographers seem surprisingly good at talking. "Most
of the directors of photography I know and associate with are more like
Renaissance men than people from any other parts of the business that I
know," says Steven Poster, whose own credits include two very
distinctive-looking recent releases, "Donnie Darko" and "Stuart Little 2."
"We need to be able to take a space or a room or a large expanse and create
the type of lighting that will indicate a mood and allow the actors to move
within that space and be lit at any given spot that will tell the story."
At the same time, cinematographers are also busy being managers. "We're
managing relationships, we're managing budgets, we're managing equipment,"
Poster says. "And we're managing egos of many other people. It's a
multifaceted job. What we really are is Tom Sawyers getting people to
whitewash our fence, so we can be off doing the art that we love to do.
That's our little secret."
We've all been trained to be skeptical of anyone who's involved in the
making of Hollywood films who actually uses the A-word. Given the state of
the movie industry today, it's easier for most moviegoers to be cynical
about Hollywood than charitable toward it. We've convinced ourselves -- and
unfortunately, too often the movies themselves have proven us right -- that
movies are made by committees whose sole aim is to make money, instead of
by people with eyes and ears, brains and hearts.
Cinematographers seem to be the antidote to Hollywood cynicism -- not
because they don't have to finesse their share of studio pressure (there
are certainly times when they do), or because they claim that every movie
they work on is going to be a lasting contribution to the canon (they
don't), but because they believe so wholeheartedly in doing the best work
they can on each given project.
After a screening of the recent stinker "The Recruit" (shot by Stuart
Dryburgh), I remarked to a colleague how good it looked. "It's amazing how
much TLC goes into crap," he said, and he's right. Forget plots that don't
work or performances that fall flat: Someone still had to figure out the
best way to capture the je ne sais quoi of a particular car chase, or to
light, say, a bridge in a way that captures the essence of bridge-ness.
Beyond that, flexibility has to be part of the cinematographer's art. Every
collaboration between a director and a cinematographer is different; what's
more, cinematographers may do two or three pictures a year, working in
different styles with different directors. Poster likens the process of
making a movie to entering a marriage, complete with a courtship, a
honeymoon period, the actual work of the marriage and an eventual breakup.
Even if you work with the same director on another picture, the new
marriage will have different characteristics.
In writing about movies, most critics consider the director to be the guy
or the gal holding the bag -- not necessarily because they believe the
director is the sole and exclusive author of the work but because it's a
kind of shorthand. If you're trying to describe what action was taken to
make a movie move or feel or read as it does, you need a noun to go with
your verb, and in most cases, the director is your noun. As a colleague of
mine once explained it, the director's vision is the one through which all
other visions are filtered, which is as good an explanation as I've ever
come across.
I suspect that directors get most of the credit for the success of a
picture (or lack thereof) precisely because movies are such a collaborative
process. Sometimes it's easy to separate the strands of who deserves blame
or praise; but in many cases a great moment on film that we automatically
give a director credit for may very well be the result of some sort of
communication, spoken or un-, between a director, his or her D.P., a
production designer, a costume or makeup person and any of the actors
involved -- all of whom are working off a script by one or more
screenwriters, who may also be on hand. And don't forget about producers,
people whose degree of hands-on involvement in a picture can vary from not
much to a whole lot.
It always feels corny to talk about the magic of movies, but
cinematographers don't seem at all uncomfortable with the word. "It seems
like magic to us, too, to actually do it," Bailey says. He compares looking
at a finished film with what a composer like Gustav Mahler might have felt
when he finally heard one of his complex, conflicted and infinitely layered
symphonies played by actual musicians. "How awesome it must have been! In
filmmaking, there are so many dozens, if not hundreds, of people involved
in making a film who, in the right environment, where the producers and the
directors give them the opportunity to really express themselves and put
themselves into it, can create this incredible thing. When you go and see
the finished film, it has an existence of its own, somehow beyond you. It's
so much different than, say, writing a book or a play."
Meanwhile, film -- the medium in which cinematographers have been working
for some 100 years, a medium that in its relatively short history has given
most of us more joy and pleasure than we can possibly measure -- is dead.
Or at least, people like George Lucas would have us think so.
Every now and then, a major news outlet will run a feature sounding a tinny
but trumped-up death knell for film as we know it. Last summer, Los Angeles
Times staff writers P.J. Huffstutter and Jon Healey jumped on the
bandwagon, detailing the way Lucas had tried to convince his colleagues of
the supremacy of digital technology by holding that powwow in his private
screening room. He showed them two identical clips from "Monsters, Inc.,"
one completely electronic (in other words, stored on digital tape and run
through a digital projector), the other on a reel of film that had already
done four weeks in a local multiplex.
The electronic clip, the story noted, "looked less like a motion picture
and more like an open window onto a real world." Compare that with the
jiggly, scratched-up image that limped onto the screen via the poor,
pathetic stepcousin known as film.
Lucas had gathered his colleagues, ostensibly, to issue a warning: It was
time to leave film behind, or get left in the dust. Lucas, after all, had
broken some ground of his own with "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the
Clones," which was shot entirely with high-definition digital cameras --
that is, a new breed of cameras that record images on videotape instead of
35-millimeter film, but with crisper detail and a wider range of color than
video cameras have traditionally been able to capture. "Attack of the
Clones" was also edited with digital equipment and, in the relatively few
theaters equipped to do so, projected digitally.
So because he'd been able to make a stiff, crummy-looking, overblown
faux-epic on a new plaything, Lucas felt completely justified in
foretelling the death of film. The L.A. Times article played right into his
phony argument, in language that sounds borrowed from that most filmic of
news sources, a World War II newsreel: "Lucas' blunt message stands at the
center of a schism in Hollywood over the fate of film in the film business.
New high-definition video cameras and digital editing equipment challenge
the longtime supremacy of film. They are cheaper and more flexible. But
they also frighten directors and cinematographers who understand every
nuance of film. A creative misstep can tarnish a career, so many of those
established in the film industry blanch at the thought of showing their
inexperience with the latest technology. A colossal mistake, seen by
millions of fans, might reveal that they are passé storytellers -- easily
replaced with younger, cheaper and more tech-savvy rivals."
Aside from a quote or two from cinematographers Roger Deakins ("With
digital, it's all very businesslike. We're not businessmen. We're artists
and magicians") and Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot portions of Michael Mann's
"Ali" using a high-definition camera ("This is different from film. Not
better or worse but different"), cinematographers were woefully
underrepresented in the piece. Considering these would be the guys who'd
understand better than anyone the potential advantages, or lack thereof, of
digital video, it undoubtedly seemed more convenient to not even bother to
ask them.
One of the chief problems with the Times article -- and with Lucas'
argument in general -- is that it makes no distinction between the various
uses of digital technology. As Poster explains it, "One of the things
journalists and the public are confused about is that when you use the term
'digital cinema,' you lump it into one kind of thing, but it's really three
things: It's image acquisition, it's postproduction and it's exhibition."
Digital applications are currently most widely used in postproduction, the
steps taken at the end of the moviemaking process before the definitive
print -- called the answer print -- is struck. That's the stage at which
cinematographers color-correct the film, which generally means sitting down
with a lab technician and making sure every frame looks the way it's
supposed to. "Stuart Little 2," for example, included lots of special
effects that had to be added during postproduction. The entire film -- even
those portions of it that didn't feature special effects -- was digitized,
and Poster used some new digital tools to complete the color correction
before transferring the whole thing back to film.
"We edit digitally, we do visual effects digitally, and now we're starting
to finish the film digitally," Poster says. "The tools are tremendous, and
it's just developing into something that's going to become ubiquitous
within the next year or two. Finishing a film digitally will be the norm,
not the exception." That's a case of the technology being used to make the
process more efficient, but it also, of course, works in the service of
maintaining the visual integrity of a film.
Poster is less enthusiastic about digital technology as it has so far been
applied in terms of exhibition -- that is, projection. As moviegoers, we've
all seen our share of dingy prints at the multiplex: By the time a picture
has been shown five or six times a day over a period of several weeks, any
print is going to show some wear and tear. No D.P. likes to see that happen
to his or her movie. But there are still too many variables involved in
digital projection to make it an immediately viable solution, Poster says,
no matter how "clean" Lucas' digitized "Monsters" may have looked.
For one thing, there's no worldwide standard for digital exhibition of
movies. "Film is a worldwide standard," Poster explains. "You can send a
35-millimeter film to Bangladesh and get it shown." But various different
standards are competing in the digital realm, with no single version in a
dominant position.
Also, the cost of equipping a theater to project movies digitally is still
prohibitive. Poster puts it at around $150,000 per screen, and because the
technology is changing so rapidly, the equipment could become obsolete in
as few as five years. (Whereas a regular old motion picture projector costs
around $30,000 and might last 20 years.) And how will people be trained to
maintain digital-projection equipment and play digital movies so they look
as good as they should, when most of the big movie chains have done away
with most of their union projectionists? "It's a much more complex
technology than we're ready to deploy," Poster says.
On a more fundamental level, Poster also says we don't really know how
images shown on film, as opposed to those captured or projected digitally,
affect audiences on a subconscious level. He wonders if maybe there isn't
"a perceptual quality to motion pictures that exists maybe because of the
flaws of motion picture film." The very slight "jiggle and weave" of film,
as opposed to the much-touted steadiness of digital images, may have
something to do with why we respond to movies as we do. "There's the
granularity of film, which changes on every frame. There are all these
perceptual components, which create a hot medium for the audience. It
engages the audience in a way."
The point isn't that Poster and his colleagues are resistant to digital
technology. They want to make sure any new technology they adopt is better
than what they've already got, in subtle ways as well as obvious ones.
Today's cinematographers see what's coming in terms of technology and
equipment. When it's good enough for them to use, they say they'll be
ready. We're still in the infancy of "high-definition technology" in the
movie business, Poster explains. "But high-definition technology, which has
been said to be the death of film, the be-all and end-all, is in a
rudimentary form that is rapidly changing. So this technology that was
supposed to replace film is, within the next year, going to be the old
technology."
It's crucial to note, though, that the term "digital technology" doesn't
mean much all by itself. Cinematographer Wally Pfister's credits include
"Memento" and "Laurel Canyon," but because he began his career as a news
cameraman in the early '80s, he knew how to shoot on videotape long before
he ever shot a frame of 35-millimeter film. As much as he loves working
with film, he's convinced that within 15 to 20 years, electronic media will
replace it. But for now, he says the quality of digital images is nowhere
near that of images recorded on film, in terms of resolution, richness or
subtlety.
Pfister believes that large electronics corporations are using the term
"digital" to sell the idea of something revolutionary and hot, even though
this "new" technology, at least at this point, is no improvement on the old
one. Sony and Panasonic both manufacture high-definition cameras, and have
a stake in getting their products used and accepted (not to mention plugged
by Lucas), whether they produce satisfactory results or not. It's easy to
see how a multinational entertainment conglomerate like Sony -- which owns
Columbia Pictures -- would benefit if its equipment became the standard
among filmmakers.
"The buzzword is 'digital,'" Pfister says. "It's the same buzzword that's
used in the consumer world -- the same word that was used to sell CDs and
DVDs and anything for home computers. But it's not an accurate way of
describing it. The images are collected and processed digitally, but
really, it's videotape. It's a video camera, and the images are recorded
onto a video chip." Yet the companies that make this gear, he notes, are
trying to act like they've invented "a whole new device."
In fact, Pfister is enthusiastic about the fact that digital technology
could help democratize the world of filmmaking. "Anyone who wants to tell a
story can afford to," he says, "by picking up a camera for $1,000 and
buying computer software for another $1,000. That basically allows them to
write, produce and edit films entirely on their own." Pfister, Poster and
Bailey all note that there are instances where the new high-definition
cameras can be put to good use, particularly in episodic television -- the
image quality looks just fine on TV.
The problem, Pfister says, is that digital technology is being pushed for
theatrical exhibition purposes even though it's still an inferior medium.
Manufacturers of digital filmmaking equipment are hoping to take advantage
of the fact that the technology is changing so rapidly -- today's
top-of-the-line high-definition camera is sure to be tomorrow's garage-sale
Brownie. Obsolescence guarantees a steady revenue stream, as most of us
know from having to replace our computers every other year.
At the moment, for the serious cinematographer's craft, Pfister says,
high-definition cameras are simply not the best option. "It's like asking
us to work with crayons rather than oil paints. You can do some incredible
works of art with crayons. But with the current videotape format, you're
never going to capture the textures, the depth, the richness, be able to
see into the absolute subtleties and the shadows, that you can with
35-millimeter film.
"Most cinematographers, we have a great passion for the artistry involved
in our jobs. And what we love the most is painting with light. If somebody
tries to tell us that the paintbrushes that they have are better than the
ones that we're using, we're gong to be leery. And we're going to be the
ones to decide whether those paintbrushes or that particular paint is as
good as it should be. Because we know it better than anybody else does."
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John Bailey says that a few years ago at the Sundance Festival, when one of
the "film is dead" factions of young directors was making itself rather
noisily heard, he decided to shoot something on digital video, just to find
out what it was like. He thought he might end up doing a small project, a
10- or 15-minute student-type film. Then Jennifer Jason Leigh approached
him to shoot the feature she was making with Alan Cumming, "The Anniversary
Party."
"So I decided to really embrace the D.V. aesthetic and make it as much like
a film looks as I really could, given the technology and the equipment,"
Bailey says.
In retrospect, Bailey says, both he and Leigh realize there was no reason
not to have shot "The Anniversary Party" on 16-millimeter film and then
blown it up to 35-millimeter, given the time, effort and cost of doing the
project digitally. But the experience of making "The Anniversary Party"
helped him define some of the difference between film and video. He
realized that there were some independent features -- he cites Neil
Berger's "Interview With the Assassin" -- that have really benefited from
embracing new technology.
Digital technology and celluloid technology have also converged in recent
years, he says, "to create images and propel stories in a way that was
impossible even six or seven years ago." We're seeing more and more images
that are being created completely through computer-graphic technology --
images that couldn't possibly exist in the real world.
"This kind of incredibly rich, complex and highly artistic image creation
on computers becomes sort of a new norm and expectation, sort of an image
default position," Bailey says. "It has the possibility to desensitize our
ability to look at beautifully captured, real, natural images.
"I'm not trying to pick on any particular film, but I'm thinking of a film
like 'The Two Towers,' or even the first one ['The Fellowship of the
Ring'], where there's just so much incredible stuff that's created only on
computers. There are now studios that are thinking about going and shooting
in New Zealand. Admittedly, New Zealand is incredibly beautiful, and those
movies had some wonderful natural landscapes. But those studios are going
there looking to capture images that were captured only on computers."
In other words, they want to shoot on location in Middle Earth.
"It's a very exhilarating time and also a very anxiety-inducing time for
all filmmakers and especially for cinematographers," Bailey says. "I've
been joking to a lot of my colleagues that I think given the surfeit of
energy and speed and lushness in films today, the most revolutionary and
the most daring images you can create are very simple images, very directly
captured images." Bailey recently had another look at a 1966 Tony
Richardson film, "Mademoiselle," shot by David Watkin (in widescreen
black-and-white, something of a rarity in itself), in which Jeanne Moreau
stars as a sexually repressed schoolteacher who wreaks havoc in her small
village, poisoning wells and burning things down.
"It's incredible, but the fascinating thing about it is there's not a
single camera movement in the entire film," Bailey says. "All the action
happens within a static frame. This film is, like, two hours long, and it's
absolutely riveting. It's so unlike anything that you would ever see now."
If you spend enough time going to the movies, you begin to realize that you
never quite know what's going to inspire the filmmakers, the
cinematographers and the screenwriters of tomorrow. In 10 years, will every
mainstream Hollywood feature look like "The Matrix Reloaded"? Is that what
audiences will expect and demand?
Maybe. But for every movement, every trend, there's a backlash. For every
10 kids who decide they want to be filmmakers after seeing the Wachowski
brothers' action-fest, there might be one strange little tyke who manages
to catch "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Vertigo" or "Night of the Hunter" or
"Blue Velvet" and decides she wants to make a movie that looks like that.
Change is coming, as it invariably does, and the only hope for people who
love movies and care about their future is to bet our money on the strange
ones. The revolution will not be televised. No matter how it plays out, it
will be coming to a movie screen near you.
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About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.