Gerda Taro. Photo by Fred Stein (one sheet for the film).
ONE
In May 2007, Mexican documentary filmmaker Trisha Ziff, at the behest of curators at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, met another Mexican filmmaker, an elusive but affable man named Ben Tarver, at a coffee shop in Mexico City. Tarver brought with him contact sheets he had printed from three rolls of 35mm film negatives, images of known historic importance, but heretofore unseen and long believed to have been lost. They were part of a cache of more than 3,500 35mm. frames documenting the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. The photos were believed to constitute a complete chronology of the three year struggle, a prelude to WWII, described by Herman Göring, commander of the German Luftwaffe, as a training exercise for the coming Nazi Blitzkrieg. The photographs were taken by three young photojournalists working on the cusp of what would be legendary careers. But all three were to die while covering this and other mid-century armed conflicts. Continue reading ‘Trisha Ziff and The Mexican Suitcase’
Are we living in a golden age of photojournalism? Has the artful sophistication of today’s image makers so unbalanced the hoary “picture/ thousand word” equation that some of the news we read is the photo caption?
Multiple broadcasts, print and Internet platforms swamp us with a daily, even hourly, flood of ongoing and one-off news events from every corner of the earth. We are drowning in images: from the most august, traditional sources made by those dedicated and gifted photographers who are keenly aware of every nuance inside the frame, to ragged grab shots caught on the fly by a bystander’s iPhone, and more and more, those of social or political activists caught in the fray of an unfolding crisis. Where, in such a democratic cacophony of images, do we find some hierarchy of trust, truth and (god forbid) artistic insight? Is it even possible to do, or if so, how? In a world of seeming infinite visual mashups is the concept of photojournalism itself as obsolete as last year’s digital photo printer?
An examination of the thirteen pages of The New York Times “Sunday Review” section of December 25 offers dramatic color images of 2011 from the pages of the Times under the headings “Natural Disaster,” “Occupy Wall Street,” “Arab Spring,” “The World,” and “The Nation.” A double page centerfold is Tyler Hicks’ intense portrait of Libyan rebel fighters near Ras Lanuf reacting after a NATO airstrike against Qaddafi forces in March. It evokes the immersive immediacy of a “You Are There” French heroic salon painting of the 19th century. Delacroix and Gericault seem to loom just beyond the borders of the frame. Hicks’ chiaroscuro photo represents the highest level of an artist engaging the viewer with the drama of a singular moment frozen in the undifferentiated flux of time.
Libyan rebel fighters near Ras lanuf. Photo by Tyler Hicks.
Thirty-five minutes into the documentary film of her life, Wish Me Away, singer Chely Wright tells Baptist minister C. Welton Gaddy of a moment of such personal despair that she put a loaded pistol into her mouth. It may be difficult to understand what could have precipitated an existential crisis this dire in a woman who has millions of fans. In her recent autobiography, Like Me, she describes the moment in clinical detail:
I go upstairs and locate a loaded 9-millimeter handgun. It is heavier than I remember. I say a prayer to God to forgive me and to understand why I can’t go on anymore like this. I beg God to realize that I will never be able to fit into the life that I’ve created, that I will never be accepted.
I pick up the gun and put the end of it in my mouth. It’s cold. I hold it steady and get my right thumb on the trigger and prepare to pull it by pushing it outward. I close my eyes . . . thumb still on the trigger. My mind is going a million miles an hour. I think of my family, my dogs, my friends, my fans, the sun, a kiss from Julia, and music.
Lena Herzog, born Elena Pisetski, photo by Rachel Lorenz.
There was an electrical power blackout the day that seventeen-year-old Elena Pisetski first encountered a collection of jarred fetuses in the galleries of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera Palace, where an eerie light seeped in from the windows. Pisetski was a student at the university’s Philology Faculty located on the embankment of the Neva River, next door to the beautiful aquamarine-colored mansion housing the scientific specimens of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch was Dutch, one of the legions of seekers of new knowledge who, during the age of exploration of the New World, collected thousands of related and unrelated artifacts from his native Holland as well as from distant lands, into what were called Wunderkammern (Cabinets of Wonder). Continue reading ‘Lena Herzog’s Camera Finds “Lost Souls”’
Gregg Toland is widely regarded by most contemporary cinematographers as the essential locus for a discussion of breakthrough movie image creation. The most cited of his films is the collaboration with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, a film that looms large in anyone’s movie canon, as much for its narrative innovation as for the deep focus and wide angle camerawork that heralded its signature style, a style that seems largely to have stuttered after Toland’s death in 1948. The irony is that this deep focus technique has found new standing in digital 3D cinematography, even as 2D video cinematographers labor to remove the onus of the wide-angle “video look,” and as CCD imagers have grown ever larger. With the improving dynamic range of 35mm. sensors and by selection of longer focal length lenses, this video “look” is eroding; at its highest quality HD video now closely matches film.
Less well known than Toland’s collaboration with Welles is the cinematographer’s multi-film collaborations with other directors such as Howard Hawks, but especially with John Ford, who like Welles, shared with Toland his single card credit on The Long Voyage Home.
Florencia Colucci and her lantern, “La Casa Muda.”
On Halloween night, this year’s Uruguayan entry for the foreign film Oscar was screened at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater. Merely fortuitous, or more likely, a programming wag’s “in joke,” La Casa Muda (The Silent House) is a tense horror film of the “girl trapped in a haunted house” sub-genre. Its defining marker is that it conforms to the even smaller genre of films photographed, like The Russian Ark, in a single, uncut shot (or so the distributor’s ad copy and critics’ gullibility would have you believe.) I knew none of this promotional copy beforehand, but it did become clear with the opening long tracking shot starting from a parked car, walking through a wooded field, around the front of a farmhouse and finally into the house’s dark recesses, as it follows a young girl, Laura, played by Florencia Colucci. Clearly, this was not going to be a chaos cinema movie of 3000 plus edits; I decided to try to discern the few cutting points. This was difficult as the camera cleverly panned into blackness or used swish pans several times to hide cut points. In an email, the film’s producer, Gustavo Rojas, confirmed to me that there are only a dozen shots in its 78 minutes running time. This is a film that owes much of its fear factor not only to the inky depths beyond Laura’s handheld lantern or its device of unfolding in real time, but (in the Bressonian sense that Matthias Stork talks about in his video essay) in the canny and dramatic use of ambient sound. A statement by director Gustavo Hernández cites the primacy of sound as a unifying factor:
Many years ago, when I was a child, I listened [to] a strange noise in my house attic, a soft noise but very clear, that paralyzed me completely. For many seconds that seemed hours, all of my senses were aware, trying to convince myself that [it] was only the wind pushing the window. I sharpened my ear and held my breath simply searching for the silence. It was a tiny experience that I perfectly remember; because in my memory it is the first time that I felt fear, different, raw, and basic.
Matthias Stork is more likely to be found hunched over a research desk at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library than in the darker recesses of a multiplex cinema playing the latest Hollywood visual effects laden action flick. He is, after all, a graduate student in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education from Goethe University, Frankfurt, in his native Germany. His current focus is on German expressionist films of the 1920s.
In the last decade of the silent era the Hollywood studios siphoned off many of the finest German filmmakers; the stream became a flood with the rise of National Socialism in 1933. It included director Fritz Lang and the great cinematographer Karl Freund, who had emigrated to the US in 1929. Several years earlier, German émigré F.W. Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise, was one of the high water marks of this great stream. But it is the lesser-known director, Paul Leni, who is the object of Stork’s current research. Leni had made the macabre Waxworks in 1924 Weimar Germany. In Hollywood, he directed only four films before an early death at age 44 in September of 1929. He seems a worthy figure for exegesis for a young German film scholar.
Matthias Stork at the Herrick Library, October 2011.
But here is the surprise. Stork’s real scholarly passion is the American action film, a genre that at first glance seems ill tailored for an academic suit. But one of the endearing qualities of German scholarship in science as well as in the arts is its ability to imprint an academic perspective on pop culture as easily as on philosophical ontology. Continue reading ‘Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part One’
It took time for the reality of it to sink in. Although Kodak announced in June of 2009 that it was retiring its banner transparency film, Kodachrome, introduced in 1936, it was only with the cessation of processing at the end of December, 2010 by Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, that amateurs and professionals alike had to recognize that an era of image making had died. I wrote a piece about the demise of Kodachrome that some read as a wake rather than a tribute. I meant the latter. After all, it is not Kodak’s fault that despite its archival superiority to current imaging techniques, photographers just stopped buying it.
As if the once mighty imaging empire of Kodak were not already in straits, successive internal “consolidations” have weakened rather than helped its bottom line. An NPR story on September 27 forecast that even with its sputtering attempt to gain market share in digital imaging (even home copiers and printers) the great American icon’s pedestal is crumbling. Some naysayers give it six months to a year before being broken up, its divisions being parceled off to the sharks of corporate raiding. In a dispiriting story in the October 1 Business Day section of The New York Times, Kodak said that it had hired the Jones Day law firm to give it advice regarding restructuring, although it denied rumors it was considering filing for bankruptcy protection. For many of us who have imagined that film will always be there, this is dismaying. Many of us embrace the continuing advances of digital technology even as we advocate that film is still a superior (and certainly more archival “capture” medium.) And because Kodak is a company that has supported so many generations of emerging filmmakers with its programs, it is even more dismaying to see the near Schadenfreude that so many seem to display at seeing Kodak and its products at a difficult crossroads. Too many of my colleagues who have benefitted from Kodak’s generosity ever since their student days now seem almost ecstatic to dance on celluloid’s anticipated grave. It confounds me because I encounter many students today whose fondest dream is somehow to “shoot on film,” even as their cinematographer heroes abandon the medium as unhip, obsolete. Continue reading ‘Second Year Blogging: A Salmagundi, Part 3′
Entering the phrase “occupy wall street” into the YouTube search box brings up dozens of pages of amateur videos of the recent demonstrations in downtown Manhattan. A Google entry of “photos of occupy wall street” brings up pages like this one.
Some of the photographs are by established professional photojournalists like this one from the NY Daily News at the end of September.
Occupy Wall Street" protestor being arrested, NY Daily News photo.
But much of the imagery and print coverage surrounding these protests was all but ignored the first week and a half by the traditional news media: the TV networks, the nation’s elite newspapers like The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and even the Grey Lady herself, The New York Times. Continue reading ‘Second Year Blogging: A Salmagundi, Part 2′
On September 9, The Boston Globe featured this photograph on page one above the fold:
“September”
At first glance, it reads as a quasi-abstract geometric painting hiding behind a streaked, scumbled surface. As soon as you reflect on the date, two days after the publication of the newspaper story, the horror that the painting documents becomes all too evident. The painter, Gerhard Richter, has throughout his career alternated many styles of 20th century abstraction with his own brand of soft-focus photorealism.
This painting, “September,” serves as an entry point for Globe staff writer Mark Feeney’s discussion of a canvas that critic Robert Storr has called “the ghost of a ghost.” Feeney’s meditation on the events of “9-11” on the eve of its tenth anniversary, analyses how the patterns of our daily lives have been changed forever:
My own thoughts about this painting and how it fits into the greater genre of historical painting was the subject of an essay I wrote in February of 2010.
Although the essay is not one that I wrote this past year, its relevance to the recent tenth “anniversary” of 9-11 (what an odd word to use for such a traumatic event in our history) compels me to open this review of the past year’s work with another look at a work of art that has come to define that calamity, a work by a German artist who has himself lived in the shadow of his own nation’s apocalypse.
TWO
It’s difficult for me to realize that I have just concluded two years of writing this blog, something that I undertook rather casually at the behest of Martha Winterhalter, publisher of AC Magazine; our original intent was for me to provide occasional content for the ASC website. Somehow, despite photographing feature films and continuing educational work, I have managed to write over 120 of these pieces, mostly on a weekly publishing schedule, each one exploring a subject that has grabbed my attention, gnawing at me to consider something more than a quick posting about a current topic. All of these essays are archived by a link below the “recent comments” section on the right side of the blog page:
Below that is a box to subscribe for email notice each time a new essay appears. Please do subscribe. It takes just a few seconds. We have so many demands for our online time that it’s easy to lose track of yet another site. Subscribing will give you a reminder of new material.
Some friends and readers have asked me why I don’t write exclusively about filmmaking issues since this is a blog hosted by the ASC. My response is that as important and as vital as our photographic work is to our professional identities, it is not the sum total of our selves, either in our work or personal lives. I came to filmmaking, and cinematography, not through a direct door as a tyro Super 8 adolescent, or even as a compulsive Hollywood movie buff, but as someone who discovered “Cinema, “ aka European art films of the 50s and 60s, well before I had any idea who Ford, Hawks, Sturges, and Hitchcock were. And American postwar “B” movies loomed into my narrow ken only through the lens of the French term “film noir.” I knew the films of Bergman and Bresson before I knew those of Ray, Mann, Aldrich, or Fuller. Kind of upside down, I know, but that’s how it happened. I am still playing catch-up toward many of the beloved works of American cinema. In short, my perspective on film has been as erratic and as eclectic as my interests in the other arts. It’s that eclectic bent that informs what I write about.
THREE
Photography does lie at the core of what I feel compelled to write. It is, after all, the daily manna of my own creative diet and that of my fellow cinematographers. But we do not live by emulsions and digits alone. Nothing causes my eyes to glaze over faster than a presentation of some new digital workflow: necessary information, to be sure, the arcana of which can be tossed about like a can of newly opened tennis balls—but that’s not the game itself. But when I want to talk about cinematography I think of no more inspiring artist than this man:
Jack Cardiff at the Technicolor 3-strip camera.
This photo of the young Jack Cardiff as a camera operator, was taken at the time that Technicolor trained him as the go-to point man in England for the introduction in the mid-30s of their new three-strip color camera system. Cardiff went on to have a distinguished career, being honored with two Oscars, the second one in 2000 for his entire body of work, as well as a directorial nomination in 1960 for Sons and Lovers. I never met Cardiff, though I feel I have come to know him through the marvelous feature documentary on his life and work, Cameraman, directed by Craig McCall. I have spoken about Cardiff and this film often, introducing it at an ASC dinner meeting screening, as well as programs at a TIFF Toronto retrospective and a recent AFI screening. The film, as well as Cardiff’s autobiography, Magic Hour, is the impetus for a four part blog I wrote in October while on location in Anchorage. It contains many embedded videos, the one of the Red Shoes ballet unfortunately being recently disabled; but many are still active and give a full perspective into the richness of his work.
Even if you have seen McCall’s film, Cameraman, I think you will find intriguing insights to Cardiff’s aesthetic life in this series of essays.
Karl Struss, photo by Clarence White.
Although my four-part profile of cinematographer Karl Struss appeared the previous year, it is a companion piece to that of Cardiff. Struss began as a Photo-Secessionist photographer, a student of Clarence White in New York City. C.B de Mille gave Struss his first real break in Hollywood as a set photographer. In short order, Struss bought a 35 mm B&H camera, affixed a “KS” plate to the camera door (and in those heady, wild days) was a “cameraman.” That free-for-all time has a current re-evocation: today, it is possible to buy an affordable Canon 5D, print up a business card, and declare yourself a director of photography. For good or bad (and you will find passionate exponents on both sides in a digital flip-screen world of image capture), the sightlines are shifting. Struss’s career is not only a window into a great period of art photography but one into the ever-shifting technology of Hollywood: from the silent era’s still developing film grammar; the introduction of sound; 3-strip Technicolor, and even up to the so-called golden age of 50s 3-D films. Struss’ last decade of cinematography included TV commercials, a still nascent form. I encourage you to review these essays if you’ve not done so, and to revisit them if you have.
The jury seems to be still out as to whether we are entering a game-changing shift in filmmaking with the current pack of 3-D movies, and whether 3-D is finally going to stick to the screen, or whether it will shoot out the rear exit of the theater— as it has done before. Many of the most recent crop of 3-D offerings, some Pixar animation excepted, have not been unequivocally embraced by audiences; many viewers seem to be wavering on whether to fork out extra cash to see a current release in 3-D, or choose an adjacent screen showing the film in 2-D at a significantly lower price. Many of the erratic, CGI impacted summer tent pole movies such as Transformer 3-D are edited at such a fast pace that the human eye can barely follow the flow of images, much less discern any aesthetic evaluation of what the experience of depth adds. Werner Herzog’s entry into 3-D, the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, on the other hand, brings a sense of poetic immersion into the mysterious Chauvet Caves in a way that is not possible on a flat screen. But here’s the 2-D trailer anyway:
The most engaging 3-D films I have seen are dance films, from the ballet company exercise that Vince Pace has used as a 3-D demo, to one of a Chinese company of deaf dancers (My Dream) that I saw at the recent Big Bear Film Festival as part of Ray Zone and friends’ presentation of almost two dozen 3-D shorts hosted by the Stereo Club of Southern California. Without a doubt, the most eagerly awaited 3-D dance film is Wim Wender’s tribute to his late friend, choreographer Pina Bausch.
Pina Bausch, photo by Anne-Christine Poujoulat.
The film played at the Berlin Film Festival in February, has screened commercially in Europe and was featured at the recent Telluride Film Festival. It will open soon in the United States. I discuss the film and embed a video of the trailer in a longer essay about Pina Bausch and her company from last January:
One of the vicissitudes of embedding video is not knowing how long any single video will stay posted. Several of the Pina clips are now disabled but many are still active.
From Paris, my friend Benjamin Bergery also writes a blog hosted by the ASC website. A recent piece is an interview with Wim Wenders about the director’s friendship with Bausch, and the technique and aesthetics of shooting a film about her work in 3-D.
This essay is a companion piece to Bergery’s article in the September 2011 issue of American Cinematographer magazine. When queried about the future of 3-D Wenders says simply:
There is no future if the new medium isn’t done more justice soon! If the studios keep producing trash with it, strictly action-based roller-coaster rides, the medium will collapse.
FOUR
Dance, painting, architecture. Cinema embraces the other plastic arts, as well as music. Silent films always soared on the crescendo of music, often a commissioned score for full symphony orchestra for films like Murnau’s Sunrise and Gance’s Napoleon. Classical music has often had an uneasy rapport with movies, its ill fit often being a measure of its stand-alone structure, not subject to the demands of the flow of images. But exceptions seem to abound as many composers have written for the concert hall as well as for the cinema. This tradition does go back to French silent films and the group known as “Les Six,” several of whom had careers at least as distinguished in movies as in live performance. Also, the Russians, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Schnittke, are prime examples of composers best known for their symphonic work but who had major, if uneven, success in films. Today, many composers of the so-called “minimalist” style have inherited that cinematic lineage, the most noted being Philip Glass who scored the Godfrey Reggio Katsi trilogy and the Paul Schrader film, Mishima. The Gus van Sant film Gerry used a haunting piece by Aarvo Pärt, the Estonian composer whose concert music has graced several recent films. A composer often linked with Pärt is the recently deceased Pole, Henryk Gorecki, whose “Third Symphony” became an unlikely CD international best seller.
Henryk Gorecki
Gorecki’s death late last year prompted me to write a tribute that embedded several deeply moving videos reflecting the symphony’s themes of the Jewish Holocaust. The two principal videos are still active. If you missed this essay the first time round, I think you will find the juxtaposition of music and image deeply affecting.
Last Spring I saw a new 35mm print of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at Manhattan’s Film Forum. A few days later, a friend, Bill Wilson, gave me a copy of Bresson’s little book of aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer. For the next few days, it became my subway read. I had not well remembered how simple yet true the director’s thoughts were about the nature of the cinematic image. His carefully crafted sentences echoed the dense, restrained images of his films. I highlighted some of these thoughts, and listed them in an essay about Bresson and his “transcendental” style. Much to my surprise, I received more emails and comments on this piece than on most of the ones I expected to be more popular. If you happened to miss the essay here is the link:
If you did read it, consider looking again. Bresson’s reflections on the nature of the cinematographic image, as well as on movie sound, transcend any technology that records those images. Aristotle’s “Poetics” still speaks loudly to us down the ages in its clarity of definition of drama, but Bresson’s Notes whisper to us about the abiding essence of cinema.
Robert Bresson
Next week: Part 2 of the second year review, with a look at the burgeoning internet coverage of “Occupy Wall Street” as a manifestation of a new form of public, non-professional photojournalism, and an homage to some of our greatest and most daring artists of conflict photography.
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