ONE

Several weeks ago, I emailed a photo of a 35mm film camera to Phil Radin, a long-time friend. He has been a fixture at Panavision longer than most of the camera equipment (just joking Phil), and has served as its executive vice-president of worldwide marketing since 1995. The photo I sent him is of the 1898 Prestwich movie camera.

I suggested that in light of the rapidly changing technology of motion picture cameras, film and video, Panavision should consider a radical design approach for the next generation of Panaflex cameras. Like the Prestwich, it would have a wooden body with a crank handle. Promoted as a “green” machine it would dispense with environmentally polluting batteries, and the camera body and magazines, once they became outmoded, could, unlike toxic video cameras, be readily re-cycled into garden mulch. Moreover, this analog device would incorporate all the hipness of a retro aesthetic—a true “steampunk” camera.

I meant it as a gentle jab aimed at the great American company that had begun in the mid-50s simply as an anamorphic projection lens vendor; but Panavision very soon took the “mumps” out of Cinemascope with its integrated squeeze lenses, replacing the patented Fox anamorphic system with the superior engineering of Panavision.  Even the company name sounded classier.

Emerging from the chaos of competing studios’ multiple wide screen formats in the late 50s, Panavision set a new standard that represented the cutting edge in 35mm and 65mm film technology and camera design aesthetics for decades (thanks to the vision and taste of its co-founder, Robert Gottschalk).

Like other manufacturers of motion picture film cameras such as Arriflex, Panavision has moved into the manufacture of HD digital cameras, even while creating new lens systems for its “mature” film cameras. As if these parallel technologies are not already demanding enough, 3-D movies have once again been thrust into the mix. Despite the marketing hype from several video camera manufacturers who have a compelling interest in rendering all 2-D hard and software obsolete, the path into these deep space thickets has not been universally embarked upon by the filmmakers themselves:

nytimes.com—“Resistance Forms Against Hollywood’s 3-D Push” article link

Even as studios are currently filming many of next summer’s bloated budget, VFX films in 3-D, its longer-term prospects remain uncertain. The website Gizmodo recently featured a story that graphed the slowly diminishing percentage of box office receipts for each 3-D release, compared to that of the same film in its 2-D version.

gizmodo.com—“Is 3D Already Dying? article link

Many 3-D supporters attribute this to a still troubling shortage of requisite converted screens and 4K projectors, but opinions are mixed. The divided perspective comes even as an IPO for RealD, the dominant 3-D vendor for exhibition, opens strongly on Wall Street. But some A-list directors and cinematographers (many of whom enrolled in Sony and IATSE Local 600’s 3-D training classes) are, in fact, questioning whether this new iteration of 3-D is the promised, long-awaited “revolution” or just another periodic 3-D hiccup.  Some studios are now second-guessing the value of 3-D production for anything other than the largest budget and franchise films.

There are, however, many fervent believers—besides Mr. Cameron:

seekingalpha.com—“Will 3D Encounter Resistance” article link

Into this cauldron of confusion about where the future of cinema is headed, the cinematographer, as always, stands over the boiling pot, surveying the bubbling ingredients, trying to divine the nature of the stew and how to serve it up. It is fair to say that it is an uneasy yet exciting time for the cinematographer, especially for those who have careers shaped by and practiced mainly in the era of 35mm film production (I count myself among them). Not only is today’s imaging technology changing at what seems an ever-escalating pace, but the role of the cinematographer itself is awhirl within it. As private discussions and public panels proliferate, debating the changing role of the cinematographer, it may be interesting to take a step back and look at a simpler, clearer time.

TWO

In the opening minutes of the feature length documentary Visions of Light there is a shot of cinematographers hand-cranking their cameras. In the narration, cinematographer Stephen Burum, ASC tells us that in the beginning there was only the cinematographer, a man and his camera recording life passing in front of him, a veritable flaneur, capturing life’s drama in motion. In the early silent days of feature filmmaking, multiple cameras employed slightly different angles and image sizes, not for simultaneous coverage like today, but to produce multiple negatives for international markets. The cinematographer, after a day’s shooting, would often directly supervise the development of the day’s negative. Billy Bitzer, cinematographer for most of D.W. Griffith’s great films, writes about this in his memoir, Billy Bitzer: His Story.

amazon.com—Billy Bitzer, His Story, (The Autobiography of D.W. Griffith’s Master Cameraman) link

It was also common, even mandatory, in silent days for the cinematographer to own his own camera. Bitzer photographed most of the Griffith films with a Pathé Frères’ camera like the one pictured at this site:

samdodge.com—Jackman Pathé link

A few years after Karl Struss moved to Hollywood at the end of WWI and began to work for C.B. DeMille as a stills set photographer, he purchased a Bell and Howell camera. He had a plate engraved  with his initials affixed to the side. It is this camera that is seen in the series of photos of Struss taken in 1922 by Edward Weston.

It is also this camera, equipped with an electric motor, which Struss used for the famous overhead tracking shot through the swamp in Murnau’s film Sunrise.

I discussed Struss’ role in this film in the last part of my four-part essay on his work from last December:

John Bailey’s Bailiwick—“Karl Struss a Tripod in Two Worlds—Part Four Sunrise” link

Shortly before Struss bought the B&H camera, fellow New York Camera Work photographer, Paul Strand, bought an Ackley camera and began to make documentary films. He all but mothballed his stills camera for a decade. The last series of photos he made were of the Ackley camera movement itself.

With this camera Strand, along with fellow photographer/painter Charles Scheeler, photographed a ten-minute visual portrait of Manhattan.

In the years before the introduction of sound produced a freeze frame in dynamic, even frenetic cinematography, the camera became an almost god-like tool that delivered the entire visual world, real and imagined, to eager moviegoers.  Cinematographers “played” the intricate mechanism of their cameras,creating elaborate in camera  effects with the mastery of a pianist performing a Chopin prelude.  Today, many cinematographers are again buying their own cameras. This time they are digital video, affordable and compact, even DSLRs such as the Canon 7D.

As early as 1922 the cover of the American Cinematographer magazine proclaimed, “Give Us A Place to Stand and We Will Film the Universe.”

This triumphal confidence reflected the cinematographer’s prominence in the hierarchy of filmmaking. Karl Struss and Charles Rosher shared the first ever Academy Award for cinematography in 1927, a year before the Best Picture Oscar was created. The great Russian cinematographer Edvard Tisse achieved a level of fame almost equal to that of director and partner Sergei Eisenstein.

Another great Russian filmmaker of the era, Dziga-Vertov, espoused documentary filmmaking as the true mission of cinema. His landmark film Man with a Camera elevates the camera and the cinematographer to a near deific status. The  film’s cinematographer, often seen with his camera and tripod riding atop a speeding car as he cranks away at the passing scene, embodies a contemporary fusion of Socialist ideology with that of Futurist aesthetics, the cameraman as the cutting edge artist of his time. This groundbreaking work was one of the first films I saw in my beginning camera class at USC and it fired my imagination to the potential of the cinematographer as dramatic image storyteller, much as it had Nestor Almendros a generation before (naming his autobiography with the same title as the film). The last ten minutes of Man with a Camera are an intoxicating rush of images bookmarked by a surprising stop-frame animation of the camera itself, as a living character in its own right (beginning at 2:37 in this clip). The jazz score by the Vitaly Tkachuk Quartet is improvised in a live performance at the Mute Nights Festival in Odessa, June 19, 2010.

As Vilmos Zsigmond insists in his Visions of Light interview, sound brought a stultifying, if brief, change in how movies were made. Dialogue came to the fore in a way that especially in American cinema stilled the manic freedom of the pure image and relegated the camera to the role of a dialogue-recording device. Some would argue that the camera has never fully escaped these shackles. Notwithstanding the Golden Age of American cinema being one bonded to the spoken word, cinematographers and directors continued to explore new ways of using the camera as a dramatic, narrative tool often serving as poetic counterpoint to the literal narrative reality of dialogue. Over a famous liquor-fueled weekend, Gregg Toland is said to have instructed the tyro film director Orson Welles in the principles and techniques of the motion picture camera. Welles was as quick a study as Toland was a quiet and collaborative teacher. Their only film together is one of the landmarks of American film.

Welles acknowledged Toland’s crucial role with a shared credit, unheard of then, perhaps even more so now.

THREE

In the late 40s the Motion Picture Academy decided to make a series of short documentaries for general release in order to inform theater audiences what the various craft categories contributed to the filmmaking process. Titled simply The Cinematographer one ten-minute film was a window into the complex role of the Hollywood feature film cinematographer. When I first saw it as a beginning cinematography student, it struck me (smack dab in the middle of the French New Wave revolution) as being hopelessly outdated. Even then, the BNC Mitchell camera featured was about to become a relic; I was also amazed at the formalism of the short’s description of the cinematographer’s “job.” The cinematographer as an executive wearing a suit, sporting a viewing glass as if it were a monocle? I thought this pose was an affectation created solely for the film. But a few years later, as a camera assistant, I came to realize that many such production stills I saw from 30s and 40s movies pictured cinematographers like this, it being their genuine working attire. The cinematographer was a highly paid, even contractual, studio artist, and his dress code reflected his status. The few times I was privileged to work with Philip Lathrop, a gentleman of the old school, he always wore a dress jacket on the set.

Though he is presented in the Academy short film anonymously, the featured cinematographer is Karl Struss, ASC. I only realized this decades later after I had met Struss at a retrospective of his films at LACMA. I have thought this short film to be nearly lost, but I discovered it recently on that paragon of visual archiving—YouTube.

The film is a sort of Cook’s Tour of the many areas of responsibility assumed by the director of photography within a traditional hierarchy. Early on, the narrator intones, “He [the cinematographer] has served a long and thorough apprenticeship in all phases of cinematography.” But even as I was starting in the “industry,” that structure was breaking down. The long-standing movement through the work categories, from film loader to camera assistant, to operator, to cinematographer, was under assault by a younger generation, not part of the studio system, many of them young émigrés from Europe, such as Vilmos Zigsmond and Laszlo Kovacs. Nestor Almendros, Vittorio Storaro and Sven Nykvist arrived soon after. The next were a group of Brits, all renowned in their home industry. Hard on their heels were the Australians. All of these interlopers introduced exciting, new techniques and visual style into a moribund Hollywood system. They also helped fuel the American New Wave of the 70s, and supported maverick American cinematographers like Conrad Hall, Owen Roizman, Haskell Wexler, and John Alonzo– also inspiring my generation of cinematographers, only recently emerging from the film schools.

Some of my peers followed this maverick route and went directly from film school into independent and non-union filmmaking. Others, such as myself, chose a slower path moving through the apprenticeship and journeyman categories. For me, it was an opportunity to learn from the generation just before me, some setting examples through their newly wrought creative freedom, and others through their hidebound resistance to any change from abroad.

Even as the cameras and film stocks evolved over the next several decades, the primacy of film as the preferred acquisition medium remained the one constant. This gave a relative sense of stability to the process of filmmaking. The evening screening of film dailies for the crew in large screen projection was the norm. This ritual gave all departments a pretty accurate window into how the film from the day before was working—or not. The abandonment of 35mm film dailies starting a decade ago followed the rise of digital editing on the Avid. HD dailies became the new norm, as studios were loath to hire extra editorial staff to conform film dailies to the Avid for previews and screenings. Downward pressure from the front offices soon began to eliminate even HD dailies, replacing them first with standard definition DVDs, and then by transmission of dailies via the internet through a system like PIX. Every phase of this cost cutting has helped Balkanize the dailies experience, neutering the cinematographer and director from collectively evaluating the previous day’s work. This shortsighted decision has also deprived the next generation of upcoming directors, cinematographers, and editors of the time-honored experience of community. Everyone began to watch dailies, if at all, on personal laptops at home or on location in their hotel rooms.

The next phase in this process, digital acquisition, eliminates film in the entire production chain, often sending a signal to crew that the viewing of dailies is no longer important. After all, don’t the on set HD monitors reflect everything that is being captured by the digital cameras? So, a long history of mentoring relationships has been largely undone by technical progress, helping marginalize the role of the cinematographer as a crucial interdepartmental linchpin. Not the intended consequence, for sure, of what digital acquisition promised. One could ask a simple question, “Must technical progress so often come at the expense of creative values?”

FOUR

One of the issues that has emerged in my recent consideration of the much-viewed on-line Cinematographer vs. Producer video by NicolasDH, centers on a simple issue. Has the emergence of digital cameras, especially lower-end ones, into mainstream Hollywood features irrevocably altered the role of the cinematographer in contemporary filmmaking? In the world of 35mm film, the experience and judgment of the cinematographer was crucial to a full realization of image creation. In the democratizing era of digital video, in a what you see is (more or less) what you get environment, it is tempting for nearly everyone to express an opinion about what is being displayed at an on-set HD monitor. This extends downstream into the editing suite as the movie is being cut. Too often, the images are seen as just so much “data” to be moved around, reframed, flipped and blown up, as though the cinematographer’s care in image creation has lesser currency because it is “digital.” Everyone has Photoshop on his or her laptop; everyone knows how to alter images. The current generation of Avid editing machines has lots of bells and whistles that make shot alteration all too easy. This practice is further abetted by the often-heard mantra by harried cinematographers, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in post.”

I have been fortunate, so far at least, that my own experiences in digital video have been spared this forensic dismembering by well-intentioned collaborators and, for the most part, my work has been treated not much differently than it has been on film for the past 35 years.

But I have experienced a few “meetings” involving laborious on set discussions with filmmaking partners concerned with things such as lighting ratios and exposure levels. Years of experience  in 35mm film does not seem to make any cinematographer immune to second-guessing by a recent film school graduate planted next to an HD monitor. And this sense of entitlement may be carried through into the mastering process in the DI suite. Actors may become unexpected “collaborators” when their contracts permit them to supervise digital, cosmetic “fixes.” This is not always a welcome surprise, as such concerns may be substantively different from those of the director and cinematographer, prime partners in creating those images. Colleagues have told me of physical fights that have erupted in the DI suite among opposing factions. And sadly, I have witnessed directors marginalized, caught in the midst of these power plays. It has led me to wonder what it may be like for younger cinematographers still trying to establish their reputations. They often deal with the polarities of having on one side less life and film experience in dealing with volatile and unruly egos, and on the other with trying to create a personal vision amidst the chaos of contentious opinions displayed at the video village and  inside the DI suite.

FIVE

Many young cinematographers and directors are facing challenges about what kind of camera to use, in what  medium and format. Often, they tell me, the choice that is made is not an informed one. Equipment price, not aesthetic criteria, is the determinate.  This issue is the subject of the Cinematographer vs. Producer video. Because there is no more bottom line decision to be made than what camera a filmmaker uses (with crucial downstream consequences), I have been eager to find the creator of this video, obviously made by someone with close proximity to the subject. In case you have not yet seen the video or want to review the essay again, here it is:

John Bailey”s Bailiwick—“Cinematographer vs. Producer” link

When the essay about this video came out several weeks ago, it generated many thoughtful comments. I made many personal replies. I also made phone calls and sent out emails trying to find the filmmaker.  A week passed with no success. Then he contacted Martha Winterhalter at American Cinematographer magazine and I was able to begin a conversation with him. It became immediately clear that he was indeed a young filmmaker for whom the discussion in this video was not hypothetical, that it had immediate personal relevance.

In next week’s essay, Part Two, you will meet “NicolasDH.”  He will explain his thoughts behind the creation of the video as well as his own modest thoughts on the role of the cinematographer today.

This is a photo of the bare exhibition space of a most unusual gallery.

The name of the gallery is also its address on Manhattan’s West Street, a long walk and a world away from the glitz and glam of Chelsea’s affluent exhibition spaces. 401 Projects stands alone as an art space in a busy commercial area fronting the rushing traffic just outside its door, a stone’s throw from the Hudson River. If the gallery had Chelsea type storefront windows it could claim the quintessential “riv vu” moniker. 401 Projects was founded in April 2006 by photographer Mark Seliger as a non-commercial exhibition space for emerging as well as established artists. Famed VII photojournalist, James Nachtwey, has exhibited at the gallery several times. A few years ago his subject in this space was the operating theater of an Iraq War triage and trauma hospital. Titled simply Sacrifice, the now completed 60 image photo essay dominates an angled gallery wall at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a continuous scroll-like mural, the emotional coda of the Getty’s current exhibition, Engaged Observers. I will be doing a piece on this historic exhibition very soon.

Even if you know Nachtwey’s work from his museum exhibitions or from tony galleries, or from his Time magazine photo-essays, a visit to his website and to the essay I wrote about him last October may give you added insight to his fervid, intense commitment to humanely documenting world events, often in the most desolate and troubled places. The essay has links to scenes from Christian Frei’s Academy Award nominated documentary, War Photographer.

John’s Bailiwick: “Bearing Witness” blog entry link

When you enter 401 Projects to view his latest solo exhibition, you pass along the length of a narrow hallway. It is almost impossible to back far enough away from the walls to get a full view of the photographs hanging there, Nachtwey’s photo-essay on the devastation of this year’s Haitian earthquake, titled “Aftershock.” The hallway is moody, lit usually only by light streaming in through the frosted glass front door. This is what it looks like—Nachtwey’s photographs from the Haiti earthquake here lining the wall on the right.

And here is a view of the sky lit main room of the exhibition. The photos are not artfully framed as in a traditional gallery, but simply push-pinned through the print into the wall. The harsh skylight beats down on the slightly curled paper like the relentless Haitian sun. These are not meant to be collectible prints, but documents, a solemn record of the ongoing tragedy that has befallen the Haitian people, as witnessed by this most compassionate of photojournalists. The exhibition is held in conjunction with several Haitian relief efforts.

Here is a view of the main gallery.

401 Project’s rough brick walls and unforgiving light, as well as the erratic blood-like red lines spiking out above and below the photographs, represent a Richter scale like record of the quake’s seismic trail. An industrial font wall stencil introduces the exhibition.

Everything here is displayed in a way that removes you as far as possible from the normal photo gallery environment. The effect is as if you were in an impromptu space thrown up a short time after the quake itself. To return to the dim entry hallway after your eyes have adjusted to the bright sun streaming through the skylight—is to encounter an inferno of images of dead bodies just piled up across the street on the sidewalk. Nachtwey says that within an hour of his getting off the plane, and still orienting himself to the surreal landscape, this is what he saw.

Instead of moving ahead to continue his work deeper in the city, he stayed on this single street for some time, recording the way passing Haitians reacted to the sight of the dead, left like so much refuse to be picked up who knows when. To pass along the length of this dim wall, seeing the corpses across the street from the perspective of passing Haitians in the foreground, is a deeply immersive meditation on the vagaries of survival. This sense of immediacy rather than that of removed observation is the measure of Nachtwey’s way of making us witness to the most painful of events. If you link to the earlier essay cited above, you will see in scenes from Christian Frei’s film, War Photographer, how Nachtwey bears witness.

Here is a closer photo of a wall of the main gallery room with the red seismic record:

Stenciled in smaller print on the wall between the hallway and the main room is Nachtwey’s own statement for the exhibition. To read it is to discover an artist whose sensitivity to the power of words is equal to that of his photographs.

There is nothing more I can write in the rest of this essay that will serve the work, nothing more than letting Nachtwey’s own words on the wall statement in the photo above,  and now placed between the photographs below, speak to you:

To witness the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti is to be lost inside a waking nightmare, the markers on this mapless journey, swarms of looters, children with chopped-off limbs, cities fabricated of sticks and bed sheets, pulverized cathedrals, dogs circling the dead in the streets.

Most Haitians have always lived in a society clinging to a narrow ledge on a precipice above the abyss—on the plateau over them, the rich, unseen in their black-windowed Land Cruisers. Higher still, as if levitating in air, the immaculate, blinding white Presidential Palace, the secret desire of all despots, now crushed by the weight of its own three Baroque domes. Where the ledge crumbled the dead cascaded into oblivion. Where it held, people huddled closer, those with next-to-nothing now with even less. They continue to endure their own history—a crescendo of privation and hardship, matched by strength, pride and dignity born in the conquest of slavery, nurtured by poverty, struggle and faith.

The earth shrugged, Haiti collapsed and the world responded, “compassion fatigue” unveiled as the straw man of cynics and ad salesmen. Epic catastrophe was met by epic generosity, without benefit of untapped oil reserves or geopolitical gain. The UN is here in force, but the real united nations are the small NGO’s from every corner of the planet who just showed up, flying by the seat of their pants. String their acronyms side by side, and they’d go halfway around the equator. Recite them, and you’d be speaking in tongues.

The Haitians themselves are not just sitting back with their hands out. They’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting; so humble in its nature it seems invisible. Massive, international relief supplies are transported by cargo ships, helicopters and C-130’s. Haitians carry what they need on their heads. They dig survivors out of the wreckage by hand, not with big yellow machines. Everyone is doing what he can by whatever means available.

As a photojournalist involved in documenting the history of the past 30 years, much of my work has focused on wars, conflicts and social injustice. It’s been fueled by anger, driven by the belief that if people are informed they will be inspired by compassion, and will share a sense of outrage at violence, aggression and the unacceptable deprivation of fundamental human rights. Those issues are all man made, and anger can jump start the process of change. An earthquake is an act of nature. Tens of thousands die in a few minutes. Who is to blame? Regime change is not an option. How can anger be directed at the earth itself? Compassion is the ultimate motivation in a natural catastrophe. The challenge is to maintain it for the long haul, not allow it to die with the headlines.

Haitians have forged history with a capital H. Slaves rose up to vanquish the armies of Europe’s mightiest empire. An earthquake reveals the power within the earth itself. But the spirit of the Haitian people is also a force of nature. Virtually all the symbols of political power in a country synonymous with corruption have been erased. What will the people of Haiti write on the blank page of a new chapter of their history?

ONE

The cavernous expanse of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay is one of the world’s most pleasurable places to see art. Even with the 5th floor Impressionist Galleries undergoing the first full-scale renovation since its 1986 opening, this must-see collection of 19th century French art housed in a once long closed railway station and one time site of Orson Welles’ film, The Trial, dazzles the visitor with one iconic painting after another. And even with masses of newly itinerant Chinese tourists, weighed down with kilos of digital cameras, cruising the galleries (and unlike the Louvre, with photography mercifully interdit in the collection), the vaulted ceiling with its bright but diffused skylights invites you to stroll as if you were in an Impressionist’s plein air park.

Continue reading ‘Looking, Looking But Not Seeing’