American Cinematographer - January 2008 - (Page 20) Right: Bauby sees the first copy of his memoir, which he blinked out to a secretary one letter at a time. Below: Filming one of the picture’s many distinctive POV shots. into New York’s elite downtown art scene; and Before Night Falls (AC Jan. ’01), about a gay writer struggling to survive in revolutionary Cuba. “Julian is not interested in conventional filmmaking,” says Kaminski. “He’s very much interested in pushing the boundaries of the medium, and at the same time he left me totally free to create those images. In filmmaking, it’s very important to be with someone who’s not afraid of the image.” Kaminski started by asking himself how being paralyzed would affect a person’s point of view. “I try to identify with the person the story is about — that’s when the visual language comes out. With Bauby, the question became: what happens when you start looking around the world, closing one eye?” The answer involved shifting focus, and variable focus is a prominent feature in the first part of the film, when Bauby emerges from a deep coma. He dips in and out of consciousness, catching glimpses of his surround- ings: doctors peering in his face with penlights, cartoons on the TV, lace curtains blowing. His focus might fix on a doctor’s stubbly cheek for an instant, then shift and fade to black. As his condition stabilizes, the camerawork does, too. Working in standard 1.85:1, Kaminski used a battery of devices to create these POV shots. (He used Zeiss Superspeed lenses for more conventional shots.) One was Arri’s Shift & Tilt lens system, which allowed him to “play with the bellows and manipulate the film plane and depth of the sharpness,” he says. “You can photograph a wall straight on and, by adjusting the bellows, make the wall out of focus. Same with a face — you can put the camera straight on and make half of the face out of focus and the other half sharp. As the person is coming forward, you can also pull focus and maintain the sharp focus on the face.” The Arri system comes with its own set of lenses, which range from 16mm to 135mm. Kaminski stayed mostly on the wide end, 35mm and wider. “They focus within 1 centimeter,” he notes. “They’re potentially macro lenses.” This was especially useful for close-ups like the POV shot of Bauby’s eye being stitched closed. (In reality, latex was stretched over the lens.) 20 January 2008
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