American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 98

of the "century of cinema," when the studios
were committed to releasing varied films.
Within a few years, a succession of "blockbusters" (now deemed "tentpoles") would
command most screens in the newly built
multiplexes, screens that filmmakers naively
expected would be available for all films.
Trying to claw through the diminishing
exhibition opportunities for tadpole movies
today is, fortunately, not my job. But exploring how to photograph them with the same
production values expected of any mainstream movie is, and it's a challenge as well as
an opportunity. Well, the challenge is obvious, but where is the opportunity?
In recent blogs on the ASC website
(theasc.com), I have written about the cinematography of two distinctly different but
highly original camera artists: Alton and
Figueroa. Both worked under conditions
familiar to today's indie cinematographers:
painfully short schedules, small equipment
packages and undermanned crews. Today,
after decades of working in the world of
generous studio schedules and budgets, I
find myself more and more in league with
these cinema outliers.
There's a temptation to view the socalled "democratization" of filmmaking
embodied by small digital cameras as a
tipping point - as a seismic realignment that
is restructuring movies - or to think that
high-resolution video games are somehow
redefining the processing of images in our
brains. Prominent neurologists such as Oliver
Sacks are exploring the cerebral consequences of what Matthias Stork calls "chaos
cinema." My own feeling is that we cinematographers are too close to the front lines
to evaluate much of this right now. We're in
the trenches, below the horizon. More than
ever before, I feel a new urgency with each
film to jump out into the fray, dodge the
incoming flak, scurry under the wire and
move forward - simply to survive. The battle
metaphor might seem overwrought, but it is
more apt than ever. There's something exciting about this perspective; it throws me back
to my film-school years, to the struggle to
gain any foothold in the industry. I've been
working with emerging and first-time directors more than ever, even as I've seen many
gifted veteran directors struggle to get a
favorite script in front of the camera.
The ongoing challenge is to find ways
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November 2013

to integrate the set experience that has
served me, along with an open-ended
approach to every new film. It is this
approach that Truffaut and Godard spoke
of half a century ago, when they were
rewriting the rules of filmmaking, severing
the platitudes of the "tradition of quality"
that were stultifying French cinema at the
time. In the BBC documentary The Camera
That Changed the World, Raoul Coutard
declares that he never considered himself a
film artist because he spent most of his
youth photographing movies with directors
that didn't really know how to make
movies - movies that have since become
iconic.
People often ask me about technique and equipment. Do I still use tungsten lights, or only Kino Flos and LEDs?
When shooting digitally, do I do on-set
color management or use a single LUT, or
simply default my setting to Rec 709? How
do I work with a colorist? How do I choose
a camera? ProRes or Raw? My answers are
simple: I work with what is available in the
budget. There are few rules in this new era,
but one is that it's irresponsible to carry a
truck full of gear you will seldom, if ever,
use. I remember two lighting lessons from
my earliest days in 16mm features. One
was lighting a large Catholic church with
only six Babies. The other was lighting a
night exterior at a remote mountain hot
spring with a Coleman lantern and two
flashlights. (It was a half-hour trek in, and
our only other equipment was an Éclair
NPR, two rolls of film, a Nagra and tape.)
The Way Way Back and the three
other tadpoles I shot last year were not
gonzo, run-and-gun films. They all feature
accomplished actors and aspire to the spitand-polish look today's audience expects of
commercial movies. (It's an audience way
too savvy about filmmaking techniques,
and way too eager to render its opinions in
the bubble of the "focus group.")
In the 35mm-film era, cinematographers spent our time on set, planted next to
the camera operator and director. That intimacy with the actors began to erode with
the introduction of video monitors, which
quickly spawned an entire video village.
Today, operators and assistants tell me they
see the cinematographer vanish into the
video tent in the morning and emerge at
American Cinematographer

lunch. Is it any wonder that in this environment, the cinematographer's primacy is eroding? When the cinematographer is absent
from the set, the camera crew can find itself
working more and more in the English tradition, with the camera operator setting up
shots with the director as the cinematographer's voice booms from the tent like the
Wizard of Oz. It's true, there is a venerable
tradition in that system; it's easy to reel off a
list of gifted British "lighting cameramen."
But it's not how most American cinematographers work. Regardless of schedule or
budget, it is the cinematographer's ongoing
dialogue with the director, scene to scene,
shot to shot, that lies at the heart of the classic American system. The DIT's tent can
become an unexpected impediment to that
communication. And, with monitors everywhere on the set, the cinematographer is
easily second-guessed, and his function as a
principal partner of the director is also dissipated.
On the exhibition and viewing level,
we are asking the question, "What is a
movie?" The venerable Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences is also facing this
question. The lines between cinema and television are blurring because of the dramatic
formats of cable series such as Breaking Bad,
The Newsroom and Boardwalk Empire,
shows that explore a range of plot and character over the course of a season, with
dramatic arcs that are not possible in a traditional feature film. The feature-film "look" in
cinematography, design and editing is very
present in these programs.
It's an exciting and a scary time. Job
categories and even careers are being redefined, and it's the tadpole movies that are
doing it. For today's indie cinematographer,
the demands of low-budget filmmaking are
akin to walking a tightrope without the time
to set up a safety net. Thinking on your feet is
a critical skill; you must be able to quickly
abandon preconceived plans you might have
worked out with the director and adjust to
the unexpected. God knows, there are lots of
ways for a scene to spin off the wheels, and
on indie productions there is often no time to
right the wreckage - you just have to clear
away the mess and restart. Sometimes it is the
unexpected, impromptu response to a problem that creates a better scene. And isn't that
the ongoing magic of making movies? ●

http://www.theasc.com

American Cinematographer - November 2013

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