American Cinematographer - January 2016 - 28

A Guided Tour of Hell
By Jean Oppenheimer

Shooting on 35mm stock is rare
enough these days, but color-timing
photochemically is almost unheard of.
Yet, that's the path cinematographer
Mátyás Erdély, HSC and director László
Nemes insisted on for the Hungarian film
Son of Saul. The harrowing Holocaust
drama won four awards at the 2015
Cannes Film Festival, including the Grand
Prix, and is Hungary's submission for this
year's Foreign Language Film Academy
Award. The film also screened at the
recent Camerimage festival, where Erdély
was awarded the Bronze Frog.
Son of Saul is set in the AuschwitzBirkenau death camp in October 1944.
Both dramatically and visually, the film
focuses on a single individual, Saul
Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a member of the
Sonderkommando work unit - Jewish
prisoners who were forced to remove
corpses from the gas chambers and transport them to the crematoriums. One day
Saul spots the body of a boy he believes to
be his son. He becomes obsessed with
hiding the body and giving the child a
28

January 2016

proper Jewish burial.
Saul's single-minded quest leaves
him oblivious to everything else around
him, and his psychological fog is mirrored
in the film's visual concept. "The lens
remains focused on Saul, almost always in
close-up or tight medium, while the
horrors unfolding in the background -
inmates herded into gas chambers, dead
bodies being dragged away - are out of
focus," Erdély tells AC, speaking by phone
from his home in Budapest. "By shooting
close to wide-open [T2 on interiors and
T2.8½ for exteriors] and focusing the lens
approximately 2½ feet from the film
plane, objects [beyond those 30 inches]
are still visible, but blurry. László's genius
was in using this very basic photographic
tool for dramatic purposes."
Nemes started thinking about Saul
more than a decade ago, and initially
mentioned the project to Erdély in 2007,
after the cinematographer shot the director's first short film. Over the years, even
while working on other projects, they
established a set of rules to follow: the
entire film would be shot handheld, using
a single lens and a single stock.
As to the film's unusually narrow
American Cinematographer

aspect ratio, the cinematographer
explains that initially "we were concerned
that 1.37:1 wouldn't give us enough of
the environment. But once you move the
camera - which we do constantly on
Saul - you can reveal as much as you
like.
"This film absolutely could not
have been made without focus puller
Gergely Csepregi," Erdély adds. "He was
remarkable."
Son of Saul was shot predominantly on an Arricam Lite (with an HD
video assist to ensure high-resolution
preview images). An Arriflex 235 was
substituted when confronted with especially tight spaces; when running with the
camera was required; and when the
camera was placed in an underwater
housing unit, even as the lens remained
above the water line.
Far more significant for Erdély than
the camera selection was the choice of
lens and film stock. "One of the most
important aspects of choosing the right
lens was how the out-of-focus images
would look," he submits. "The film's
whole visual approach relies on what is
revealed, how it is revealed, and the infor-

Son of Saul production still by László Nemes. Additional images by Gergely Csepregi. All images courtesy of the filmmakers.

In the Holocaust
drama Son of
Saul, AuschwitzBirkenau prisoner
Saul Ausländer
(Géza Röhrig)
becomes
obsessed with
hiding the body
of a boy he
believes to be his
son, determined
to give the child a
proper Jewish
burial.

American Cinematographer - January 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2016