American Cinematographer - February 2013 - 8

This issue has a decidedly Australian flavor, spotlighting a
trio of cinematographers who hail from Down Under. First
and foremost is Dean Semler, ASC, ACS, who will receive
the Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award on Feb. 10.
During a long and prosperous career, Semler has amassed
dozens of credits on a wide variety of popular movies. In
1991, he earned Academy and ASC awards for Dances
with Wolves, and he earned a second ASC nomination in
2007 for Apocalypto. A member of the Australian Cinematographers Society’s Hall of Fame who has received the
Queen’s Medal (one of Australia’s highest honors), Semler
has also won an Australian Film Institute Award (for the
thriller Razorback) and earned five additional AFI nominations. “You’d think every film
was his first film,” camera operator Mark Goellnicht tells Jean Oppenheimer in her
entertaining profile of Semler (“Vision and Verve,” page 62). “He still has that excitement in him.”
Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty procedural that dramatizes the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin
Laden, was shot by another Australian with keen eyes and a hot hand: Greig Fraser,
ACS, who joined the project after lending his talents to the recent features Let Me In,
Snow White and the Huntsman and Killing Them Softly. In Michael Goldman’s piece
about the production (“The World’s Most Wanted Man,” page 32), director Kathryn
Bigelow says she wanted to work with a cinematographer “who possessed enormous
confidence to go along with his skill.” Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.
The period drama Gangster Squad benefits from cinematography by Dion Beebe,
ASC, ACS, who has also enjoyed big success in Hollywood. Beebe’s experience on
major productions served him well alongside director Ruben Fleischer, who was helming his third feature. “I’m a young filmmaker,” Fleischer tells associate editor Jon
Witmer (“War on Crime,” page 42). “Dion is such a maestro and so experienced, and
he taught me so much. I value his opinion and respect everything he did.”
This month’s issue also covers the TV miniseries Parade’s End, which Mike Eley,
BSC shot at locations in England and Belgium. London correspondent Mark Hope-Jones
visited the production while the filmmakers were staging battlefield scenes in the latter
country (“Crumbling Pillars,” page 54). Eley notes that he and director Susanna White
were inspired by an exhibition of Vorticist paintings at the Tate Modern museum in
London: “Parade’s End is thought of as one of the first modernist novels, and Vorticism
hit the world around 1914, slap-bang in the middle of our story. In particular, we were
struck by the vortographs, which are photographs taken through a fractured mirror,
and we decided to borrow that technique.”
Rounding out this issue is a pictorial recap of the 2012 Plus Camerimage festival,
which lived up to its billing as a premiere showcase for the art of cinematography
(“Postcards from Poland,” page 72).

Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor

Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

Editor’s Note

American Cinematographer - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2013