American Cinematographer - February 2014 - 30

I

A Black-and-White Reverie
By Mark Dillon

Like Godfrey Reggio's experimental
documentaries Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of
Balance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation
and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, his latest
feature, Visitors, is dialogue free and showcases music by Philip Glass. Whereas
Koyaanisqatsi offers a colorful symphony of
sped-up images, however, Visitors takes the
opposite approach, featuring intimate
black-and-white tableaux shot in slow
motion. The 87-minute feature comprises
74 shots, which were captured by cinematographers Graham Berry, Tom Lowe
and Trish Govoni.
"This is poetic cinema, which for me
is about giving people a sensation, an
emotion and a perception," explains
Reggio. "The intention is to have the audience feel something, and that's going to be
different person to person. I'm not interested in narrative films. It's a pictorial
composition."
Reggio began planning Visitors in
2003. When funding became available, in
2010, he commenced scouting locations in
Louisiana, his home state. The shoot took
place in four stages between September
2010 and September 2012, and Reggio and
his collaborators worked from "talking
papers" he had created in lieu of a screenplay. "I used that to communicate about
what the film is and what the photography
would be," he explains.
The filmmakers avoided juxtaposing
shots that might create a particular mean30

February 2014

ing. "Sometimes when we put two
thoughts together, they would start to add
up to a specific didactic idea, and we'd say,
'We don't want to do that,'" recalls coproducer/associate director Jon Kane. "We
were keeping it atmospheric so the viewer
could bring his own ideas to the film."
The images were captured mostly in
color and then transformed into black-andwhite in post, a decision that was finalized
during production after Reggio saw Lowe's
monochromatic infrared photography,
which includes images of Six Flags New
Orleans (nearly destroyed by Hurricane
Katrina) and the swamplands at Louisiana's
Atchafalaya Basin. "Tom was doing this lush
black-and-white stuff that was so stunning
we decided to make the portraits blackand-white to match, and then it all became
black-and-white," Kane recalls.
Lowe, who specializes in time-lapse
cinematography, suspended work on his
own documentary, TimeScapes, to join
Reggio in New Orleans. Reggio showed him
some black-and-white infrared photos and
asked if something similar could be accomplished with moving images. Lowe
proceeded to line up a couple of Canon
EOS 5D Mark II cameras modified to shoot
black-and-white IR, and he shot sun and
clouds passing over skeletal roller-coasters
and an Art Deco hospital building, which
eventually came to serve as a recurring
monolith in the film.
The filmmakers later secured a Red
One that was also modified for IR, and used
it to capture high-speed shots in 3K
Redcode 42 at 48 fps. This footage was
American Cinematographer

recorded to a 128GB Red Ram SSD drive,
while the Canon time-lapse material was
captured in the raw format to Lexar 300x
32GB CF cards.
Lowe shot the swamplands using a
rig he assembled with Kenyon gyrostabilizers for the Red camera, which would often
rest on his knee. Accompanied by his first
assistant, Dustin Kukuk, and boat captain
Roy Blanchard, Lowe captured five days'
worth of IR Cyprus trees, lily pads and other
natural elements. "Godfrey trusted me to
shoot what I felt was worthy," Lowe recalls.
"He said, 'I don't care how much footage
you shoot. I'm not looking for coverage. I'm
only looking for special things. If you come
back with nothing, I won't care.' That was a
relief on one hand, but on the other, he put
it on me to figure it all out! But I was so
inspired by everything I saw that finding
special shots was easy."
Lowe's time-lapse gear included a
CamBlock three-axis motion-control
system. One or two hours of shooting
would yield one shot in the final film, with
Lowe capturing one frame every three or
four seconds. He shot completely with
natural light, and the IR filters created
dramatic looks such as blackened skies.
Lowe used 10mm, 12mm and 16mm Zeiss
Ultra Primes, as well as the extreme-wideangle 8R/T2.8. "If you window down a Red
One to 3K, you lose some of the field-ofview, so we had to use a very wide lens to
get a perspective that looked like, say, a
14mm," he notes.
Berry, who is based in France, first
collaborated with Reggio on Powaqqatsi.

Visitors photos and frame grabs courtesy of Cinedigm.

Among the
images
cinematographer
Tom Lowe shot
for Godfrey
Reggio's Visitors
were infrared
vistas of the
hurricanebattered Six
Flags New
Orleans. Lowe
shared
cinematography
duties on the
film with
Graham Berry
and Trish
Govoni.
American Cinematographer - February 2014

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