American Cinematographer - March 2018 - 58

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Spirit Awards Honor Indie Cinematography

Left: Cinematographer Elisha Christian studies the light on the set of Columbus. Right: Jin (John Cho, left) and Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) develop a
relationship while exploring the architecture in Columbus, Ind.

the opening of Beach Rats, a film that
captured two Indie Award nominations:
Best Male Lead for Harris Dickinson, a
British actor surrounded by a largely
nonprofessional cast; and Hélène
Louvart, AFC, a French cinematographer who used Super 16 to masterful
effect, capturing the glaring summer sun
of Brooklyn's boardwalks, the rainbow
lights of Coney Island at night, the
impenetrable darkness of midnight
hookups in seaside scrub, and the sense
of struggle on Frankie's face as his identity and desires collide.
It was a Facebook selfie that triggered the visual discussion for the film
by writer/director Eliza Hittman, a
Brooklyn native who won the Dramatic
Directing award for the movie at
Sundance 2017. The story finds Frankie
whiling away the summer, playing
handball and getting high with friends.
He's half-heartedly dating a girl. But
alone in his bedroom at night, he trawls
a gay chat room, then starts meeting up
with older men for sex.
Hittman had reached out to the
Paris-based cinematographer through
director Tim Sutton, for whom she had
shot Dark Night. Louvart, a director of
photography on 50-some features, had
also worked with Wim Wenders on his
Oscar-nominated 3D documentary
Pina; Agnès Varda on her Césarwinning The Beaches of Agnès; and Alice
Rohrwacher on a number of projects,
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March 2018

including Cannes Grand Prix winner
The Wonders.
Two months before production,
Louvart flew to New York to spend 10
days with the director, visiting locations
and dissecting the script. After spending time in total darkness at various
beach cruising spots, the duo knew the
film's sex scenes should remain just as
dark. Hittman resisted producers'
urging to shoot digital, as those cameras
can peer too far into shadow. With
Super 16, says Louvart, "when it's dark,
it's dark." Characters who step back
from the camera are swallowed up by
the night - which also paralleled
Frankie's compartmentalized existence.
"You go into the darkness to meet
somebody, but after, he will disappear,"
the cinematographer observes.
The graininess of Kodak Vision3
500T 7219, used for nights and interiors, assisted in their goals. "It gives a
feeling of something underground,
something invisible," says Louvart. It
also had a timeless feeling, which in this
context augmented the sense of
Brooklyn's Gerritsen Beach being
trapped in time - stalled by Hurricane
Sandy, by its distance from the subway,
and by its isolation from work opportunities and evolving social attitudes.
Louvart operated an Arriflex 416
Plus mounted with Arri/Zeiss Ultra
Primes during the 25-day shoot. The
16mm, 20mm, 24mm, 28mm and
American Cinematographer

32mm primes were her workhorse
lenses. Using a mix of handheld and
tripod, she often kept the camera close
to Frankie, simultaneously revealing and
confining him in the 1.78:1 frame.
For night exteriors, Louvart and
Hittman had the unorthodox idea of
front-lighting with a single LED on a
stick, "like catching an animal in the
darkness," the director said during a
New Directors/New Films Q&A. One
key inspiration was Barbara Crane's
tightly cropped, front-lit Polaroids of
revelers on the Chicago lakefront. For
this work, the filmmakers employed
Litepanels Astra 1x1 Bi-Color LEDs
- making use of either a single unit, or
two or three units connected together
- for the beach footage.
Six small, gelled, battery-operated
Litepanels LEDs augmented the fireworks scenes. The gaffer and other
crewmembers followed close behind
Louvart, casting colored light on the
actors' faces in lockstep with the fireworks display. "We had to shoot very
quickly, without stopping the camera,"
says Louvart. "They lasted exactly 10
minutes, so we had 10 minutes to shoot
- no more - with a 122-meter roll of
Super 16mm. Of course, we could shoot
the next week, as the fireworks happen
each Friday evening during the summer,
but we tried to do everything at the
same moment. And we did it, because
everyone was on the same page."

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