American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 76

Filmmakers' Forum
Musician
Graham
Sharpe, one of
three subjects
in the
documentary
Shoulder the
Lion, suffers
from
debilitating
tinnitus. Codirectors Patryk
and Erinnisse
Rebisz strove to
find visual
representations
of each of their
subjects'
conditions.

Senses Work Overtime in Shoulder the Lion
By Patryk Rebisz

Shoulder the Lion is a documentary about the uncertainty of
the future, as seen through the sensory experiences of three individuals. A blind photographer questions the power of images in today's
visually saturated culture. A painter and former boxer searches for her
place in life after a traumatic brain injury scrambles her thought
processes. A musician, plagued by hearing loss, must give up
performing and discover a new purpose.
These three stories provide the narrative backbone, but the
film's subtext examines how we, as a society, depend on various
media to perceive and understand reality. I shot and co-directed the
documentary with my wife, Erinnisse Rebisz, who was also the film's
editor. As filmmakers grappling with such abstract ideas, we had to
ask ourselves, how do we avoid merely illustrating the narrative events
and instead infuse our images with meaning?
As we considered how to visualize the story of Alice Wingwall,
the blind photographer in our film, our research led us to the work of
South African scholar David Lewis-Williams, who speculated on the
origins of images. He proposed that thousands of years ago, in the
total darkness of the caves, primal man (or woman) entered a trance
state in which images started to materialize seemingly outside of the
person's mind, as artifacts that could be touched, traced in the
memory and left behind. This idea of darkness producing images
fascinated us and seemed to illustrate the story of Alice's photography. It also led us to research Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which the
blind see visions that the brain produces - from spots and grids to
76

August 2015

more detailed imagery - in order to make up for a lack of stimulus
from the optic nerve.
As these images exist only in the mind, there is nothing "real"
except darkness, so our interpretation of these concepts had to be
appropriately Spartan. Ultimately, we decided to attach a half-dome
piece of transparent plastic to the close-focus 20mm
Sigma photo lens and projected images straight onto the dome;
some of the images were traced from actual cave drawings, while
others were abstract sketches by Wassily Kandinsky, who explored
meaning behind line and point. The half dome became, in essence,
a part of the lens, so it was as if there was nothing but the camera,
which perceived these images inside its own "mind." (We shot the
film on the Canon EOS 7D, which was the most affordable camera
for our purposes when we started shooting three years ago. It records
1920x1080p to the highly compressed H.264 codec, which looks
surprisingly good.)
We still wanted to visualize how a blind person might "see,"
and for this, Alice offered an answer when she told us that, to her, a
word is worth 500 images. We started collecting groups of images
that could define certain words: window, door, column, etc. It was as
though we were in Plato's cave, but instead of looking for the real
world, we were searching for the shadows. We projected these
seemingly similar elements from Alice's photographs, filming them
through a rectangular matte we placed in front of the lens to obscure
anything other than the point of interest - the column, for example.
The fractional image then implied, quite literally, that this one piece
of information did not provide the full picture.
While filming, we also realized that Alice is the only one of our

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