American Cinematographer - September 2012 - 49

A visual motif of Samsara is a shot in which the subject stares into the camera lens, unspeaking and often unblinking, for so long that the viewer may begin to question who is watching whom. “All of the portraits are stylized after the great still photographers that I love, like Yousuf Karsh, Irving Penn, Mary Ellen Mark and Annie Leibovitz,” says Fricke. “Something is revealed in their portraiture, and when a person stares into the camera, if you’re lucky, you can get the essence of who that person is.”

“We wanted to capture the essence of the people and places we were photographing, and a 65mm camera is the best tool to do that.”

A close-up detail of the instrument the monks use to craft their sand paintings.

The film opens with a striking close-up of a young Balinese girl costumed and painted with the makeup of a traditional Tari Legong dancer. Fricke, who prefers to shoot with natural light in the subject’s natural environment whenever possible, photographed her hypnotic dance in a school courtyard in the small Balinese town of Ubud. “That was mostly natural light, with a little bit of grip to bounce here and there, but [the approach was] very minimalistic,” says 1st AC J.C.

Earle, who also served as gaffer and grip when the situation called for it, as well as associate producer and assistant editor. “Ron and I placed the dancers under an eave so they received a soft, natural front light from the clouds. Of course, the challenge with natural light is that it changes, so if you watch that scene closely, the contrast ratio moves around.” Although Fricke favors the modified Schneider 140-280mm zoom for portraiture, its slow f5.6 aperture prevented him from using it on this particular scene, which was photographed on a cloudy day with the 250D stock. Instead, he relied upon the workhorse Panavision 65mm prime lens package, comprising 50mm, 75mm, 100mm and 150mm lenses. Earle notes, “You can spot the Schneider lens in the film because the zoom gives you the feeling of movement, like the portrait of the Himba woman in Namibia — when it pushes in, that’s the Schneider. For it to be sharp, you want a stop of at least f8, and ideally an f11, so we were only able to use
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that lens for really bright exteriors.” Pulling focus while wide open and at close focus on the 65mmformat lenses was a good challenge for Earle. “On the longer focal lengths, the depth of field can be as small as a couple of millimeters,” he says. One of Fricke’s favorite portraits — a shot of Marcos Luna, an ex-gang member living in Los Angeles — also became one of Samsara’s most revelatory moments. “We went to his apartment thinking it was going to be another ‘stare into the lens’ kind of setup,” says Fricke. “We put the Panavision camera [with a 50mm lens] on the mo-co dolly, with the jib arm and the pan-and-tilt head. The idea was to move over the top of his head and move down his face to find his eyes, but when his wife placed this beautiful baby girl in his arms, he began rocking back and forth, kissing and cuddling the baby. The ‘Tattoo Man’ became ‘Tattoo Daddy,’ which transformed the portrait into something really wonderful.” A 12'x12' silk was rigged overhead to soften the light falling on
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American Cinematographer - September 2012

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