American Cinematographer - May 1988 - 48

mately important

what

was

was

said.
didn't

We

back¬

use

ground music to emotionally

un¬
derline moments in the film. I have
to

come

consider music

device in
as

dishonest

a

documentary filmmaking

well. When music

occurs

film, it is there because it
of

in

was

our

part

film segment which we bor¬
rowed from somebody else. In
a

those few isolated instances
the sound and the

left

we

image together.

We felt that in that way, we were

maintaining the integrity of the
document, or of the pseudo-docu¬
For instance, we

ment.

left

un¬

touched the segment of a

The

Nobody Lis-

tened
work■

crew at

who asks the questions, who answers them, and what
they're talk-

about. Many people are
fascinated by others telling stories,

ing

and

some

films show that. The Sor¬

also

scene

rated

Pity is almost exclu¬
sively made up of such interviews talking heads - and is not boring
for a single minute of its three and a
half hours. It was that challenge
that

set for ourselves in the

we

making of Nobody Listened.
Another model for

Nobody
ethnological docu¬
mentary developed by French film¬
Listened

was

the

maker

Jean Rouch.

which I

greatly admire,

His films,

are direct
and devoid of artifice. For him,
sound and text

are

of paramount

serves as an

unadulte¬

example of the kind of infor¬

mation that Cubans have

access

to

today.
Our crew,

and the

row

dards,
it

by most stan¬
small, but for this film

was

was more

were

two

than

men

director of

adequate. There

at the

camera.

photography

was a

The

Cu¬

ban

emigre, Orson Ochoa, and the
operator was the young Peter Girolami. Phil Pearle
man.

At times

we

was

the sound

also counted

on

the

help of a few volunteer produc¬
tion assistants. They, along with Jor¬
ge and I, constituted the film crew.
Because of the nature of the project,
of

some

us

donated

our

salaries,

Much of the time
ors

shot in exteri¬

we

with natural

light, occasionally
white board to reflect and

using

a

fill in

some

shadows. When

we

in¬

terviewed the
Gutierrez

political leader Eloy
Menoyo or the black

farmer Esturmio Mesa Schuman in
interior

locations,

we actually used
daylight coming
through a window to the side - a
Vermeer technique more than 300
years old. As for the camera, in

the

Paris

natural

we

with

a

had the classic Eclair NPR
12-250

Angenieux

The other times
16 SR-II with

a

used

zoom.

an

ARRI

Zeiss 10-100

zoom

we

lens.
For the

16mm

blow-up from the
negative to the 35mm prints

for theatrical distribution

we

are

a new method
DuArt Laboratory in

using

developed by
New York. It
involves enlarging the original neg¬
ative directly onto 35mm without
an
internegative or C.R.I. The re¬
sults are outstanding because two
generations are eliminated. The re¬
sulting print has normal contrast
and extremely fine grain. But this is
a recommended
procedure only for
films that have a very limited distri¬
bution because it is a dangerous
technique - the original negative
can be
damaged and there is no
safeguard.
The last few years have
seen a new
problem arise for the
filmmaker. Documentaries are of¬
ten
assembled
from
eclectic
sources: film archives, found foot¬
age, and array of others. Today the
material that one finds may be in

any of a variety of formats: 35mm,
16mm, 1", VP, V2", even 8mm video,

importance, almost more so than
the images themselves. The idea of

and the shoot

with enthusiasm and commitment

some

adopting a style such as this may
seem paradoxical coming from a
cinematographer. Visuals should
not be neglected, yet I am con¬

for the film.

system, and others in the American

In

was

pleasantly filled

Paris, I used Fuji film

negative A-8521. In the United
States we used mostly Kodak nega¬

vinced that the difference between

tive stock 7292 which

we

rated at

the old and the

ASA 250 instead of the

recom¬

documentary
lies precisely in the importance giv¬
en

to sound. So

shooting,

we

new

before

we

started

told the sound

and the director of

man

photography
that sound would have priority. If
necessary, composition would be
sacrificed to obtain good micro¬
phone placement. What was ulti¬

46

Cuban TV
program in which Castro is being
greeted with flowers and waving
handkerchiefs by the young pi¬
oneers during the Third Congress
of the Communist Party. The seg¬
ment is underscored by heroic mu¬
sic that together with the images
helps to portray Castro as some
kind of mythical figure. The short

shooting. More often than not we
only plugged in one of the lights.

American

Cinematographer

mended 400. In

doing we could
grain for the subse¬
quent blowup to 35mm. In the way
of lighting equipment, we only
obtain

a

so

finer

in the 650 line

European PAL

NTSC with 450 lines.

Bringing foot¬
from all those formats into one's
own can be
complicated and expen¬
sive. In years gone by it was much
easier. One only had to go to film
archives to obtain impeccable ex¬
cerpts of newsreels usually shot in
non-fading black and white 35mm.
age

That

light plus two IK Quartz. We
plugged them directly into the out¬

footage would be transferred
an internegative from the
original, and that would be all. In
Nobody Listened, we used older,

lets of the houses in which

35mm black and white shots of Sta-

used

one

May 1988

foldable 2K soft Lowel

we were

using
American Cinematographer - May 1988

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