American Cinematographer - February 1990 - 54

substance to last, in German scien¬
tific calculations, more than three
months. That's assuming you
avoided the disease factor, or sim¬

ply being worked to death," he
states.

"The viewer in Triumph is
thrust into this experience - sur¬
vival at any cost - with the central
characters. There is no moral lec¬

turing. It's very easy to say what
people should and shouldn't do
from the safety of a normal life..."
Clark and director Robert
M.

Young developed a specific
cinematographic approach to
communicate this psychological
experience. "We tried to compose
all the shots with two purposes in
mind," Clark relates. "One was to

keep the psychological reality alive
and intense and electric. At the
same

time,

we

wanted to convey

Auschwitz. Clark's
were the first fea¬

enough of the workings and pro¬
cedures of the camp that you al¬
ways feel situated very concretely
in what's going on. So it's a tricky

ture motion

balance in terms of shot structure.

Above: Internees

arriving at

cameras

picture

allowed to

Any kind of conventional masters,
two shots, and singles, didn't re¬
ally apply, and we really tried to
stay away from that.

roll inside the gates
of the infamous

death camp. Right:
The new Aaton
35mm handheld
camera

ture the

"That tends to be the

shooting style we use in all our
films; it's just that this film, because
of the subject matter, was an excep¬
tional opportunity to enter into this
type of structure. Because it was

helped cap¬
desperate

confusion of the

railway sidings.

also

a far less conventional
story,
that many people feel is one of
the most difficult things to portray,
we felt that an unconventional
one

approach was necessary.
cupation was at its most intense,
when I was thinking, 'Oh no, I've
got a problem with the 10K in that
cherry picker, because the bulb's
just gone, the color temperature is
dropping, we've got a voltage
thing to think about, did I send a
correction filter up with him? I
don't have time to get him down.
.

.

et cetera

-

whatever these

things are, the ultimate and unfor¬
gettable fact, even in the most tech¬
nically obsessed moments, is that
countless people came through
that tunnel of death. It's just not,

that

"It's

a

psychological real¬

ity that we're dealing with, what
survival means in that situation.
The routines we take for granted in

impression of a POV experience
without literally doing a 'point of
view' shot. In other

words,

we

would

choreograph particular
events and experiences and com¬
pose the shot in such a way as to
project a sense of the periphery
around the subject - the things
that they were either interacting
with or trying to avoid interacting

our

with.

doms and liberties that provide us
with a personal dignity, are all
eliminated. It was a process of

"Let's say a character is
trying to find a moment of pri¬
vacy," he explains. "Of course,
privacy is impossible. It's not as if

purpose.

Its purpose is to help
provide the viewer with an empa-

complete dehumanization. You
cease to exist as a
person with an
identity. On top of that you were

you can go somewhere and be
alone. The shot would have a
frame size which allows a sense of

thetic

not

and could never be, a normal set.
"Of course it's pretty hor¬

rifying, what happened there, but
the film is not a display of grotesquery and horror. That's not its

52

actually went through. So
you're not standing back and
looking at all the horror, counting
the atrocities. It doesn't pull its
punches when it comes to that, but
you're seeing it from inside the
family's experience. This empathetic approach determined the
stylistic way the camera was used,
the way we shot it.
acters

"When you say 'point of
view' too frequently, it's shorthand
for literally a 'point of view' in
cutting terms, as a shot or a se¬
quence of shots. We tried to design
the shots so that we would give the

experience of what the char¬

American

Cinematographer

daily lives, not the big free¬
doms, but the small personal free¬

given sufficient nutritional

February 1990

closeness

or

intimacy, but still
American Cinematographer - February 1990

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