American Cinematographer - August 1990 - 47

came

Material for the film
from many different

sources,

Frames from the
train montage.

including the BBC, Brit¬

ish Movietone News, Petrified

Films, the National Archives,
and Hollywood Film Registry.
"A lot of these private collections

actually more interesting
than the better known ones,"
reveals Engle. "It's funny, the
more modern the
place, proba¬
are

bly the less likely you are to find
gold. If you want to mine gold,
you go where nobody else has
been before. If everything is
convenient and computerized, it
probably means that people have
been there, and you've seen
those shots before. What you

really need to do is to have the
time and the patience to sort
through all those rusty old cans."
The audience, thrilled

by these otherwise lost images, is
the beneficiary of the painstaking
work of the archival searchers.
"As the body of film images

grows,

the

comes more

sense of history be¬
defined. The horrors

of war, the thrill of early flight -
film gives us at least a taste of the

past, a luxury which until only

recently was just a dream. But
according to Engle, sometimes
it's difficult to keep these noble
thoughts in mind in a dank,
smelly, film vault," says Engle.
"I like the search for

images in the sense that I love the
detective work involved. I love
to find material for all the philo¬

sophic reasons - materials that
people haven't seen, and is beau¬
tiful and fresh - but it's a chore.
I'm a live-action director and

filmmaker, not

a

stock footage

guy. I have worked over the
years on many compilation
films, and many films involving
archival material, and so I know
that whole area of filmmaking
very
cans

well. But

you know, rusty
and cold vaults can get a

little tiresome," he laughs.
One of Engle's stated

goals for any film he works on is
to gather "a rich collection of
images." These extend even to
his somewhat unusual technique
for photographing headlines,

photos

lines, the music, and the narration

or articles.
"All my two

dimensional
objects are shot 'off the wall,"' he
says. "That is to say, they are all
shot on film, they are physically
lit, and they are shot off an easel,
a table, or some other
way. They
are

not shot

on an

animation

stand, and they are not shot with
nice even lighting. We try to
achieve a very stylized look, often
with vignetting. Or we play with
the angle and the focus - we light
and shoot two dimensional ob¬

as if they were three dimen¬
sional. Suddenly, it's a more excit¬

jects

ing image than one might tend to
find. It's just a small detail that
will integrate with the whole."
That careful attention to
detail pays off particularly well in
a train
montage sequence, which

depicts

a

Benny Carter

cross

country tour. "I'm very proud of
the way that sequence flows,"
says Engle. "The train, the head¬

August 1990

all the elements are carefully
orchestrated. We worked very
hard on it in the cutting room

-

building the visual effects and
getting it all to flow with an inter¬
nal rhythm that complemented
Benny's music. In as many places
as

I

out

could, I tried to do that with¬

getting tricky

or gimmicky."
footage for Sym¬
phony in Riffs was filmed in New
Hampshire, New York, Washing¬
ton DC, Los Angeles, and aboard
the SS Norway in the Caribbean.
"The performance mate¬
New

rial

was

shot with two

cameras

only, usually two Aatons, and
time code Nagra stereo track. Phil
Hurn and Jeri Sopanen were the
principal cameramen." relates
Engle. "Shooting performance
with two cameras is very diffi¬
cult. If I have any regret, it's that
I didn't have the budget to put in
another

American

camera.

When

Cinematographer

you're

a

45
American Cinematographer - August 1990

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