American Cinematographer - May 1992 - 54
Jaromi
byPhots
The Paranoid World of Kafka
by Ron Magid
Cinematographer Walt Lloyd sits
at
a
sidewalk cafe in Santa Monica,
pointing enthusiastically to images
in
a
book devoted to
Josef Sudek's
exquisite black & white photo¬
graphs of Prague. After spending
several months in the Czechoslo¬
vakian capital photographing
Kafka, director Steven Soderbergh's
long-awaited followup to sex, lies
and videotape, Lloyd is still excited
over the city's scenic nuances. "I
really wanted to capture the same
incredibly subtle tonal variations,"
says Lloyd. "These photographs
the German Expressionist films of
the Twenties. Not so, says Lloyd: "I
was much more influenced
by still
photographs than by earlier films.
In addition to Sudek, I was inspired
by the Russian photographer, art¬
ist and poster-maker Alexander
Rodchenko, who also lived in the
early part of the century.
Rodchenko was a lot more of a high
contrast-type character than Sudek.
He went in for acute angles, angu¬
lar shapes and sharp shadows, and
are
from the Twenties, and there
haven't been a lot of architectural
he liked to shoot
changes. I guess Sudek was a
starting point. He was incredibly
I did look at
relevant because he lived most of
his life in Prague and photo¬
52
audiences have assumed that the
visual tone of Kafka was inspired by
through fore¬
ground objects like grates and trees.
a number of black &
white films, but I did not see The
Third Man again, as a matter of
graphed it extensively."
Ironically, most critics and
point. The oldest film I watched
was Jean Cocteau's
Beauty and the
Beast. I was pointedly trying not to
American
May 1992
Cinematographer
copy any particular style or film for
Kafka, and I think I was relatively
successful at that, even though I
realized that a reference to German
Expressionism
or any
other high
style
contrast older black & white
was
inevitable."
Lloyd was more
successful in the eyes of the
than
Inde¬
pendent Feature Project/West,
which presented him with this
year's Spirit Award for Best Cin¬
ematography. (See related story in
What's New.)
Despite its title, Kafka is not
biography; taking its thematic
cues from the
claustrophobic,
a
Produced
and
Directed
Director of
by Stuart Cornfeld
Harry Benn
by Steven Soderbergh
photography, Walt Lloyd
American Cinematographer - May 1992
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