Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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Conrad Hall was one of them, as well as Lucien Ballard, both men having photographed iconic “new westerns” in the 1960s. The other three were, even then, legendary cameramen: Hal Mohr (who was president of the camera local when I joined in 1969), Hal Rosson (who was noted for his luminous black-and-white imagery and his two-year marriage to Jean Harlow), and Arthur C. Miller (who won the first of his three cinematography Oscars for How Green Was My Valley in 1941, edging out the more flamboyant work of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane). Like many of his generation, Miller was a workhorse, photographing as many as a half dozen films a year, an IMDb total of 145 titles.
Zsigmond speaks of the role of the film schools at USC and UCLA. Certainly, many of my generation of cinematographers were film-school brats. My friend the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and I were at USC Cinema at the same time. But nearly twenty years before us, so was Conrad Hall. The difference between our film-school years and today is that USC and UCLA, along with NYU and a few other schools, were then the whole enchilada. Some universities offered a survey of film history, often tied to a “novels into film” course within the English Department, but few colleges offered cinema as a major. Even fewer had full-fledged film production facilities, such as equipment and stages. Today, there are hundreds of schools with richly endowed film and TV departments. “Cinema” has also become an academic discipline, fodder for legions of “critical studies” doctoral theses. Cozy tie-ins between many film schools and the studios have become common-place; USC Cinema is widely regarded as a recruiting arm of Hollywood. When I began searching for an entry-level job straight out of USC, I was advised, above all, not to speak of having attended film school. There was plenty of residual old guard resentment about these upstarts with their fancy foreign-film predilections.
Today, it is almost unimaginable that a director or cinematographer would not have attended film school. The films they make there are widely seen by studio executives and talent agents. Screenings of student films to the industry, as well as their presence in the film-festival circuit, assures broad-based visibility, if not ready distribution. Many of these student films are extremely well crafted, often employing professional actors, and are aimed squarely and unabashedly at landing studio development deals. Student thesis projects shot as feature-length films are not unusual.
This democratization of cinema is not only a product of the film schools but also of recent digital video technology, a sea change that the 1984 interviewees could not have anticipated. Small, affordable digital cameras (even with full high-definition—HD—resolution) are rapidly replacing the 35 mm film cameras that have been a century-old standard for image capture. A fellow cinematographer (a peer, recently retired) quipped that even film school is becoming optional. It does help to establish future working relationships, he insists, and it may be crucial as a venue to have your work seen by prospective employers. “But today,” he jokes, “anyone can call himself or herself a cinematographer. All you need is two thousand dollars to buy a Canon 5D and another fifteen dollars to print up ‘director of photography’ business cards.” Young film-school graduates who face incredible competition for even these entry-level positions may not concur. If a new edition of Masters of Light were written today, one seeking out the most cutting-edge image creators at the cusp of mainstream Hollywood careers, it would likely present a roster of background and experience very different from that in the present volume. I meet young cinematographers (and thankfully, an ever-increasing number of women among them) who are not members of a union and who exhibit little enthusiasm to join one. The union training regimen is simply not in their game plan. Just as the number of film-school graduates resembles a population bomb, the rate of technological change in equipment and new distribution platforms keeps accelerating. Last year’s must-have digital video camera becomes this year’s hand-me-down. Last year’s viral video becomes curiously quaint. Last year’s film-school wunderkind is this year’s has-been. It takes only one box-office dud to end a career before the dust even settles.
This reverse pyramid of technical and human obsolescence presents several conundrums. Just how much time can the young cinematographer expect to expend in glossing the intricacies of new cameras and of their interfaces with multiple postproduction platforms? If your idea of filmmaking is only equipment based, then you are likely to be a very happy duck. But if you are interested in how to use the equipment to create compelling images in the service of a dramatic narrative, you may be slogging uphill even as the studios race to the bottom. There is no question that the increasing sophistication of digital cameras and their quest to equal the resolution and dynamic range of film is succeeding. Most of the cinematographers profiled in Masters of Light did not enter into the digital realm. Haskell Wexler did, and early on. He recently has made a video documentary about the week-long May 2011 conference of international cinematographers hosted by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). I, too, am making the transition. Vilmos Zsigmond continues to work in film, as does Vittorio Storaro, who also continues teaching cinematography in L’Aquila, Italy, between movie assignments.
The conundrum of digital video filmmaking lies partly in the simultaneous complexity of the cameras themselves and the apparent ease of actually creating images. In his interview, Gordon Willis talks about the efficacy, even necessity, of testing motion-picture film when you are at a learning stage—or even when you are an experienced cinematographer using a new Kodak film emulsion. (Much space is devoted in the book to the characteristics of high-speed film emulsions and how they influence lighting styles.) Willis documents the exposure curve of film emulsions, and the characteristics of over- and underexposure in half-stop increments, then waiting to see the projected dailies a day later to evaluate the response. Learning the characteristics of emulsions is ground-level knowledge in the era of 35 mm film that is the focus of the book. But such knowledge may be all but irrelevant in digital video. A high-resolution reference monitor that very closely shows what the camera tapes, drives, or cards record can seem to be all that any young cinematographer needs to guide him or her in learning about lighting and exposure. What you see on the monitor is what you get. Even grizzled, film-based cinematographers who have embraced the world of digital cinema tell me that they no longer sleep fitfully after a challenging day of edgy lighting, or do not get up early to see dailies at the lab before the next day’s call time. It is tempting to surrender to what seems a foolproof technology.
I admit to not always looking at dailies when shooting on HD video. What surprises can there be? What latent anxiety lurks? Such ease of image creation can make one lazy: lazy, if you think of the era of film materials as the norm. But what is the norm before us in digital video? Film, 35 mm and 16 mm film, is rapidly disappearing, much to the chagrin of art-house screens, film societies, film archives, and indie and experimental filmmakers. One of the latter is Tacita Dean, who, in an expansive film installation at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, recently pleaded for the necessity of maintaining film as a viable creative medium—one inherently different from video.
That is a case that I also made in an article I wrote for the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times in February 2001. More than a decade ago, when I was finishing my first digital video feature, The Anniversary Party, it was clear that a confrontation between film and digital video was looming. My article was titled “Film or Digital? Don’t Fight. Coexist.” The directors Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh had decided with me to shoot on video with a Sony ENG camera at PAL resolution. At that time, the only HD camera readily available was the Sony 900, and getting it was beyond our budget means. Today, a decade later, many producers insist (wrongly) that 35 mm film is beyond their means. It is why I am shooting my third consecutive low-budget movie with the Arri Alexa. It is difficult to make a case for the primacy of film when conventional wisdom asserts that video is cheaper, ignoring, of course, the hugely expensive storage resources demanded by the captured zeros and ones when the camera is left running constantly between takes, a common indulgence by many of today’s directors.
The title of this book hints at the primacy of lighting for the cinematographer. And it is true that most cinematographers interviewed referenced lighting more than composition, editorial coverage, continuity, or camera movement. In the classical-era English system, the director of photography was called the lighting cameraman; the camera operator was called the operating cameraman. David Watkin and Geoffrey Unsworth are notable examples of the former. Despite the changing technology of lighting equipment, just as with the cameras themselves, certain verities remain. It is this focus on