Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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relevance. Lighting units may appear and disappear from year to year, but the creative wrestling of these mechanical lumen beasts, the shaping and molding of their output in the service of compelling, emotive image making, is timeless and constant. When Gordon Willis speaks about his trials with the Hollywood old guard when he employed uncompromising top light and below-standard Kelvin temperatures in The Godfather, he is arguing for an aesthetic and a style that is grounded in character and drama, just as his looming shadows in All the President’s Men were not a technical conceit but were rooted in the mystery of the Deep Throat plotline. The same is true of Conrad Hall when he talks in his interview about his attraction to “despair” as a driving metaphor in Fat City, even, I would add, in much of his seminal work. Hall was attracted to the dark side of human behavior, to the Outsider figure. I wrote about this in a posthumous tribute article in the May 2003 issue of American Cinematographer magazine devoted to him. The biting overexposed key and rim light in many of the close-ups in Hall’s films dramatizes the character’s alienation and despair, just as much as the top-lit, dead, lost eyes in Willis’s Godfather portraits.
Much is made today about how digital video requires so little light. It is true that the sensors of the Alexa and the Sony F65 have an exposure index of 800—but that is only slightly faster than that of existing Kodak and Fuji film stocks. There is no situation that I have yet encountered shooting with digital video, that I could not also have done on film. (John Alonzo used to brag about how he force processed new film negatives to an EI of 1600, a full stop above today’s video sensors.) The falloff into darkness or the burnout into pure white overexposure may be different in film and video, a product of what overexposure, especially, does to the two different recording materials. Depending on your perspective or on a given situation, you may prefer one medium to the other. But the aesthetic consequences of exposure decisions based on lighting are inherent in the choices that any cinematographer makes. It is this balancing act that lies at the heart of much that is discussed in Masters of Light, issues irrespective of any existing or evolving technology, issues faced by Storaro as well as by earlier artists such as George Barnes, Karl Stress, Gregg Toland, and George Folsey. This lies at the heart of the book and makes it still compelling reading, not only for cinematographers but also for anyone interested in the creation of movie images.
There is much discussion of how new technology in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s influenced the look of motion pictures. Zsigmond talks about “flashing” the negative to cut contrast or to introduce a base fog level into a film such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller. That aesthetic rationale is still fascinating, even if Zsigmond can accomplish much the same effect today on the DaVinci Resolve in the digital intermediate suite—and with none of the potential pitfalls that handling film negatives in pre- or postexposure devices entails. Gordon Willis, again, talks about the homemade rig for top lighting actors, a wood, paper, and rope device that could be rigged on a practical location’s ceiling—a rig known disparagingly among the conservative Hollywood cinematographers as a “coffin box.”
I was camera operator on a TV series at the old Hollywood/Burbank studios when Willis was photographing All the President’s Men. A traditional way of lighting a large set, such as the offices of the Washington Post, would be to construct the ceiling with removable bleached muslin, wood-framed sections, lighting the exposed, open sections from the “green beds” framing the set perimeter. Willis chose, with production designer George Jenkins, to construct a hard-ceilinged set with real fluorescent fixtures. Fluorescents were anathema to Hollywood cinematographers of the time. Not only did the implanted ballasts hum and buzz to an ungodly level but also the uneven chromatic spectrum played havoc with human skin tone. Willis had the ballasts removed and placed outside the stage. I remember walking by several times on the way to the commissary, seeing and hearing the stacked ranks of ballasts around the stage perimeter. Favorite gossip among conservative on-lot TV cameramen was to jeer at this impostor from New York City to whom they had recently denied an Oscar nomination for The Godfather. One day, I was allowed access to the tightly secured stage; I stood in wonder at the seemingly infinite set that was cached onto the stage, barely allowing space for the required fire lane. It was only a decade later that fluorescent technology with isolated ballasts and color correct tubes became available. Once again, technology rose to the service of creative vision. Frieder Hochheim was the gaffer on the 1987 film of Charles Bukowski’s novel Barfly, photographed by the ever-innovative Robby Müller. The practical location of the bar was so constricted that there was nowhere to hide normal studio lighting units. Today’s ubiquitous KinoFlo line of fluorescents was born for this film; Hochheim has become one of the industry’s leading innovators of lighting equipment. The newest incarnation of adapting industrial lighting technology to movies is LEDs, at first as block like “bricks,” but now as the lumen source for traditional Fresnel lensed lamps. So, technology is always in rapid cycles of creation and obsolescence. What remains is the creative vision and insight into problem solving that is the true mainstay of the working cinematographer. It is this spirit that lies at the heart of the interviews in Masters of Light.
The most important thing that you can glean from these interviews is an understanding of how the inherent planning and discipline required of the cinematographer in the film/photochemical era helped shape the way he approached his work. The constant exploring, evaluating, and adjusting that was demanded by the workflow of celluloid spilled over into a broader consideration of the dynamics of camera and lighting style. The ritual of “dailies” projected on a large screen was a kind of laboratory for director, cinematographer, editor, and production designer to critique the evolving dynamics of the movie in a collaborative way. A kind of previsualization was necessary for the next day’s preparation, based on the previous evening’s “dailies.” This technique fostered a macro view of the cinematographer’s role as visual storyteller, engaged in translating character and story into supportive and emotive images. This discipline may still be exercised in the digital era, but it is no longer so universal. The creation of each image in digital video can be more improvised: the screen of the reference monitor becomes a kind of canvas on which the cinematographer paints—seeing the immediate result of each “brushstroke.” This can be exciting in a way. Imagine Jackson Pollock “in the flow” of one of his drip paintings. But this immersive approach to cinematography can also be limiting; the “action” itself may become the motivating force. It is tempting to sidestep the more rigorous task of executing a layered preparation—mere play trumping a carefully wrought plan.
Of the fifteen cinematographers interviewed in the book, none is a woman. It is a situation that would be unlikely in any compilation today, as women are rapidly achieving prominence in the field. Of those interviewed in Masters of Light, five are deceased: Nestor Almendros, John Alonzo, Bill Fraker, Conrad Hall, and Laszlo Kovacs. Mario Tosi, the same age I am, has been inactive since the early 1980s. Owen Roizman, retired since the mid-1990s, is a past president of the ASC and is very active in the organization. Like me, he photographed three features for the director Larry Kasdan. Roizman had a recent exhibition at AMPAS of his portraits of cinematographers. Bill Butler is now ninety-plus. His most recent credit is from 2009. Billy Williams retired a decade ago and now teaches. Michael Chapman is a recent recipient of the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award; he was Gordon Willis’s operator in the early 1970s. His last credit as cinematographer was about five years ago. Vittorio Storaro, who was one of my great mentors, along with Nestor Almendros and Willy Kurant, has recently done a number of films about painters (a further distillation of his ongoing theme of bio films). He and the director Carlos Saura are planning a film about Pablo Picasso and the creation of the large painting Guernica, his memorial to the Spanish town bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. Gordon Willis, also retired, lives outside Manhattan, as revered by the current generation of cinematographers as he was at the time of his interview. He and the late Bruce Surtees share the moniker “Prince of Darkness.” Haskell Wexler continues to produce a stream of activist documentaries and is also a vital member of the ASC. Vilmos Zsigmond has moved from the Hollywood Hills to Northern California; he continues to work unabatedly. In the past decade, he has made three films with Woody Allen, and another with his longtime collaborator Brian de Palma. He recently filmed a thriller in Canada and has also worked in his country of origin, Hungary. Last, my own update. I have always been somewhat chagrined that I was included in the esteemed group selected by Schaefer and Salvato. I was the new kid on the block, somehow slipping onto the team. Yet, I am the one