written by Mark London William, British Cinematographer
Inspired by a celebration of rising talent at the Emerging Cinematographer Awards, Mark London Williams runs through classics like Jaws and buzzy new fare like Bugonia to explore how, in the words of ECA co-chair Eduardo Fierro SVC, cinematographers are the “hunter-gatherers” of light, “bringing stories back to caves”.
While there are always horrors aplenty to contemplate in the world, regardless of season, the October Country – to use Ray Bradbury’s phrase – seems to be the time we do so deliberately. A practice that crosses the calendar page into November’s chills.
But as with so many lines these days, those dividing “genres” have long since blurred – where does “horror” leave off, for example, and “thriller” begin? (Or “horror” vs. a night watching the news, for that matter?) One of the first blockbusters to do such genre blending – and at the same time, vastly elevate the “beach read” as source material – was, of course, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, now celebrating its 50th anniversary (certain columnists for this very publication can still remember the specific matinee where and when they first saw it).
The summer tentpole-launching classic not only managed to pull in even more box office during a 50th anniversary re-release but also warranted its very own retrospective at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, debuting last month and running straight through next year’s beach read season.
Jenny He, senior exhibitions curator at the museum, told us, “Jaws established a signature approach to cinematic suspense, a canonical entry in the lineage from Alfred Hitchcock to Jordan Peele. The film’s enduring resonance is a result of Steven Spielberg’s storytelling precision […] brought to life through innovative techniques by key collaborators including director of photography Bill Butler ASC. The narrative themes of Jaws – at times a nuanced character study and a thrilling nautical adventure – are reflected in the exhibition, which unfolds the film scene by scene.”
And also, one might say, craft by craft, as a scoring orchestra greeted us the morning of the media preview, to play selections from “Johnny” Williams’ iconic score (as a certain Mr. Spielberg himself would refer to him, during later opening remarks).
Upon entering the gallery, an exhibit detailing Butler’s iconic camera work – his operator was none other than the great Micheal Chapman ASC – is one of the first displays you see, replete with docents standing next to Roy Scheider-on-the-beach-style folding chairs, helping attendees put their phones in a rig to create their own “Dolly Zoom”, a shot that even had its own signage on the museum wall, explaining it was created by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, and done by second unit cameraman Irmin Roberts. A translation below revealed that this now-iconic “disorienting effect” is correctly called, in Spanish, an Efecto Vértigo.
One of the sobering ironies of Jaws, however, is that as terrific as the film still is, all these decades later – Robert Shaw’s “U.S.S. Indianapolis” monologue, Murray Hamilton’s array of mayoral sport coats, all those shots where the horizon line and the water line merge, further disorienting viewers, Verna Fields’ relentlessly precise editing, et al – it’s become pretty clear that sharks actually have more to fear from human beings than the other way around.
Looking up
Still, if you’re in LA, or find yourself here over the next several months – it is award season, after all – consider dipping a toe or two into the exhibit’s waters.
And while Jaws did span a slew of “animals gone berserk!” B-movie copies, the hordes of bees that inform the plot of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia are not among them. Indeed, the bees, and the film’s other non-humans, are generally saner, and more in tune with things than the presumed sapiens.
Which is one of the contentions of Teddy, the film’s plot-driving, warehouse-working conspiracy theorist and beekeeper, played by Jesse Plemons with an intensity that balances both mania and reserve, in one of the year’s Oscar-buzzy performances. To prove his numerous points, or at least his most critical one, that our miseries are deliberately inflicted on us, yet not of this world, Teddy kidnaps Emma Stone’s Michelle Fuller, a relentlessly driven health industry CEO, adept at unctuous corporate-speak, whether in public or private settings.
Or in a kidnapper’s basement.
Stone, of course, has become a regular for writer/director Lanthimos, as has cinematographer Robbie Ryan BSC ISC, with Ryan nabbing Oscar, ASC and BAFTA nods for The Favourite and Poor Things.
We caught up with him one morning from his hotel room in Canada, where he was getting ready to shoot a commercial, calling such between-features work “life savers, to be honest with you”.
And with Lanthimos, there will be a little more “between” than usual, as the director comes off a busy stretch of back-to-back features. Bugnoia is an adaptation of 2003’s Save the Green Planet!, from South Korea, but updated with more urgency, and perhaps even sadness, given all the environmental unravelling that’s taken place in the generation since.
Set now in the US south, another of the film’s remarkable collaborations was with production designer James Price (who also worked on Poor Things).
“I can’t praise James highly enough,” says Ryan. “We actually shot most of the place in London – in Henley-on-Thames,” where Plemons’ house, doubling for one on the outskirts of Atlanta, is located. Price built the interiors “with the basement attached”, the room where most of the interrogation of Stone’s steely executive takes place.
Lanthimos, Ryan says, also prefers a set that’s “true to character”, which meant practical – and narrow – staircases, cramped space, and “keep(ing) the lighting in tune with what the house had in hand […] We had to work within its limits. I don’t like to knock a wall down… [so] if you can get an exposure, you shoot it.”
Big cameras in small rooms
But despite a shared proclivity toward more natural, source lighting – some Astera Titans and Creamsources notwithstanding – as Ryan says he now works “more that way as well”, a larger consideration, perhaps literally, was how to move the cameras around in such a nearly-real space.
And not just any cameras. As with other recent prestige and award-season releases, Bugonia was shot in VistaVision, the rediscovered format du jour that Ryan describes as “tough but rewarding”.
Part of that toughness comes from the outsized cameras, made that way because of how the film runs through them, allowing for more “portraiture” within the frame. And those cameras – a Wilcam W11 and a Beaumont VistaVision – are also “very noisy”.
On top of which, Lanthimos’ preferred directorial style is that “if people are moving, the camera is moving”. Though things inside the camera are moving too, because with this format “it transports the film twice as fast”.
Since “you don’t want to spend that time reloading”, they had Kodak “cut us 2000 foot rolls. We shot it as if it was a normal camera.”
Given that “most of the film is set in the basement”, that also meant “a very small crew on the shoot”, or at least on the set, as there was also “a massive crew outside waiting to get in”.
Ryan is quick to praise those crewmates as well, including the grips, gaffer Jonny Franklin (who helped hang some of those aforementioned Creamsource Vortexes for a “soft moon” effect, since lunar phases are also critical to the plot), “good Steadicam guy” Matt Fisher, helping to augment the operating that Ryan already does, as well as Dan Sasaki at Panavision, who helped with the “bespoke” G-series lenses. Though Ryan avers that maintaining the glass was actually “more of a challenge than getting it”.
They also used diopters (something mentioned in that Jaws exhibit too) on a zoom, to help capture the bees on flower petals, and in the hives maintained by Teddy.
“We had to all dress up head to toe in full bee suits,” Ryan says. “It was a working hive,” and they were placed into what he describes as their “bee seats” to get the shots. Or what shots came their way. “Obviously bees aren’t going to do what you’re going to do,” or what you want them to.
“It was,” he says, “a surreal couple of days.” Which would comport perfectly with the feeling the movie successfully conveys.
In addition to being apiarists, though, cinematographers are also “visual psychologists”. At least according to Johanna Coelho, the DP behind HBO’s Emmy-winning medical drama, The Pitt. Her remarks came at ICG Local 600’s annual Emerging Cinematographer Awards, one of the true harbingers that fall has arrived. She was there to receive the Distinguished Filmmaker Award, and of The Pitt, with its kinetic camera, its crew dressed in medical scrubs lest an elbow or backside is glimpsed in one of those restless takes, she said she’d never filmed anything like it before, or used the techniques brought to the show. She also called cinematography “a sacred craft”, and that was certainly on display in the rich visuals of the evening’s winning films.
And while “emerging” gives a sense of having just graduated from film school, in fact a lot of the awarded cinematographers have been out and already working – in docs, indie features, industrials, news gathering – and are looking for exactly the kind of exposure that the ECA provides to help them more fully emerge to those next stages in their careers.
Indie spotlight
Earlier that same evening, ECA co-chair Eduardo Fierro SVC likened cinematographers to “hunter-gatherers” of light, “bringing stories back to caves”.
And certainly, illuminating the darkness has become a more critical task than it ever has before, in most of our lives.
A couple of smaller indie projects striving to do that, The Knife and Happyend, can be found on the edge-of-the-current-radar screen in this already busy time of the year, with blink-and-you-miss-it theatrical runs (though Happyend is touring screens for a few more weeks, while The Knife has moved on into the streams).
We first saw The Knife at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, earlier this year. An inaugural feature from accomplished NFL running back-turned-accomplished actor Nnamdi Asomugha, who directs, co-writes with co-producer Mark Duplass, and stars in the film, it follows one fraying, nerve-wracked night in the house of a black family living in a provisionally bucolic neighborhood, where an intruder suffers a mishap, involving a knife.
And as the eventually-arriving police seek to find out the truth – or perhaps to fit whatever truth is available into an existing template – the evening becomes more fraying, still.
The Knife was shot by cinematographer Alejandro Mejía AMC, who came on board “after reading the script sent by my agent, Craig Mizrahi, and meeting with Nnamdi, an exceptional artist and powerful director. We immediately connected, and I was particularly drawn to the story unfolding over a single night in one location[…] Our collaboration was built on trust and a shared appreciation for cinema and literature, which we discussed extensively during pre-production. Nnamdi proved to be an excellent team player and was committed to shooting on 35mm film.”
Early access to the location allowed them to “even pre-visualise nearly the entire film on our phones to refine its visual narrative”, in turn influenced by other visual narratives, unexpected and otherwise, including Nuri Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Michael Haneke’s Amour, “and Gordon Parks’ still photography from his book The Atmosphere of Crime […] additionally, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s films Amores Perros and Babel with the cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto ASC AMC were major influences on the camera language we developed for our project.”
That “language” included a visual transition, initially observing the main character Chris’s life, then shifting “to a subjective point of view as the intruder entered the house”, while the decision to shoot on film provided “an organic, emotional look that deeply connects with the audience, making them feel as if they are inside experiencing the tension, and almost feeling claustrophobic.”
The claustrophobia was caught by “an Arricam LT 3-perf camera, paired with Vantage One T1 lenses from Hawk, all supplied by Camtec in Los Angeles. We shot on 500T film, consuming approximately 400 rolls of 400ft. This marks my first feature film shot on film, though I have prior experience with 35mm on short-form projects.”
The Arricam was paired with “Hawk lenses for their aesthetic and mechanical performance. Their consistent weight and exceptional close-focus capability were tools I utilised frequently throughout the film.”
He describes the film as “an invaluable experience that provided many lessons, some of which I applied to [upcoming crime thriller] The Deputy. While both are distinct projects, they share a common narrative of unfolding over a single night. Additionally, I had the pleasure of collaborating with my trusted team: first AC Stephane Renard and gaffer Hitoshi Tomonori on both films.”
Collaborating was also key for cinematographer Bill Kirstein, he shot the recently reworked Mean Girls before the just-now released Happyend, though the latter was being prepped first. The latter is a collaboration with director Neo Sora, with whom he’s been “working together for many years now. In 2016 they reached out to me,” with an early draft of what would become Happyend, and realising they “shared a lot of the same references” – which included “a lot of the greats of East Asian cinema”, along with the “blocking and staging of Ernst Lubitsch” – kept in touch through script revisions on a film that seems even more prescient upon its release.
Set in a near-future Japan, the story follows a group of students in their last year of high school, though recalls a grittier coming-of-age tale like Cooley High, more than something like American Graffiti, with a whiff of dystopian future thrown in, as an authoritarian-tilted government seizes on a series of potential natural disasters, like earthquakes, to increase the surveillance of its populace.
Including its young folk who are already feeling “filed, stamped, indexed and numbered” in the words of the ‘60s-era TV show The Prisoner.
The more those students push back, though, the likelier they are to find their ID numbers – and faces – displayed on the large screens that adorn their school, with their “social credits” rapidly diminishing, in turn denoting a narrowing of future choices.
And yet, Happyend never loses its sense of humour, wistful as it may be.
Kirstein says the use of rehoused Minolta Rokkors, hitched to a Sony Venice 2, helped create a “memory of the future” for the visuals, shooting with at 3200 ISO, contrasted with an 800 ISO “for all the surveillance”, which also used contemporary Sony lenses, for a starker look.
But creeping totalitarianism aside, the story’s emotional underpinnings are taken “primarily from Neo’s personal life experience, growing up with a tight friend group – and why they drifted apart”.
The camera charting that drift was always “motivated by character movement”, with Kirstein using “deep depth of field – so characters could move through space”, while he also remained “conscious of almost never showing sky [for] the world the characters exist in”, emphasising how they are also hemmed in. Though the artificiality also underscores “this feeling that you’re being told a tale […] as if the main characters are remembering this story from the future”.
You don’t only have to be a DP to be a hunter-gatherer of light then, or at least stories.
The question always, though, is which ones we keep telling ourselves.
