Hard, Fast and Beautiful (Ida Lupino, 1951; photographed by Archie Stout)

The terrifying first four shots from the climactic tennis match in Lupino's Hard, Fast and Beautiful. For much of the actual scene, the players are in close-up, but at the beginning, they're ant-sized. Low-angles, high-angles -- everything looms over the players. The shadowy journalists sitting courtside are framed to look like giants, and the announcer is isolated atop a stark celestial pedestal -- St. Peter as imagined by Albert Speer by way of Edwin B. Willis.

Spinotti's Workshop

The Gardener (Dante Spinotti, 2009)

A little treat for those who (like me) think Dante Spinotti's a pretty smart guy. Like a magician performing his most famous trick, Spinotti shot this little dialogue-less short in front of a crowd of Polish film students late last year. He was in Łódź to receive a lifetime achievement award at the cinematography-focused Plus Camerimage festival (which is now apparently moving out due to conflicts with the city), and took time during his visit to do a little workshop, taking a break before every shot of The Gardener to explain his motivations. The film was finished in time to screen at the closing ceremony.

The Map

A map is not the same thing as the place it represents. The globe is not the Earth. The map is a way of systemizing an indescribable whole. When I look at Chicago on a map, I’m not looking directly at the city where I live, but I’m looking at a reference, a sort of text that uses measurements to give me a rough idea of where this city is in relation to other cities. The dot is a variable that stands for the city; if I get a magnifying glass, I won’t be able to discern any more than what I see right now.

Raoul Coutard’s Hoa Binh opens with a map. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here—let’s talk about Coutard for a minute. Why, for example, is he the greatest cinematographer? Answer: because, in making his moving pictures, he’s aware that he isn’t capturing the image of something, but an image of it. Free of having to define, he instead describes. A photograph of a thing, like a map, is not the thing itself. So Coutard has a certain freedom: he can use the wrong film stock, shoot under the wrong lighting conditions, use the lenses you’re not supposed to be using because he knows that the people who follow all of these rules make images just as subjective as his. Let other cameramen worry about science and mathematics: he can be a dramatist, a journalist or a poet. Coutard always points out that he has no style, and that the camerawork is different for every director he worked with. This is partly true; Coutard’s style is the ephemerality of images. The feeling that, say, a camera movement, even if duplicated for every take, will, on some level, never be the same twice.

So Coutard opens the film, which was his first as a director, with a shot of a map. There is a voice, helicopter noises, etc., etc. But let’s talk about the image, which, like all of Coutard’s greatest images, has a disposable quality. It could be any image, but it’s this one and we have to deal with that decision. So disposable, in fact, that the credits are shown over it, identifying the producer, the title of the film (and in classic French style, the title of the source novel and the names of its author and publisher) and, finally, the name of the director. All of these bits of text take precedence over the image under them in our viewing experience. As the credits roll, we get closer to the map, which we at first see as consisting of Asia, India, the Middle East, the horn of Africa and a bit of Australia. As we get closer, the frame becomes dominated by Cambodia and Vietnam. This is not a zoom; a zoom changes our view while maintaining the same position. The slight changes in perspective and lighting along the edges make it obvious that the camera is slowly dollying towards a map. We are physically getting closer; even this subtle movement is a physical experience—not of the world, but of a map.



Eventually, this specific image of a system (a false image) dissolves it into a specific image of something ephemeral: a helicopter pilot’s head, a reflective visor covering his eyes. A dissolve is always a struggle: one image conquers the other one. There is something deeply dramatic to dissolves, especially in older Hollywood films, which would often dissolve in the middle of an action. That action became the dying breath of a scene as the next one stood victorious over it. So we begin with the system of Vietnam: the map. Vietnam as a place on a globe, as a place in relation to other places. And slowly this image is overpowered by a real, fleeting experience—looking directly into a man’s face. His visor even reflects the cameraman.

Coutard was once a war photographer. He was in the French Indochina War and lived in Vietnam for 11 years. So imagine Coutard sitting down at his home in Paris or at some café and opening up a newspaper. Or maybe he’s watching television. He sees a map with arrows and lines and explanations. And as he looks at the map it becomes overpowered by his own specific experiences. He remembers the smell of Vietnam, the climate, the people. He knows war and he knows what war feels like in that region. He looks at this map, this empty system designed to give people with no specific experiences, no memories of a place a way to itemize it. And whereas others can toss it aside, turn to the next page to look at the sports section, this map, meaningless to them, is in a quiet struggle with an image in his head.

A fleeting, disposable image becomes beautiful through its disposability. It could be any image, but it’s this one. The first memory. The film editor is often in the act of remembering, of searching for a moment that has now passed but an aspect of which has been recorded, and creating something out of that aspect, that shadow. Movies are a shadow world, in that every action casts its shadow—every decision has an infinite number of counter-decisions. The image of the helicopter pilot’s head is only on the screen for a second after it finishes dissolving in. It is followed very quickly by other images—also of masked, helmeted heads, of an airfield and of smoke. From the stand point of production, they are identical: a cameraman is told to get footage of a helicopter crew, maybe to focus on their heads. From the point of planning, any of the first four images after the map could be the one that the map image dissolves into. But each attempt at creating the same image results in a different image. One image is chosen: the helicopter pilot’s head, staring at the camera man is the image that overpowers the map.

Textures 1: The Walls in The Passion of Joan of Arc

a still from The Passion of Joan of Arc

The walls of the set of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc were painted light pink. The reason is simple: on black and white film, the color would come out as a light gray, therefore preserving the texture while seeming to us to be almost white; in fact, we remember them as white: white and bleak, with a rough surface we can imagine running our fingers over, chalky like whitewash. They would crumble at the corners or perhaps leave white streaks on our backs if we leaned too hard. We imagine the whitewash slathered by workmen with primitive brushes—something about that set makes it impossible for us to imagine even modern tools working on it; we can feel the cold stone underneath the surface of the paint, cold like a cellar wall, even though we know very well that underneath the paint there is probably nothing but wood and chicken wire and plaster. We've heard, too, that it's not Rene Falconetti's arm that is bled, just a willing stand-in's, but we still wince.

The wall constructs an imaginary place just with its texture: The Passion of Joan of Arc is a film of concrete, harsh surfaces—Joan's oily face, the rough cloth of the clerics' robes, the iron of the window-bars. But we remember the walls best of all: their uncomfortable angles stick in your mind just as strongly as Falconetti's gracefully pained facial expressions; their starkness seems to taunt her throughout the entire movie.

But the walls are pink—light pink—not gray, and certainly not white. It’s not the real color of the set, but it’s the real color of walls in the film and in our minds. So it’s not the real wall that we see, but something that resides inside of it—a possible image, a ghost maybe. The camera has x-ray vision: it reveals aspects of everyday objects invisible to the naked eye. A harmless pink wall, but buried somewhere within is the possibility of a cruel gray wall; wood and chicken wire and maybe some plaster, but deep inside somewhere there is a cold medieval prison. And Rene Falconetti is just a woman, but buried somewhere in her is a saint. Images make mediums out of everyone. Cinema is a seance.

The camera, after all, doesn't see things the way we see them, regardless of whether it's loaded with color film or black-and-white film or high-speed film. The camera is an instrument that captures images, but it is not an extension of our vision. It’s like a piano and our eyes are like the fingers on the keys and the foot softly pressing the damper pedal, guiding it to produce something we can't on our own.

48 Hrs.

Lobby cards for Walter Hill's 48 Hrs.

48 Hrs. is a mysterious film.
The greatest puzzles in Walter Hill's 1982 action flick are the lights: frequently out of focus in the foreground, they pop up seemingly unexplained. Streetlights become will-o-wisps at the edge of the frame; streets are photographed from above through of clusters China lanterns that form glowing clouds. We can still tell what they are—ordinary, familiar objects—but in the way they’re introduced, they become foreign. Suddenly the ordinary warrants an explanation. San Francisco is some place we've never heard of; when its hilly streets are used to set the film's car chase, we're surprised--the streets that we've seen a million times have become unfamiliar.
The film seems shot through binoculars—or, rather, with a zoom lens. We’re aware of the zooming (every time the camera moves, we notice the tell-tale distortion of space), but it doesn’t suggest physical distance—rather what we become aware of are the numerous objects, many of them obviously far from the actors, in the foreground. The zoom lens becomes a way to sketch telling details while allowing them to remain vague; we take these details for granted, yet we can’t completely make them out--they’re like the false memories a dream leaves behind, readily accepted but not completely understood. These qualities are all reinforced by the film’s numerous unresolved plot points, which don’t seem messy, but rather consistent with its aesthetic—even with its acting, with that odd chemistry between Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. It leaves you with a sensation that doesn’t easily submit to written or spoken language—one that can only be described by making another film.

Andrew Bujalski Interview

As Mutual Appreciation is seeing a DVD release via HVE this month, I'm reposting a brief interview with its director, Andrew Bujalski, I conducted shortly before the film's Chicago premiere in the fall of 2006.

Mutual Appreciation is in black and white. Funny Ha Ha was in color. How is Mutual Appreciation more a black and white film than Funny Ha Ha? Was it something you intended while writing the film?
My quick answer is that I believed Mutual to be a (peculiar) comedy, and that I thought black & white would be funny. I can't remember at what stage in pre-production I settled on [black & white] but I'm sure Bob Dylan/Don't Look Back had something to do with it; that said my great fear was that people would read it as merely an allusion, a tip of the hat, to all the great cinema in that format, and I didn't mean it as such. The fact that [black & white] is relatively rarely used for narrative features these days doesn't mean that the medium isn't still alive and kicking and packing a punch. It's a great thrill to get [black & white] rushes back from the lab and project them on a wall; contrary to what that one Paul Simon song says, I'd argue that everything looks better in black and white.
We've reached a point where video and video-editing has developed very far--far enough, in fact, that it's a separate medium and a separate approach to the world from film-based editing and shooting. Why have you choosen film?
Because it's still better! I was hanging out with a friend the other night and we turned on the television and stumbled upon a very peculiar episode of The Monkees, which deviated from the regular sitcom-y format, this one was just a psychedelic documentary of the group on tour--the footage was all gorgeous, the editing was bizarre and gripping (old school avant-garde, there's an oxymoron for you), and whatever technology has come since to replace all that hasn't won my heart the same way.
I've read that Chantal Akerman was your thesis advisor. Has she been an influence on your work?
Chantal was indeed my thesis advisor. I'm hugely fond of her personally, am sure I learned a lot from her directly then, and of course [I] am a fan of her oeuvre as well. That said, as a cinematic forebear I don't think I've taken more (or less) from her than I have from 100 other filmmakers whose work has stuck with me.
Did you make any films before Funny Ha Ha? Shorts and the like?
Sure—my Chantal-advised thesis was a 26-minute fiction film. Not very good! But an incredible learning experience all around, there's no question I couldn't have made Funny Ha Ha without getting through that one first. Also a handful of other student shorts, both on my own and collaboratively. Some documentary work, which I think has been massively influential on how I approach fiction.
What was the documentary work like?
We learned from the ground up: here's how you load film in the camera, here's how you run the Nagra, here's how the Steenbeck works. Go out and shoot. The observational tradition.
A friend of mine once said that at a certain economic level, every movie becomes a documentary: i.e., with a low enough budget, filmmakers rely on places they actually know and the day jobs of their actors for material. Do you feel that there's a documentary aspect to your films, that in a way you're portraying the lives of people you know in a fictional manner? And is this your primary interest, or, as the friend suggested, a question of economics?
Most good fiction films borrow some energy from documentary, just as the reverse is also true. Which doesn't mean necessarily that I am "fictionalizing" my friends' lives, on the contrary, I'd more likely say they're "documentarizing" my made-up story. I sort of agree with your friend but think he's looking at it backwards—it takes a lot of money to bleed everything resembling life out of a film.

Charles Adare arrives for dinner...

A horse-drawn carriage pulls up—it’s in a studio somewhere, some potted palm trees and a moody backdrop suggesting the Australian countryside, sometime in the evening. The lantern lights the coachman’s face moodily from underneath. There’s a shot of a sign, some dialogue, a zoom into an obvious matte painting—Under Capricorn’s greatest strength is how studio-bound it is, how obviously false. 19th century Australia is created not through location shooting, but through well-appointed room, long hallways with columns and occasional servants, gentlemen standing around in sparsely furnished estates made to look as opulent as possible with limited means. The unconvincing exteriors only add to a sense of Australia as a sort of mock England—by outside the landscape to a few establishing shots and an opening sequence that could be set anywhere, we are introduced to a world of people trying to create a society despite what might exist outside.

For all we know, Australia could be on the Moon--it's not as though Michael Wilding, playing the newly arrived Charles Adare, would ever notice. The matte painting is soon followed by one of the most beautiful of all long takes as we discover Australia with him—and it is not the Outback wilderness that we are seeing, but rather the house, its servants and masters. He sneaks around the garden, peeking in as Joseph Cotton scolds the help before intruding just in time to cover up for his spying. The truth of Australia, or at least the imaginary past Australia we are seeing here, has nothing to do with the potted palm trees and everything to do with the women fighting in the kitchen or the tiny chain of command established in Cotton’s household.

It's Hitchcock's greatest adventure film, and a reminder of what a great magic trick the moving long take is. And like a magic trick, we forget about its power—a magician never seems that exciting, just kids' stuff, until you happen to see one perform and, embarrassingly, you're a bit mesmerized. The roving camera is an astounding tool for evocation when exploring something unknown, or, even better, something you want discovered. Maybe it's more than a trick--it's a real incantation, a spell that can summon up not just a room, but the society the room is intended for in the space of a few lazy minutes.
Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men is Under Capricorn's direct descendant—but unlike its grandfather, the film's protagonist is no longer exploring, but interacting, living in the world of the film. The exploration is occurring on the part of the eyes and ears of the audience (the cameras and microphones). The very nature of the roving camera allows us to explore the world around him and the sound, like that in the second scene of Heaven's Gate, suggests an entire universe outside the characters not by merely commenting, but by downright interrupting.

Down with the awkwardness of forced introductions! Bits of newspaper, sound bites, and marks on the landscape do the talking, freeing up Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Julianne Moore and the rest of the cast to explore their own (and their characters') interactions with this imaginary future. We understand the cages cartoonishly stuffed with immigrants well enough on their own so that we can instead focus on Owen passing them by without looking; the world wasting away outside the bus Owen and Moore ride on tells us enough by itself—instead, we can explore how uneasily they sit next each other in the dirty seats of the bus's second deck. These scenes eclipse the film’s famous single-take action sequences—these are moments that recall Ernst Lubitsch in their casual ephemeralism; a Lubitsch dark and despairing, though just as reliant on the cult of the material, of the physical, in the conjuring of imaginary (though no longer glamorous) worlds to support the characters.