Cinematographer Style

by John Calhoun

Belying what many think of as the technical orientation of their job, cinematographers can be remarkably loquacious. That’s one insight in store for viewers of Jon Fauer’s Cinematographer Style, an artfully edited documentary made up of interviews with 110 prominent practitioners of the craft. Notably absent from the line-up are obvious gear heads; these are men and women more interested in discussing the esthetics and emotional content of light, composition, movement, and color—in other words, the building blocks of the film image. Forget directors, actors, and screenwriters: on the basis of this documentary, nobody talks as passionately or poetically about the art of film as cinematographers.

            Cinematographer Style presents anything but an unbiased or unsponsored view. Fauer, who is credited as producer and cocinematographer as well as director on the film, has not only shot numerous commercials and documentaries, but has also written and taught extensively on the subject. More to the point, Cinematographer Style is copresented by the trade organization The American Society of Cinematographers and by industry heavy-hitters Arri, Kodak, and Technicolor. But there is no product placement or even much mention of specific brands of camera, lens, lighting fixture, or film stock. The equipment these craftsmen employ daily may be at the very forefront of film technology, but almost to a person, they regard these tools as a means to an (elevated) end.

DP for Fassbinder,  Scorsese, and many others Michael Ballhaus

            Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (whose credits encompass the bulk of Bernardo Bertolucci’s oeuvre as well as Apocalypse Now, Reds, and Dick Tracy) sets the tone as he opens the film, brandishing a light bulb: “Light. Light I think is knowledge. Knowledge is love. Love is freedom. Freedom is energy. Energy is all. Without light, we can’t have images.” While that might sound like a rather ostentatious way to state an obvious fact, Storaro’s intoxication with the possibilities of his chosen art form is not a posture. Film is something verging on a sacred calling for the cinematographer (and don’t call him a director of photography—photography refers to the still image).

            Following opening remarks from a few other leading lights of the profession like Owen Roizman (The French Connection) and Gordon Willis (The Godfather movies), Fauer has each of his 110 interview subjects introduce themselves. One might do well to memorize the cast of characters, because this is the last time in Cinematographer Style the speaker is identified. While this strategy avoids a cluttering up of the documentary’s spare visual style, it can be frustrating to listen to a particularly keen insight and not have a clue as to who’s providing it. Fortunately, homevideo offers the option of rewinding to the beginning to match that well spoken face to a name.

            The all-talk approach distinguishes Cinematographer Style from the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, which provided more of a historical view, complete with voluminous film clips. Theory and personal vision are given priority over the anecdotal; this is not the place to learn how Bill Pope helped achieve some of the more startling effects in The Matrix, but to learn that the movie’s look was influenced “by the light in Paris…as interpreted by filmmakers in the 60s.” (That’s one of the few “huh?” moments on hand not inspired by one of Storaro’s more cryptic pronouncements.)

            Fauer organizes the film around several broad themes—Getting Started, Style, Lighting, and Technology. In the first part, the subjects explain what drew them to the profession, whether it was a matter of entering the family business or pursuing an artistic aspiration. “I could never draw or paint or do anything like that,” says Don FauntLeRoy, echoing the experience of many. “I picked this camera up, and I could paint.” Vilmos Zsigmond and the late Laszlo Kovacs describe a somewhat more dramatic entry into the ranks by shooting and smuggling film of the 1956 Revolution out of their native Hungary, and eventually making their way to the United States.

            But it is in the sections on style and lighting that the documentary really finds its heart. Pinpointing their style or even providing a definition of the term represents an attempt to describe the “ineffable,” but the cinematographers make a stab at it anyway. Is style “the initial intuitive impulse of how a movie should feel,” in the words of Ellen Kuras? Should it be, as John Schwartzman says, “as transparent as possible?” Quoting the late, great Conrad L. Hall, Roger Deakins cites the important mistakes, or “happy accidents” that are knowledgeably seized upon and put to use. Willis offers the opinion that “The trick is to integrate your visual decisions with the movie, with the story.” Easier said than done: the cinematographer goes on to reveal about The Godfather’s famous burnt-umber visual style that “it was about twebtt minutes before starting the movie that I finally decided what it should look like.” Even now, he’s hard pressed to say why: “It felt like it should be that way.”

Frequent Coen brothers collaborator, Roger Deakins

            Willis and Storaro are presented as the high priests of film here, a status that becomes more evident as the documentary turns to lighting. The Godfather cinematographer, who burnished his legend through long-running collaborations with Alan J. Pakula and Woody Allen, maneuvers a lighting fixture to demonstrate how he became dubbed “The Prince of Darkness.” Instructing Fauer to turn off the key light, he declares from the resulting shadow, “I like this; this is best.” Storaro holds forth on his favorite topic, the thematic substance of color, as he manually adjusts the color temperature on himself to illustrate the point. The director looks on indulgently, as can be seen to greater extent in the full interviews with Storaro and Willis that constitute the DVD’s extras. The two visual artists are a study in contrasts, the Italian as extravagantly Old World in manner as in his style, and the New York native Willis a plain-spoken proponent of minimalist form. Cinematographer Style makes subtle stylistic nods to both cinematographers, as the elegantly lit and composed interviews call up both the testimony of “the witnesses” in Reds and the opening moments in Don Corleone’s study in The Godfather.

            There are some less felicitous elements—the final section, on technology, seems like an afterthought, perhaps because most of the interviewees are not that interested in talking about it. What goes largely unacknowledged is that this distance from technology is made possible by the support of countless gaffers, grips, assistants, and postproduction technicians whose jobs are reliant on a precise understanding of the hardware and the software that produce those beautiful images. Also, Fauer has gone to great pains to include female and African-American cinematographers like Kuras, Amy Vincent, Ernest Dickerson, and Bill Dill, but one still can’t escape the reality of how underrepresented these groups still are in the profession (and Dickerson long ago moved on to directing). The biggest disappointment is that Haskell Wexler, who helped shape the look of late 1960s and ’70s cinema by bringing documentary technique to the mainstream, and who is every bit the equal of Storaro and Willis in terms of influence, is among the interviewees, but is given very little screen time.

Amy Vincent, whose credits includes Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou and Kirby Dick's documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated

            Yet Cinematographer Style has a fittingly elegiac conclusion, as the participants concur that film as a primary visual medium is probably on its way out, but that the means of expression is less important than the urge and talent to express. Storaro sums it up: “On stone, on wood, on canvas, on film, electronically... the idea is what never changes.”

John Calhoun is a film librarian for the New York Public Library and has written about film for a number of publications.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV No.3 2009

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