Cinematography is Changing
By Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC
We are all cinematographers now. With any camera we can afford–Alexa, RED, Sony, Go Pro, iPhone–we’re producing images. But is this a great time for cinematography? Kodak’s recent demise is not only an economic or technical issue; it is also a cultural life “drama.” The ease with which digital pictures can be produced leads to the mistaken conclusion that an image is no more than just the registration of reality. In fact, the cultural richness and experience of generations of DPs, photographers, graphic artists and painters should be understood as part of any visual representation.
DPs are hired for their taste, cultivated through their life experiences and knowledge and understanding of film, music, art, literature, photography. We draw on these to shape a film’s look. This is often neglected in pre-pro, leaving the look to be achieved and refined in post. There’s nothing wrong with post manipulation as it can often be more precise to adjust an image in a colorist’s suite than on set. But these tools do not mean we curb our vision until post. So much of the look is created by the close collaboration between the director, production designer and DP.
With digital capture, it becomes easy to think of the image in the simplest of terms: contrast, saturation and color bias. But often we forget about texture and sharpness. Film has organic grain texture. I’m not a film “purist” but with radical advances in digital cinema technology there has been a certain homogenization of the cinematographic image in look and texture. It is common to shoot for an evenly distributed rich digital negative with plenty of sharpness to endure the color correction suite and create the look in post. Everybody shoots the sensor the same way.
Painting is a great influence on me. When we did McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I showed a book of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings to Bob Altman. He liked it. Then I took the same book to the lab and explained that this was what we were aiming for. They understood right away why we were flashing the film.
With digital capture, we’ve been given different tools, creating possibilities for the image to be pushed any way we wish in post. Cinematographers need to master these tools. We must re-educate and retrain ourselves creatively, to learn how to evaluate what we are doing from the technical POV while at the same time working to raise the standards of visual storytelling to ever-higher levels.
(Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, is co-founder of the Global Cinematography Institute, www.globalcinematography.com).
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More