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).
Lucy Walker Made A Searing Documentary About Wildfires In 2021; Now, People May Be More Inclined To Listen
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge. "It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror." And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future. That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation." "This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview. She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish." Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the northern California city of... Read More