Every Frame a Rembrandt

Art and Practice of Cinematography

Andrew Laszlo, Andrew Quicke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136050411
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines the art and craft of motion picture photography through a veteran professional cinematographer's personal experiences on five major motion pictures, each selected to illustrate a particular series of challenges for the photographer.

"Every Frame a Rembrandt" is an expression heard on sound stages and locations the world over. While in most cases the expression is used lightly and not infrequently with a certain amount of sarcasm, its true meaning speaks highly of most cinematographers' commitment to producing the best, most interesting, unusual and memorable images for the screen. Through the five films he selected for this book Laszlo is able to show the broad range of complexity in motion picture photography, from the relatively simple "point and shoot" in the typcal western to complex in-camera effects. In recounting his "war stories" Laszlo is able to show the day to day activities of a cinematographer before, during and after filming the project, discussing equipment, film stocks, testing, labs, unions, agents, budget requirements, and working with the director and producer. The five films discussed are Southern Comfort, The Warriors, Rambo: First Blood, Streets of Fire, and Innerspace. The book is illustrated throughout with production stills from Laszlo's extensive collection (12 in a color insert).

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SOUTHERN COMFORT

During one of my visits with film students, I was asked to describe the secret of photography. Frankly, the question threw me. I knew that some students who are film aficionados have an almost religious zeal when it comes to film, nevertheless I didn't expect the question, didn't know exactly what the questioner meant, and wasn't prepared to give a satisfactory answer. Until then it had never occurred to me to think that indeed there might be a secret to photography. Perhaps because I have a tendency to be a bit caustic at times, I answered by saying that the secret of photography was having a camera with a lens, film, and the determination to point it and shoot.

And that brings me to the most basic type of photography, which I call Point and Shoot. As the term implies, Point and Shoot simply means pointing the camera in the direction of the subject matter and pushing the button. This type of photography is practiced daily worldwide by millions of people taking pictures with their still cameras. In the professional film industry, it is generally practiced on an outdoor location, usually during the day without lighting or the use of sets. On a “Western” location, for example, where the panorama is the important element, riders might be seen in the distance in a picturesque valley surrounded by mountains. Artificial lighting is not required, and, indeed, it would be of no use. Simply set up a camera, point it at the subject, and shoot. Simple! Or is it?

As I said in the Introduction, we cinematographers are constantly striving to create an image that is interesting, unusual, and memorable. Does Point and Shoot photography meet those requirements? Clearly not! Point and Shoot photography will record an image, but it will not make it any more interesting, unusual, or memorable. In fact, in many instances—due to the shortcomings of even the best state-of-the-art equipment, film stock, and laboratory techniques—the image comes up short of emphasizing or bringing additional values to the subject matter. Yet there can be hidden values, even in an image that photographically is not quite as good as the original subject matter. Certain shortcomings can take on artistic virtue, as I will discuss throughout this book.

Let's start with Point and Shoot photography. In my own repertoire of films, there is one very good example of Point and Shoot, a theatrical feature called Southern Comfort (1979–1981). When the script came in from my good friend director Walter Hill, certain aspects of the movie became obvious even on my first reading. All of the film and the entire story were to take place in exterior locations. Most of the film was going to be exterior day photography and, with the exception of one sequence, called for no sets. None of the film was to be shot in the studio or on the back lot.

The story depicts a couple of days in the life of a squad of National Guardsmen on weekend maneuvers in the swamps of Louisiana. Early in the story, some men in the squad shoot blanks at the local Cajun trappers and poachers who live on the swamp—and they shoot back with live ammunition. From this point on the film deals with the Cajuns, an unseen enemy, killing off the Guardsmen one at a time in the most ingenious ways. Only two escape in the end.

The photography of the film was scheduled to begin in late summer. Even before the preproduction period, Walter, producer David Giler, first assistant director Pat Kehoe, and I would meet

Figure 1.1 Location scouting in an airboat

on weekends to scout potential locations for the film. As I was shooting another film at the time in South Carolina, the three of them would pick me up in a small jet on weekends, and we would go from swamp to swamp in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas (see Figure 1.1).

Until this time I'd never been in a swamp. My idea of a swamp was lots of mud, brackish water, rotting timber, snakes, alligators, and flies—none of which was high on my list of priorities of places to visit. But filmmaking, which can take filmmakers all over the world to the most interesting places, is not restricted to the beautiful spots on earth alone. Swamps, caves with millions of bats, tunnels deep under New York City, the frozen regions of the Arctic, garbage dumps, and blood-splattered emergency wards, to name a few, are all potential sites for filmmaking. A location is whatever place the script describes as where the action is to take place. Expecting the worst, I wasn't prepared for the beauty of the first swamp we visited in northern Florida (see Color Plate I).

The sky was the most vibrant blue, with huge billowing white clouds. The water, a faultless, endless putting green, was covered with a lush green carpet of duckweed. The immense old oaks were richly decorated with Spanish moss swaying gently in the breeze, and brilliant white egrets completed the panorama. There was beauty all around me—and all of it, I knew instinctively and immediately, was totally wrong for the story of the film. The actions and situations of the story would have clashed head-on with the beauty of the scenery.

We found this beautiful scenery in swamp after swamp, but, as magnificent as the scenery was, it was disheartening to know that for our purposes this kind of beauty was all wrong. Walter and I were very concerned with the “look” of the film. Neither one of us wanted a glossy, pretty look. We wanted to emphasize and underline the harsh aspects of the story, add to the discomfort of the audience, and manipulate their emotional response by the style, the “look,” of the film.

After reading the script for the first time, I dug out one of my favorite photo books, This Is War, by the famed photographer and photojournalist David Douglas Duncan. Duncan covered the Korean War for Life magazine. On one of the opening pages of this book there is a full-page photograph of a Marine sitting on a rock, wearing a wet poncho and a steel helmet. Having just taken part in a two-day withdrawal, without rest, food, or sleep, the Marine's face reflected the hardships and perhaps the horrors of his experience. The photograph was in black and white; it was grainy and dark, and some of its details were obscured by the mist and late afternoon twilight. The Marine's eyes, for example, were almost totally swallowed up in the shadow of his steel helmet. I thought this photograph was an outstanding example of the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It told the Marine's story eloquently, and I sensed it would be our guide in determining the “look” for our movie. Walter agreed.

But how was this look to be achieved? Duncan, having spotted the Marine, seized the opportunity, pointed his camera, and shot. A moment masterfully captured, but how were we going to do that throughout an hour-and-a-half-long feature film? And if we wanted to get close to that wonderful look Duncan had captured, how was that to be achieved technically, and how was it going to mesh with the endless beauty of the swamp? At least one part of the answer was obvious. Whatever I was going to do with the photography, the story would not fit into the beauty of any of the swamps we had visited.

We thus had a major problem before the film had even started. But, as so often happens, the solution came from an unexpected source. In the course of scouting swamps in northwest Louisiana, we were introduced to a former college professor, Greg Guirard, who had chucked the academic world for the beauty of the swamp, where he had moved with his family. He supported himself by building very interesting and unusual furniture from wormwood that he harvested from the swamp, and by the results of his other hobby, photography. He had several photographic books published, all dealing with the same subject matter: the swamp. One of these books, Seasons of Light, was full of the most beautiful and interesting photographs taken in the swamp, mostly during the winter. Looking through the pictures was a revelation. The swamp looked grey, monochromatic, almost totally devoid of the vivid colors we saw during our scouting trips. His photographs brought us closer to that “hostile” atmosphere we thought would be right for the film. There were some colors, of course, but the colors were subtle and very subdued. The monochromatic quality of the swamp was shrouded in a mysterious semidarkness under the tall canopy of the trees. Unlike the swamps we visited at the height of their summer glory, these pictures portrayed another kind of beauty, one which, in my opinion, could not have been better for the background against which our story was to be told. There was no question that the photography of the film had to be rescheduled for the winter.

As portions of the film I was working on in South Carolina also took place in a swamp, I had opportunities to shoot a few tests and send them off to the lab for processing. The purpose of these tests was to see if I could come close to the “look” David Duncan captured with his still camera, but on motion picture film. His image lacked detail. It allowed—I should say demanded—that the viewer fill in the detail. I knew that if I underexposed the film it would deteriorate the quality of the negative by not allowing portions of the detail to register. It would also result in a grainy image, without deep harsh contrast. In other words, I felt I had to go against the rules of the textbooks, of Kodak's specs, of past and current practices, of everything I considered “good” photography, in order to get the “look” I wanted, the “style” I hoped to create for the movie.

I wanted a bad image. Or perhaps “bad” is not a good description. I wanted a “bad/good” image. At this time in pre-production I knew more about what I didn't want than what I did want. What I didn't want was a “good” image, a pretty image, with well-exposed, sharp, vivid colors, and everything in focus to infinity. The film had a rough story, so I wanted to present it in an equally rough manner. I wanted the audience to be disturbed by the look of the film, just as the characters in the film were disturbed by their environment and circumstances.

When my tests came back to South Carolina, I was delighted to see that certain aspects of what I was looking for were achievable by the underexposure. Even though I did not have the actors dressed as soldiers, the underexposed results clearly showed that, indeed, I was getting one step closer to that “bad/good” image I sought. But, photographed in September with lots of sunshine, the footage still had a lot of color and contrast. Further tests photographed with reduced exposure and the addition of heavy neutral density filters allowed me to shoot almost wide open, defeating the depth of field to the point that background objects melted into one another, losing their contrast and definition. I liked the effect of some of the details disappearing into shadows. Little by little I was getting closer to the “look” I was hoping for, which would not have been possible with good, “normal” exposure.

It has always been my practice to “bracket” the exposure over a wide range whenever I shoot these kinds of tests. Though underexposing two stops made the image bad, I actually loved it. It was scary at first to go against my years of training and experience. It was scary to know that I was purposely deteriorating the negative stock Kodak had developed and perfected, probably at the cost of millions of dollars, beyond acceptable limits. But I knew I was on the right track. I also counted on, and hoped for, Mother Nature's help: providing me with the winter look of the swamp with very little—or better yet, no—sunshine at all, and allowing the undesirable elements in my test footage (color and contrast) to be minimized or disappear altogether. I was discovering “bad/good” photography. The question now was, what other elements could I bring to the image to make it more interesting, memorable, and effective enough to exert an influence over the emotions of the audience, so that they would feel the discomfort, fear, and paranoia of the characters in the story?

When my film in South Carolina wrapped, I could turn my full attention to Southern Comfort. The rescheduled start date of the film was drawing closer. I continued my testing and research for anything I thought would further enhance our footage. Every time I discussed what I wanted to achieve with colleagues, lab people, and supply houses, everyone had advice and suggestions, but no definite solution to my dilemma. My assistant suggested that I try “black dot filters.” Frankly, until that time I'd never heard of them. We located a set, but looking at them and through them, I was dubious. They looked like rectangular pieces of glass splattered with muddy water. There were varying numbers and sizes of irregularly shaped dots and blotches of different density imbedded in the glass in a random pattern. The filters came in gradations from one to five, one being the lightest and five the darkest. As the start date of photography was closing in on me, I decided to try them, though I had strong misgivings.

In the first place, I knew that anything with a pattern placed in front of wide-angle lenses would register, particularly at small T-stops used in daylight photography. But I was also aware of an old practice of putting a small, solid object directly in front of a long focal length lens for portraiture, which disturbs the optical characteristics of a long focal length lens to produce a very pleasant, soft effect. I couldn't help wondering if black dot filters would somehow produce similar results. They did. My tests not only showed a definite improvement in further knocking down contrast, but also showed that the black dot filters had slightly softened the image, and even imposed a soft veil over the subdued colors of the winter swamp. When I used them in connection with neutral density filters, shooting at close to wide-open apertures, the results were as close to the desired “style” as I had hoped for and thought I could get. It was a great relief.

If these filters had not worked, the next process I was going to experiment with was “fogging.” I abhorred the idea. I have never been a proponent of fogging of any kind. In my opinion “fogging” was, and still is, a less than precise technique. Pre-fogging the film by the lab, rightly or wrongly, I would not trust. Fogging the film during photography with the devices available then was, in my opinion, inconsistent and required a great deal of lab work after the film was edited to balance the inconsistencies of fog densities from cut to cut. I considered pre- or post-development fogging equally undesirable. I even rejected print fogging, though this method held the least danger, as it didn't impose a quality on the negative that couldn't be removed. My experience with any techniques of “fogging,” before Southern Comfort, and since, was less than satisfactory. Yet, as a last resort, prior to my discovery of “black dot” filters, I was considering it.

While scouting one particular location in the northeast Texas swamps, we came across a crew shooting a film for Disney, I believe. The director of photography was complaining bitterly about the deep contrast, even on lightly overcast days. He was skeptical about the black dot filters, and I didn't think they would help either when shooting in the bright summer sunlight. I knew that the winter look of the swamp, coupled with the black dot filters, was going to eliminate the aggravation of dealing with contrast. The black dots turned out to be a godsend that freed me from having to resort to fogging.

As my tests proved the validity of these f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Southern Comfort
• CHAPTER 2 The Warriors
• CHAPTER 3 First Blood
• CHAPTER 4 Streets of Fire
• CHAPTER 5 Innerspace
• Glossary
• Filmography of Andrew Laszlo, A.S.C.
• Index