Vision of Light: The Art Of Cinematography

Vision of Light

The Art Of Cinematography

Arnold Glassman

3.20

 William a fraker

“I enjoy going onto a stage that’s absolutely black and then striking the first light and saying here we go”

4.00

allan daviou

“what you had to have in the black and white days you had to have a real grasp of what photography meant”

4.30

john bailey

“the 20s were really a golden age for the cinema because the camera was unencumbered by sound, and it was unencumbered by all the devices that accompany verbal dialogue story telling, it really was visual media”

6.00

john bailey

“the production of sunrise was a real water shed for american film making. That film was startling in every aspect in its design aspect in its use of its expressionist lighting techniques, character was revealed in sunrise through a lot of very complicated lighting changes and dramatic lighting sources that were very new and fresh in American films”

9.57

??

“the 30’s brought in the full flowering of the studio system, and the leading cinematographers helped create what was considered to be a studio look. There was the gloss of paramount, harder edge look that warner brothers was noted for, and the glamour that we associate with anything else”

17.50

 sven nykvist

“I was really inspired by Gregg Toland and I saw all his films and I remember the first one, the long voyage home. The light was fantastic, he worked with a depth of field the whole time and the lighting was so interesting all the time because he dared to take a lot of contrast in the pictures and perhaps it was a little too much sometimes but for a cinematographer it was fantastic.

21.40

Robert wise, director

Editor of citizen kane

“by having the deep focus he was able to give Orsen lot more leeway how he moved his actors  at stages in the scenes, it freed him up, I think that was a trememdous contribution Gregg gave to the film. We always have this problem with cinematography not being able to carry somebody in the foreground who’s sharper in focus than somebody 20 feet back, and Gregg, had for a number of years, been working on new lenses, faster lenses that would allow him to pour more light in and a stop down and get a greater depth in these scenes, and that’s one of the things, I think, that gave citizen kane the kind of dynamics that it had. Extraordinary dynamics compared to other films at the time. “

23.25

john bailey

“film noir really had its high water mark right after the war. The visual style of noir, I think has fingerprints ging back very early in german expressionists cinema. They had a sparseness. A visual and stylistic sparseness. What is the bare bones story? What are the bare bones facts of the characters? And what is the basic visual information we need to tell the story? And so, film noir developed an increasingly dense and rarefied visual vocabulary that had to do with very strong single source lighting, slashes of light, dark shadows, low angles, extremely strong graphic elements that had kind of a primal simplicity to them.”

24.51

??

“john alton is really one of the pre eminent film noir cinematographers”

24.58

allen daviau

“alton and the people in film noir were not afraid of the dark. In fact, they were willing to sketch things just very, very, very slightly to see how you could use dark, not as a negative space, but as the most important element of the scene. We’ve all been influenced byt hat in terms of whats important are the lights you don’t turn on”

25.33

john bailey

“alton did one picture particularly that I feel was very influential called the big combo what is a very simple, inelegant film, that is somewhat brutel in a way but which incorporates these very sparse lighting elements and graphic elements so thtat it is very much black and white. Theres very little grey in that movie. “

42.20

William fraker

“we were into images a little differently than the old system. The lighting was a little different, we would try things and specially I worked with connie hall for five years I was his camera operator and we did some great things, I think.

42.36

Conrad hall

“I feel particularly involved in helping make mistakes acceptable to studio heads and other people and the audience even, by using them, by blatantly, not by mistakes or anything, but by endeavor. If the light shone in the lens and flared the lens, that was considered a mistake. Somebody would report that. The operator would report, ‘The sun hit the lens, it flared the lens. Cut!’

49.10

vilmos zsigmond

“I don’t think that movies should be made because of the dialogue, I think it should have a good story, but I think the important thing has to be how it is told visually. And dialogue should be like music in the film.”

“Mccabe and mrs miler was an excellent example of being a partner with a director. Altman wanted to have a special look for this movie, he didn’t really know exactly what he was looking for, and then when we started to talk about it he said that he had something in his mind like old pictures, old faded color photographs. I doubt if he knew what he was talking about and I immediately started to experiment with flashing. I told him about flashing and how we can desaturate the colours and how he can achieve the faded look. Flashing is basically, its almost like fogging the film. Like putting a layer of fog over the negative so what happens is the blacks are not  going to be really black, its going to be a sort of greyish because the blacks are not as black, you see sort of into the shadow areas more. It also has another effect. It desaturates the colours.”

1.02.15

gordan wills

It’s not one thing that you do from a visual point of view that makes anything work. The art direction has to be right, the wardrobe has to be right, the shots structure has to be right, and the lighting has to accommodate whatever it is you’re introducing related to filtering etc. So, you cant just do one thing.”

 1.15.10

Vittorio storaro

“Cinematography is a common art. I think its not an art form that can be expressed by one single person, so ofcourse there is the director which is like the main author of the entire common expression, because even if several persons express themselves in the same art form, everbody can go in different directions. So from the writing to the musician, to the production design, to the constume design, to the cinematographer, to the editor, someone should be responsible.“

-       talking about Apocalypse now

“Mainly the first section of my light was merely dealing with light. With all these possibilities the light has to express itself. To show on screen the incredible source of light, the great generator with lamps, into the jungle. Very sharp light, very soft light, very warm light, very cold light, very artificial, very natural. Both, all the time I was working with the opposite.”

“I understood how it could be important to travel, to go into another country to use another language, to use another industry, to interchange energy.”

1.18.10

-       the last emperor (1987)

“there was one idea that came to my mind, that there was a possibility to make an analogy between the life and light. The journey that Pu Yi was doing into himself could be represented with different stage with the different stage of light. Different colours. The first time he was cutting his own vein, and you see for the first time red. Red is the colour of the beginning, the colour when we’re born. he was, remember, being born as an emperor. We go into the scene when the people with the torches are arriving to pick him up. When we see orange in the picture, it is the warm colour of the family. It is the colour of the forbidden city. I was using all the lights around the young Pu Yi to get the feeling of family. Of warm, or maternal embrace. Yellow, is the colour of our identity. When we come conscious, is the colour it represents the emperor, is the colour that more leads the light, the more represent the sun itself. Green, is knowledge. We see green the first time only when the tutor is coming. He bring s agreen bicycle. It’s the knowledge of something. Up the that moment, Pu Yi was living in the forbidden city, it was kind of the forbidden colour for him. He didn’t know anything about one section of the colour spectrum, green blue, indigo, violet. He knew only red, orange, yellow. The emoperor shouldn’t know anything, should know only a portion of it because knowledge can hurt him. I export our feeling in his way of seeing, and I re-import once again all the experience back to him.”

1.25.00

Do the right thing (1989)

Ernest Dickerson

“the first thing that Spike said to me about do the right thing he said ‘This film is set on the hottest day of the summer, how do we make the audience feel heat?”. Dealing with it in a realistic treatment I don’t thinkw oul dhave done it, btu we had one block in Brooklyn that was going to be our studio and we could control the colour. We could control the colour of the customs, we renovated some of the houses there and determined what colours were going to be there. Its manufacturing reality, heightening the reality, to get that audience to feel a certain way. I think  do the right was the first firl where I really had the luxury of waiting for the light. A lot of the times I spent planning certain scenes to be shot at certain times of the day because the film takes place on one day, on one block, where changes in light are going to be very obvious. The director is going to be the author of the performances of the film, the story of the film. The cinematographer is the author of the use of light in the film and how that contributes to the story. “

1.28.00

Allen Daviau

“Someone once said that the lighting and the look of the film makes the pauses speak as eloquently as the words, that you have moments in films that happen because of what is there visually. How someone is lit or not lit. you put something in the audiences mind visually and they will carry away images as well as the words.”