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).
Director Mark Rydell, An Oscar Nominee For “On Golden Pond,” Dies At 97
Mark Rydell, the Oscar-nominated director of the sentimental blockbuster "On Golden Pond" who worked with such Hollywood heavyweights as Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, Steve McQueen and John Wayne, has died. He was 97.
His daughter, Amy Rydell, told The Hollywood Reporter that her father died Thursday of natural causes at a retirement community for the entertainment industry in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles.
"Hard to put into words how much I loved my dad," she posted Friday on her Instagram account. "He was truly one of a kind. Funniest and most talented person I've ever known."
"On Golden Pond" earned 10 Oscar nominations
"On Golden Pond," which teamed Fonda with Hepburn and his daughter, Jane Fonda, was nominated for 10 Oscars. Henry Fonda and Hepburn won leading acting honors and the film won for screenplay, which Ernest Thompson adapted from his play of the same name. Rydell was nominated for directing but lost to Warren Beatty for "Reds."
It earned over $119 million at the box office, making it the second-highest grossing film of 1981 behind "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
"On Golden Pond" was Henry Fonda's final movie role. He starred as Norman Thayer, an emotionally brittle and distant father who becomes more accessible at the end of his life after his teenage grandson spends the summer with him and his wife, Ethel (played by Hepburn), at their cottage in New England. The film's story resembled Fonda's real-life relationship with daughter Jane, who said working on the movie together helped resolve some of their issues. The elder Fonda died at age 77 months after winning his only Oscar.
Rydell's other Oscar-nominated films were "The Fox" in 1967, "The Reivers" with McQueen in 1969,... Read More