Vittorio Storaro & Ed Lachman Talk "War" Between Film And Digital [NYFF]

This year, the New York Film Festival convened a masterclass in cinematography with two legends of the form, Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Storaro has worked repeatedly with great directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Bernardo Bertolucci on visual masterpieces like “Apocalyspe Now” and “The Conformist” and lent his talents to Woody Allen’s upcoming “Wonder Wheel.” Ed Lachman has worked with filmmakers like Sofia Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, and has developed a close rapport with Todd Haynes on diverse works such as “Carol,” “I’m Not There,” and this year’s upcoming “Wonderstruck.” The two old friends and colleagues sat down with festival director Kent Jones to reflect on their careers, influences, and philosophies. Both men had valuable insights to share, though Lachman had to be drawn out by Jones whereas Storaro, who several times stressed the importance of thinking like a student, seemed to be a natural teacher, expounding fluently on his ideas and even using visual aids he brought to share with the audience.

When asked how they first became aware of the art of cinematography, Vittorio Storaro recounted how his father was a projectionist with great interest in cinema who had in some ways “put his dream on my shoulders.” A formative experience for Storaro as a child was seeing Chaplin’s “City Lights” around the age of ten, and he said that even when he became a student at the Italian national film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he was forever hoping they would program “City Lights.”

Lachman was also born into the business on the exhibition side with a father that owned a movie theater, but, for him, the effect was to think of cinema less as an art form than as a place his father sold popcorn. It wasn’t until he was studying art at Harvard and found himself in a film course taught by Gideon Bachmann that he was awakened to the power of moving pictures. Specifically, he cited his viewing of De Sica’s “Umberto D” as a transformative moment that showed him the possibility of telling a story solely through images.

The first of several film clips shown throughout the night came from “Citizen Kane” at Storaro’s request, the scene of the newsreel men searching for the angle on Kane’s death, landing on discovering “Rosebud.” Storaro praised the scene as powerfully symbolic, equating the past with darkness and reducing the actors to mere silhouettes, figures rather than literal men. This figurative darkness that accompanies the search for lost memories is contrasted with Kane’s prematurely triumphant political speech, wherein he presents himself to the public drenched in light. Storaro said that these two scenes showed the fundamental tension of cinematography, between light and darkness.

L'Eclisse

Whereas the Italian Storaro chose an American film, the American Lachman chose an Italian film, showing the silent breakup scene from Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse.” The scene could not be more different from the previous example, as the two characters are put under an unblinking camera eye, their every uncomfortable gesture caught and magnified. Lachman praised Antonioni’s ability to “create a subjectivity in the camera” and through images “to understand everything that’s going on in that relationship.”

Lachman shared an anecdote about meeting Bernardo Bertolucci at a long-gone New York Film Festival. By citing lines from “Before the Revolution,” Lachman impressed Bertolucci so much as “his first American fan,” that the filmmaker invited the young Lachman to attend a screening of “The Conformist” as his guest, soon turning Lachman into the first American fan of Storaro’s work on that film. He continued that the two have shared sets on “Luna” and “One From the Heart” and praised Storaro both on a personal level and for his efforts to promote the art form of cinematography.

The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

Speaking of his work on “The Conformist,” Storaro elaborated on the concept of duality. He described a revelation he experienced after walking randomly into a church in Rome and gazing at Caravaggio’s painting “The Calling of Saint Matthew.” He said he didn’t understand how no one could have told him about this genius painting, which uses one single line of sunlight to convey “the separation between humanity and divinity, between past and future, between unconsciousness and consciousness, between light and shadows.”

A sense of duality was key to his compositions in “The Conformist,” which tried to show the separation between the authentic fascist experience and the previous representations of that period and also the inner conflicts of its closeted protagonist. While elaborating on the subject, Storaro also cited Plato’s allegory of the cave, also dedicated to light and shadows, saying that the allegory was a perfect metaphor not only for the Fascist period in Italy but also for cinema itself; he stressed his view that film is never truly representational, always an interpretation.

Lachman shared Storaro’s non-journalistic take on the camera, saying “photography for me is not a representational medium, but a psychological one.” For Lachman, the joy of the job is finding images that can add subtext and emotional depth to the narrative and he compared images to music, as a nonverbal means of expression. He praised the visual metaphor that “Wonderstruck” writer Brian Selznick had provided him, of using the silent period to portray the experiences of a deaf girl.

After showing a Sirk-influenced scene from “Far From Heaven,” Lachman shared that he strives to use color “not just as a decorative means, but to understand psychologically how it affects the viewer.” To achieve the proper look often means venturing outside the traditional domain of the D.P., working with production and costume designers. “Being in the art department is my favorite department because it’s what you put in front of the camera that you receive on the film or on the digital medium.”

During a discussion of film versus digital, Storaro was evenhanded, saying that one can’t stand in the way of progress and praising certain elements of digital cameras, such as the ability to view a perfect image on set. The immediacy of digital was a revelation to Storaro, who complained that during “Apocalypse Now,” he had had to wait several weeks for dailies; “they were weeklies, almost monthlies!” Storaro did express worries that the sheer ease of making images anywhere and anytime could lead to people forgetting the rules of composition dating back to the old masters like da Vinci, but also celebrated the liberation of that ease. However, when it comes to film versus digital, he finds the entire argument tedious.

“For me, this kind of war between film and digital doesn’t make sense. Because human beings forever had the feeling that they need to perform visual art, since we did graffiti in the caves,” he said, adding: “If you’re shooting in panorama, in digital, in 3D, what is the difference? Not the energy. Not the idea. Not the concept. The most important thing is that concept.”

Lachman was somewhat more negatively disposed; he made several technical arguments against digital, such as color separation and implied some others. But his main argument was simply that both digital and film are different tools to achieve different looks. Referencing the many changes to pictorial technique in modernist painting, he said that cinematographers should be able to work in both systems to achieve different looks: “I just don’t want to limit our paintbrushes to tell our stories.”

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