Color Cinematography

[gubbelsj]

A movie version of The Subterraneans was made and he hated it.

He was right. Although Gerry Mulligan escapes relatively unscathed.

[Gordon]

More cinematographic rantings by yours truly HERE.

Seriously, most of those Hammer films have workmanlike lighting and irritating scores laid on top of stagey action and hysterical characters that only only exacerbates these deficiencies, but they are generally enjoyable. Floyd Crosby's lighting on the Roger Corman Poe films is far superior and Corman pushed the unreality of the films, which was appropriate for the themes - the dream sequences in them are excellent given the meagre resources. And of course, in Italy at the time, Mario Bava was excelling himself to even greater degrees. The Phantom of the Opera (1962, Terence Fisher) is well shot by Arthur Grant and though it is not a Hammer film, Circus of Horrors (1960) has some gorgeous scenes, as it was shot by Douglas Slocombe and his regular cameraman, Chic Waterson.

[Lino]

Gordon, and speaking of Douglas Slocombe: have you seen The Music Lovers? I personally think that this particular film is a high watermark for both Ken Russell and Slocombe. There are so many moments of beauty on display that to name just one would be impossible. I literally cannot wait for MGM/Fox to get it together and finally release it because I am sure that if properly restored and transfered, it will once again be hailed as one of the very best british films of the 70's. Or ever, really.

[Gordon]

Aye, The Music Lovers is extraordinary and it pains me that there is no DVD. Slocombe was awesome.

'Many of the great cinematographers are identifiable by a signature style, whether it be painterly lighting effects or a penchant for epic vistas. Brit lenser Douglas Slocombe is an exception - the roughly 75 features he shot are united only in their adaptive commitment to finding each project's ideal visual language. From his work on nearly all the classic Ealing comedies through a sustained collaboration with Steven Spielberg, Slocombe's camera has been chameleonic. But its brilliance has seldom gone unnoticed. Slocombe remains charmingly modest about his contribution to the art form. Reached by phone at his London home, he looks back on having addressed "a great variety of pictures... each time on a completely different level. A lot of cameramen try to evolve a technique and then apply that to everything. But I suffer from a bad memory and could never remember how I'd done something before, so I could always approach something afresh. I found I was able to change techniques on picture after picture."

Period pieces, intimate psychological studies, exotic adventure tales and romantic comedies are just a few of the genres accommodated in an oeuvre that reinvented itself yet again in a final career lap lensing all three of Spielberg's cliffhanging Indiana Jones films. That flexible mastery was fostered during 17 years of employment at England's legendary Ealing Studios, where Slocombe became the pre-eminent house cinematographer. "Ealing was rather like Hollywood in the old days," Slocombe recalls. "It had a number of cameramen and directors and writers under contract, so there was a continuity of production. We all knew each other so well, we'd spent the eves together in the local pub. It was very much a community."

After Ealing's demise in the late 1950s, Slocombe freelanced for different companies, at one point signing a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox that resulted in a series of CinemaScope spectaculars, from the seafaring adventure of A High Wind in Jamaica to the high flying of WWI-set biplane saga The Blue Max and the African intrigue of Guns at Batasi. Perhaps his most striking work from this mid-'60s period lies in the unsettling b&w atmosphere of Losey and Harold Pinter's The Servant, whose gradually more expressionistic images convey the perverse shifting power balance between "master" [James Fox] and scheming "gentleman's gentleman" [Dirk Bogarde].

Slocombe was often attracted to projects that invited multiple visual approaches. For Huston's sadly studio-truncated drama Freud, he deployed "at least four different techniques within the film, all in b&w, to separate the flashbacks, the biographical story, dream sequences and so forth." George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt as well as Zinnemann's Julia similarly conjured wholly different looks for its contemporary scenes and romanticized memory segments.

"I always took everything in my stride... I'd always find a solution for any problem," Slocombe says. Still, he confesses, "In all the films I did, the ones I enjoyed most were always those that were literary subjects - not necessarily coming from a book, but with a script that one could listen to." He cites the "brilliant and funny" black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets as a personal favourite, along with The Great Gatsby ["I don't think that film received the press it perhaps deserved."] and the much laurelled Julia. Given that preference, it did not at first seem a natural fit when Spielberg asked the cinematographer to shoot the popcorn epic Raiders of the Lost Ark. Though very intrigued, Slocombe was somewhat taken aback by Spielberg's favouring "a very, very tight schedule, enormous numbers of set-ups every day, very large sets that he didn't want laboriously lit. It was challenging in terms of keeping on schedule - or rather ahead of schedule, as was his wont." Nonetheless, he soon grew to consider this collaboration among his most enjoyable, one that carried on through two sequels.' [From article by Dennis Harvey in Variety, 2002.]

The above illustrates what makes a great DP: adaptability. Storaro is great, but he is dogmatic; Slocombe approached each film from the point of view of the themes of the story, not from where he could apply his trademark techniques and always served the story. Much of his best work is unavailable: The Captive Heart, It Always Rains on Sunday, Freud, Taste of Fear (another rare example of a master DP shooting a horror film), The Third Secret, The Music Lovers, Travels with My Aunt, Robbery, Love Among the Ruins being the most neglected. Though, with that said, I see that The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976, Lewis John Carlino [screenwriter of Seconds] ) is on DVD, which sounds like a pretty strange movie, it is said to visually impressive, with the great Ted Haworth's (Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Longest Day, Seconds, Jeremiah Johnson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) set design illuminated by Slocombe with his regular camera operator Chic Waterson. It is based on one of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea's more obscure novels. Has anyone here seen that movie? Sarah Miles shows all and masturbates in a bathtub, apparently.

[Scrambles for Amazon.com bookmark]

[MichaelB]

Which part of my statement wasn't "entirely true", Michael? I state that Suspiria was wasn't shot in 3-strip, but that the original Italian (and perhaps other European countries) prints were dye-transfer. The U.S. prints were by DeLuxe. There is no falsity in my statement!

Actually, my use of the phrase "not entirely untrue" clearly referred to rumours spread by others, not to anything that you wrote.

And my argument stands: although it's true that Suspiria wasn't actually shot in three-strip, the lighting and general cinematographic plan was nonetheless designed from the outset to be aimed towards producing final prints in dye-transfer, creating as close to the effect of three-strip Technicolor was possible given the available technology and the desire to shoot in a Scope aspect ratio (I really don't think Suspiria would have worked in 1.33:1, even had it still been possible to screen that ratio in mainstream cinemas!).

In other words, I was adding colour to an argument that you were trying to present in stark high-contrast black and white. There was nothing wrong with your facts, it's just that they weren't quite nuanced enough for my taste.

[Steven H]

Though, with that said, I see that The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976, Lewis John Carlino [screenwriter of Seconds] ) is on DVD, which sounds like a pretty strange movie, it is said to visually impressive, with the great Ted Haworth's (Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Longest Day, Seconds, Jeremiah Johnson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) set design illuminated by Slocombe with his regular camera operator Chic Waterson. It is based on one of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea's more obscure novels. Has anyone here seen that movie? Sarah Miles shows all and masturbates in a bathtub, apparently.

You mean based on one of Mishima Yukio's obscure novels, right? I've seen it, and it's out on DVD from Image and looks pretty good, and is anamorphic. I really liked the film, it was creepy in a very real way (and not just because Kris Kristofferson pretty explicitly gives Sarah Miles head.) The set design and/or cinematography didn't strike me as remarkable, but perhaps i need to see it again.

As for color cinematography, I thought The Royal Tenenbaums was one of the more colorful and interesting looking films of the new century. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman is doing work all over the place, and Production Designer David Wasco isn't as prolific, but I think the use of color in the film has more to do with Anderson's taste (which is made pretty plain when you watch some of the Maysles documentary extras on the DVD.) I don't claim to know much about the actual process of "film-making", but from what I understand Anderson avoids computer work, or any processes that will lead to unneeded generations between the original negative and final print positive. Can someone in the know tell me if this will really produce noticable results, or is it just a director eccentricity?

There's also much to be said about Japanese directors' use of color. Aside from Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse (all of whom used color effectively in their later films), you have samurai film directors like Yamamoto Satsuo and Inagaki Hiroshi who used color magnificently. Yamamoto's Blood End and Inagaki's Whirlwind (shot by Kazuo Yamada, responsible for a great deal of golden age Samurai film cinematography) are great examples of color used to increase tension and bring a world of mythic action to life (two of my favorite samurai films, actually, seek them out!). And don't forget the color coded prostitutes of Suzuki Seijun's Gate of Flesh.

[Gordon]

Actually, my use of the phrase "not entirely untrue" clearly referred to rumours spread by others, not to anything that you wrote.

And my argument stands: although it's true that Suspiria wasn't actually shot in three-strip, the lighting and general cinematographic plan was nonetheless designed from the outset to be aimed towards producing final prints in dye-transfer, creating as close to the effect of three-strip Technicolor was possible given the available technology and the desire to shoot in a Scope aspect ratio (I really don't think Suspiria would have worked in 1.33:1, even had it still been possible to screen that ratio in mainstream cinemas!).

In other words, I was adding colour to an argument that you were trying to present in stark high-contrast black and white. There was nothing wrong with your facts, it's just that they weren't quite nuanced enough for my taste.

Eh? What the hell was that all about? Not "nuanced enough"? Who the hell talks like that? You state, quite boldly, that:

"There's also Dario Argento's Suspiria, one of the last films to be shot in old-fashioned three-strip Technicolor".

There is no ambiguity in such a statement. So your argument doesn't stand! Plenty of post-1954 films tried to emulate the 3-strip look using certain lighting techniques and dye-transfer processing - Bava, as you point out is a good example - so Argento wasn't doing anything groundbreaking, though the results were more extreme to everything that had been attempted before. The key factor to the beauty of 3-strip was actually the dye-transfer processing and once the Kodak neg stocks reached a high enough level, when combined with dye-transfering, the results were as stunning as the 3-strips of the 40s, certainly by the mid-80s when Fuji brought out the 250 ASA color stock. But by then, trends in set design and cinematography had changed, so not many films of 80s and 90s have a similar aesthetic to the films of the 40s and dye prints got rarer and rarer until the day came when they were no more, which was a very sad day for Cinema.

No disrespect intended, Michael, but don't try and make a fool out of me, as I certainly had no intention of making one of you.

[Gordon]

Thanks, Steve; I wasn't expecting anyone here to have seen this obscure Kris K movie! On Amazon's listing for the DVD, a few people say that it's a cut version, but I can't find any specific details of alternate cuts online. It was a highly controversial film in its day, with KK having an open public affair with Sarah Miles, cheating on Rita Coolidge and he bitterly regrets that part of his life, apparently. I'll probably check the film out in January.

Anderson avoids computer work, or any processes that will lead to unneeded generations between the original negative and final print positive. Can someone in the know tell me if this will really produce noticeable results, or is it just a director eccentricity?

Well, in the past, it did have very noticeable results on the opticals and Kubrick's 2001 has all-negative (65mm) opticals, apparently - it certainly looks like it. He did this to retain the sharp clarity of 65mm and it must have put butterflies in printers stomach! Nowadays, the quality of high-grade stocks is such that the grain structure can be retained to a high level, but in recent years, digital intermediates are used for effects shots and opticals, greatly reducing the labour of generational printing. Having said that, badly-produced prints of new films can be more common than one would expect, though this may be the case of bad projection exacerbating deficiencies in the prints. Or drunkenness on the part of the viewer.

I was actually going to ask about color cinematography in Japanese Cinema, as I am fairly ignorant of such films in the 50s, 60s and 70s, being concerned with the black and white masterpieces of the 40s and 50s. Kwaidan is, of course, one of the jewels in the crown of Cinema, and I can well imagine that many of the great Japanese auteurs created sublime color films, but I have yet to acquire them. Ishirô Honda's, Matango is high atmospheric horror film, also.

[Cold Bishop]

Wait... Mishima's masterful novel has a film adaption?? And one made in American none the less?! Kristofferson going down on Sarah Miles?! Mastrubation?! How on Earth did I ever overlook this title?!

As for Japan, I personally feel some of the best "Scope" cinematography was done by them. Their exploitation films are especially eye-popping-ly stunning. From what I've seen, Japanes cinematographers had a way of filling up the entire screen with amazing color and visuals. However, a lot of this could be attributed to the set designers more so than the cinematograpy, but I found Japan color cinematography to have a fantastic sense of mise-en-scene.

[Lino]

As for Japan, I personally feel some of the best "Scope" cinematography was done by them. Their exploitation films are especially eye-popping-ly stunning.

Agreed 100%. Look no further than School of the Holy Beast or any of Norifumi Suzuki's movies for that matter to witness how masterfully they handled the scope format.

Oh, and don't forget Nobuo Nakagawa's too. Those are some truly gorgeous films and perfectly composed works of art too, especially Black Cat Mansion, one of the most beautiful horror movies ever filmed.

[Cold Bishop]

As for Japan, I personally feel some of the best "Scope" cinematography was done by them. Their exploitation films are especially eye-popping-ly stunning.

Agreed 100%. Look no further than School of the Holy Beast or any of Norifumi Suzuki's movies for that matter to witness how masterfully they handled the scope format.

Oh, and don't forget Nobuo Nakagawa's too. Those are some truly gorgeous films and perfectly composed works of art too, especially Black Cat Mansion, one of the most beautiful horror movies ever filmed.

The first two Female Prisoner: Scorpion films are my personal favorites as far as the visual goes.

And let us not forget the films of Seijun Suzuki. Even Branded To Kill feels like it's exploding with color, despite being B&W.

[colinr0380]

Though, with that said, I see that The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976, Lewis John Carlino [screenwriter of Seconds] ) is on DVD, which sounds like a pretty strange movie, it is said to visually impressive, with the great Ted Haworth's (Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Longest Day, Seconds, Jeremiah Johnson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) set design illuminated by Slocombe with his regular camera operator Chic Waterson. It is based on one of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea's more obscure novels. Has anyone here seen that movie? Sarah Miles shows all and masturbates in a bathtub, apparently.

You mean based on one of Mishima Yukio's obscure novels, right? I've seen it, and it's out on DVD from Image and looks pretty good, and is anamorphic. I really liked the film, it was creepy in a very real way (and not just because Kris Kristofferson pretty explicitly gives Sarah Miles head.) The set design and/or cinematography didn't strike me as remarkable, but perhaps i need to see it again.

Sorry to take this thread off topic for a second but you can download the score for this film here

[Steven H]

Lino and Cold Bishop, what would you consider a good starting point for Suzuki Norifumi? I only have the Red Peony film he did in 1968, but I have access to most of his work. What do you suggest for initial viewing? I can enjoy Wakamatsu or Suzuki, but I balk at the extreme genre styles, and the "girl gangs" stuff doesn't seem that enticing.

The Japanese New Wave people were responsible for some beautiful (and available to watch on DVD) films as well. Shinoda Masahiro's Ballad of Orin and Through the Blossoming Cherry Trees couldn't be more visually stimulating. The former with a 1:33 aspect ratio, presumably shot open matte 35mm, but flatly with telephoto shots look amazing (especially the end where Orin, Iwashita Shima, is running alongside the sea.) Oshima's use of color in the otherwise black and white Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, and the theatrical use of colors in The Ceremony are worth looking out for. Yoshida Yoshishige's Farewell to the Summer Light is almost like a never ending watercolor painting, written by a Japanese about Spain (it's urban areas, beaches, and castles). Yoshida's Confessions Among Actresses might actually be the most strikingly shot film of the new wave, in framing and use of color, as bold as you'll find (though I can't tell if the film itself is upper tier without subtitles.) One of my favorite new wave directors, Hani Susumu, shot two films in scope, one in South America (Bride of the Andes) the other in Africa (Song of Bwana Toshi), but sadly, I haven't seen these (and I have tried very hard).

A little before, Ichikawa Kon's An Actors Revenge and Masumura Yasuzo's Blind Beast both make strong visual statements in color. Theatricality plays a large part in making these films look the way they do, I believe. Something like An Actor's Revenge or Shinoda's Buraikan is worth studying for the use of color in it's signalling (the latter being more subdued, for sure.)

It's interesting that in newer Japanese films, color is being put in the background and either minimized to produce a dark creepy effect (J-horror) or reduced to lessen distraction from character identification, ambiguities, and verite style (Suwa, Koreeda, Kawase, Ichikawa Jun). Except of course in the wild Tsukamoto films, where ASIA EXTREME comes forward, you see a return to that colorful theatricality.

[Cinéslob]

Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu has been, so far, the colour cinematography highlight of the NFT's Wild Japan season. The picture has a lurid, gouache quality reminiscent of Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain (bless the lord for the new restoration!); both films' exuberant shadings are a reminder of the delirious visceral smash that colour films can offer as an abutment for, well, 'fun'.

[Lino]

Lino and Cold Bishop, what would you consider a good starting point for Suzuki Norifumi? I only have the Red Peony film he did in 1968, but I have access to most of his work. What do you suggest for initial viewing? I can enjoy Wakamatsu or Suzuki, but I balk at the extreme genre styles, and the "girl gangs" stuff doesn't seem that enticing.

The aforementioned School of the Holy Beast is as good of a starting point as you'll ever get on Norifumi Suzuki. Besides being completely blasphemous, heretic, sinful and subversive (key word for this fearless director), it's also brilliantly shot and constantly inventive. Do check it out if you can.

And please don't dismiss the girl gang movies -- Panik House's DVD for his Terrifying Girl's School series entry is another reason to give this man some credit. He could do so much with so little and again, his direction is always inventive and it never lets steam from beginning to end. He was particularly talented at mixing social critique with visual panache and this is another good example of that. If you still have doubts, go and read Scharphedin2's comments on this thread.

[Cold Bishop]

Holy Beast is usually looked as his best film. Also unmentioned above is his film Sex & Fury.

Although not Norifumi Suzuki, I already threw in my two cents for the first two Scorpion films as high points in the genre. Much better than most of the other films in the genre (even the best ones I've seen from the genre), and I don't recall the film being so extreme to be off-putting.

I would recommend checking out the thread on Japanese exploitation films, since the quality of an exploitation film usually comes to down to the sheer amount of style. There should be a lot more from this genre in there.

Also, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial I've always heard regarded as having great lurid color cinematography.

[Steven H]

Also, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial I've always heard regarded as having great lurid color cinematography.

I'll check out Holy Beast then, thanks for the recommendation. I suppose one problem for me is that there's so much Suzuki Norifumi work out there. If I enjoy that, I'll seek out Sex and Fury, Female Prisoner: Scorpion, and probably Terrifying Girl's School (I'll try and keep an open mind.)

As for the two Oshimas, they do have fine color cinematography, but it's a world apart from the invention on display in the later films. Even Boy, which subverts an already subversive Cruel Story of Youth, looks more interesting to me.

[Gordon]

Terrific interview with legendary British cinematographer, Gil Taylor.

And a very interesting interview with Vilmos Zsigmond from 2004.