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HOW-TO, Techniques, & Best Practices Channel
What is Realistic Cinematography?
By M. David Mullen, ASC
posted Jun 27, 2008, 12:07 |
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M. David Mullen, ASC has earned two Independent Spirit Award nominations for best
cinematography, for Twin Falls Idaho in 1999 and for Northfork in 2003. Photographing
over thirty-five films, his filmography includes Assassination of a High School
President (2008), Big Love (2007), The Astronaut Farmer (2007), Solstice (2006),
and Akeelah and the Bee (2006).
As
most people know, the stylistic trend in cinematography over the century has been
towards greater realism, which has been easier to achieve in low-light situations
thanks to more sensitive film stocks and electronic sensors, plus faster lenses.
There has always been an impulse to make the lighting in a movie logically motivated,
even in the heyday of the Hollywood Studio Era – for example, if someone
lit a candle on the left side of the frame, the movie lamp simulating that source
would not come from the right side of frame. A window on a soundstage set, in
a scene set in the daytime, would have bright light shining through it, moonlight
would appear darker than sunlight, etc. This natural drive to motivate light logically
and dramatically, according to the needs of the story, was tempered by the studio’s
request that actors look their best at all times.
Trends came and went over time, from the very diffused look of the 1930’s
to the very crisp look of the 1940’s, from shallow-focus to deep-focus cinematography,
or from the somewhat Expressionist or Baroque use of shadow patterns to the simpler
lighting of the 1950’s. The experience of World War II caused a lot of directors
and cinematographers to strip away some of the more elaborate visual flourishes
of pre-war cinema in search of greater naturalism. However, to modern eyes, some
of this simpler lighting strikes us now as looking more “brutal” rather
than more natural, as if many scenes were lit by just parking a 10K next to the
camera. What seems like realism to one generation often looks like artifice to
the next.
What is called realistic cinematography today is not necessarily an image that
replicates the way our own eyes see reality. For one thing, we do not perceive
the world as that strobing, staccato motion a movie camera running at 24 fps give
us, nor are our eyes closed fifty-percent of the time like most shutters are.
Our eyes do not see a two-dimensional image with a surface grain texture. We don’t
perceive a rectangular black border around reality with objects composed in pleasing
patterns within that frame. Our view on the world is not hyper wide-angle nor
telephoto in terms of optical compression.
All of this is to say that realism in modern cinematography is sometimes merely
the artificial copying of artifacts from documentary work in which there are uncontrollable
elements or moments causing certain artifacts (focus problems, lens flares, underexposed
and thus, grainy or noisy images). It feels like reality because it looks rough,
unplanned, unmanipulated – though the image may be as thoroughly designed
and executed as the slickest shot ever made in a classic Hollywood movie. In other
words, “realism” becomes just another form of artificial style, only
this one conjures up associations with documentaries and thus gives the movie
a false sense of honesty in its recreations. Of course, this is part of the pleasure
of fictional movies, the willing suspension of disbelief, made possible partly
through the believability of the images being presented.
With modern tools, it is more possible than ever to shoot movies in available
light. This approach, used appropriately, can enhance the drama of a scene or
an entire movie. But it sometimes can be used as a crutch by some filmmakers to
avoid actually doing the hard work of making the movie: taking the time to think
about the appropriate use of light and shadow to tell this particular story, and
then executing that creative idea. This desire by some to avoid thinking about
controlling or creating light even extends into other issues like composition;
they fall into the trap of seeing the camera merely as a passive recording tool
that follows whatever action occurs in front of it. Yet, oddly enough, these filmmakers
are more than happy to take these sloppy images with their indifferent use of
light and unimaginative use of composition, and then, edit them in a highly stylized
and complicated manner, and then compound that giving the final production a strangely
unnatural color-correction, maybe hyper-noisy and desaturated, even greenish as
well. What results is a movie that is as stylized as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
in terms of its connections to the real world.
I bring all of this up because I often wonder whether we have hit a certain aesthetic
wall in regards to realism because it has become easy to do from a mechanical
standpoint… but many filmmakers don’t have the artistic maturity to
use it as an effective storytelling device, nor are the stories themselves imbued
with any real insights into human existence – and thus the hyper-realistic
cinematography being used comes off as a shallow stylistic trick. Either we need
a healthier respect for what should constitute “realism” in movies,
or we need to remind ourselves that realism is just another stylistic device that
we can choose to employ when it will be the most effective way of telling the
particular story at hand, or choose to discard when there are better approaches.
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