Cinematographers( Poets of Filmlight)

LANDMARKS
1991 Cable and Satellite Television comes to India following the Gulf War

LANDMARKS

1991 Cable and Satellite Television comes to India following the Gulf War

Looking at the production stills
Ravi Vasudevan

I remember looking at a strangely revealing image in a tv programme about a film shoot: Juhi Chawla, in close embrace with a now forgotten male co-star, captured just the moment before the shot was taken. The camera crew, light boys and the heavy apparatus of image making surrounded the couple. The star's face was closed, reflecting no emotion, setting up an inscrutable mask. This naked image, at once shorn of any masquerade but determined not to reveal any interiority presented an impregnable surface to the relentlessness of public scrutiny. This is one, peculiarly hermetic instance of the many worlds revealed by the images which document the time before a film unravels on the screen. The array of stills available from the National Film Archives of India speak to that curiosity we feel when we wonder about the space beyon the image so carefully framed for our view. How ever it is to regard the most intimate of close-ups, expressing the most delicate of emotions, knowing that this image is carved out from a press of bodies and machines.

Even before we subject these images to an intensive reading, there is the business of simply identifying what they contain. At present many stills have not been labeled in terms of film, studios, actors or crew. But there is also the issue of what these photographs say, how they ask us to look at the cinema as a social and cultural institution, and, specifically, as a site of production. There are certain systematic features to this genre of photography. At one level there is a demystifying of the cinematic image. Perhaps there is nothing more tacky than displaying a painted backdrop. In the production still, these surfaces appear in a space before their narrativization into the cinematic image: they are not presented to evoke immersion in a character and the space that defines her. It is this humdrum quality that invites us to look at these surfaces, and the other objects composed in the photograph, as the material of production, just as the space can be thought of as one composed of labour undertaken by the anonymous people setting up the camera, directing the light, standing atop a camera pedestal.

Studio sets, painted backdrops, microphones, cranes, scaffolding for lights are placed in the bustle of everyday work. What motivates this kind of representation? Although we don't know very much about the circulation of these photographs, who they were intended for, can we hazard that the cinematic institution has to represent itself as work, providing gainful, skilled employment, thereby laying claim to being recognized as an industry like any other? Perhaps, given the often antagonistic relationship of the state to the entertainment industry. Whatever the rationale of the genre, there are rich possibilities here for looking at how a scene is physically composed for the camera, what decorative conventions and spatial organization were used, the forms of labour employed. For example, a still from an Imperial production of the late 1920s suggests that Ardeshir Irani's company worked with the limits imposed by the proscenium stage. Then there is the film apparatus itself; here are the residual traces, from these long-lost days, of the mechanical means employed by our film industry. When put together with the intensive interviews undertaken by the Raqs Media Collective with cinematographers, we have the possibility of scrutinizing these images for an evolving history of film technologies and techniques.

But the photos are not all of one type, documenting an anonymous labour and the material components of cinematic production. For one set of photographs, much more clearly of the genre of the publicity photograph, asks us to invest in the personality of the director. The recurring motif of the director placed next to a camera, looking at images through a view finder, suggest something of the issues at stake: that the mechanical apparatus needs to be personalized, be rendered through an identifiable figure. We may reflect that the epoch these photos document, from the 1930s through the 1950s, placed particular emphasis on the film director, not only the star. In this sense they generate a symbolic account of the process of cinematic production, an account of who represents the institution or provides a frame of authority, legitimacy and fascination for the public. The symbolism of this condensation has different resonances. The respectable gentleman professional is conjured up by a cameraman-director such as Nitin Bose. Bose is always shown directly involved with the apparatus, standing with a neat, professional demeanour, one hand resting on the film spool, perusing negatives, staring out at us with urbane transparency.

A succession of stills feature that iconic figure of the historical genre and costume film, Sohrab Modi, from late in his career. Something of the stolidity of Modi as an actor, a heavy theatricality of dialogue delivery and physical presentation, rendered his characters as visual and aural motifs in the ornate, somewhat ponderous heraldry of the Hindustani stage Modi drew into the cinema. The aging, portly figure we see giving actors advice in front of the painted backdrop conjures up the role of an elder statesman or a paterfamilias. In negotiating outdoor shooting on a boat, or straddling a platform sunken into the water to capture action on a pier, he suggests a strangely heroic image, engrossed in the physicality of film-making. The aura is different from that of the professional: there is something of the bada sahib, his head covered with a solar topi, in Modi's outdoor shoots. The umbrella which protects the camera from rain and harsh sunlight in the outdoors looks like a ceremonial chhatri when Modi is under it, something which could have come from the prop department of one of his historical movies. The 'symbolic' of these photographs, what organizes them in terms of meaning, arises from such slippages in the signifier, from its location in the historical genre to its maker, suggesting his and the genre's impending passage into the past. Pathos is built into the Modi series, as the historical and costume genres with which he was associated were to lose their clout amongst audiences increasingly attuned to the omnibus genre of contemporary life, the social film.

Then there are Fattelal and Damle, (in photos identified by PK Nair), directors of the wonderful Sant Tukaram (1936). The photograph of Damle is particularly evocative of a relationship to the cinema that is exultantly immersive. The technical crew stand alongside the camera tripod, enjoying the spectacle of their director upto his neck in the water, a wide grin on his face. Those who have seen the film would know that this is the point when Tuka, under Brahmanical imprimatur, has to cast his verses into the waters; Tuka's beloved deity, Pandurang, causes the verses to miraculously resurface, leading to the conversion of the Brahmanical inquisitor to Tuka's non-hierarchical vision of the divine. In this production still, we are witness to another order of immersion in the realm of the transcendant. Director, camera and crew meld into a state of being which doubles the object, gleefully challenging the elements, the possibilities of dissolving into nature with the verses. But, to quote Tuka, all will find their way to the lord, and, indeed a way back to us, in the images which play before us at the cinema hall.

some production stills

Themes

Notes on light

Notes on LightCollated by CK Muralidharan

continued...

Themes

Dialogue on colour

These are excerpts taken from a dialogue on colour carried out on the ISCML list (Indian Society of Indian Cinematographers' Mailing List).

Sunny Joseph:

Friends,

Just a few definitions related to Colour that we all know, yet....

Chroma - Intensity, brilliance or purity of a colour [degree of saturation of a surface colour]

Hue - An actual colour, e.g. red, green.[dominant wavelength of a colour]

Tint - A variety of a colour, especially one made lighter, by adding white.

Tone - The lightness or darkness of a colour.

How many of us consciously think of a colour in these 5 tangents?

How many of our Director/Cameraman/Art-director trios design their colour schemes taking all this elements plus the psychological impact of a colour in relation to a particular scene, emotional state of the characters etc.?

Did you know that:

Man first used colour 70,000 years ago?

Only raindrops of certain critical sizes can form a rainbow?

10 million variations in colour are known to the eye?

" Music provides the best analogy for colour [they even share a vocabulary with words like 'harmony' and 'tone'] and the attribution of colours to sounds is not uncommon among painters and musicians. It rarely occurs the other way round, although a chilling exception is to be found in Munch's account of how his painting "The Scream" was inspired. Tired and ill, he was watching the sun set over a fjord:

" I felt a scream pass through nature; it seemed that I could hear the scream. I painted this picture - painted the clouds as red blood - the colours were screaming."

Somnath:

Sunny, my understanding of color (or colour depending on where you are right now) extends to three attributes, namely, Hue, Saturation and Intensity where Hue, as you say is the actual wavelength of the light - perceived by the human eye as a particular color.

Saturation would be the amount of gray in the color - meaning whereby, if you take out all the "color" from any color, you will get a gray (one of the shades of the gray scale.) Imagine if you will a gradation from left to right where the left most manifestation is one of the grays from the gray scale and to the extreme right is the color at it's most saturated - in between are all the other saturations of that color. Which brings us to tonality. Different colors show up as different tones in a B&W picture. (Green is lighter and thus higher than Red on the gray scale, for example.) Which is to say the when we bleed the color out of a picture; we get grays - or in other words, tones. This is extremely important for us cinematographers.

Imagine two vibrantly different colors (let us say shades of orange and green) that equate to the same part of the gray scale. For a B&W picture, it would be a disaster to juxtapose the two colors (for example if I shoot someone wearing a shirt of one of the above colors standing in front of a wall painted with the other color - you can imagine the effect.) So I would say that tone is a derivative of saturation.

Intensity is the amount of white or black in the color. This is also of extreme importance to us cinematographers since the amount of light we decide to throw on a color will decide its perception by viewers. Meaning whereby that dark red, red and light red (pink?) are the same hue and saturation but with different amounts of white or black mixed with the color or, you could think of it as different amounts of light falling on the red object.

Comments?

Take care,

Som

Sunny:

Somnath, It will be a highly flexible linguistics that we can expect when one talks about Colour. In fact, all this dialogue will enhance our understanding of colour. So cheers :-)

According to the modern scientific definition of colour, it is not legitimate to ascribe colour to an object, but only to the light reflected from it. However, it is a convenience, even a practical necessity, to assign colours to reflecting surfaces seen under customary types of illumination such as daylight or tungsten light. When we do so, we are referring to the capacity of a surface to modify the colour of the light falling on it. We should remember that an object has no single characteristic colour, because its appearance is affected by a number of factors, the most important of which are the quality and intensity of the illumination.

Saturation is not the grey in a colour, on the contrary it is the strength or vividness of a hue. [We, luckily agree on hue.] A red for example, can increase in saturation from a pale pink to a vivid vermilion. The term was originally coined by dyers to describe the strength of a dye. It is used to describe the purity of a colour - the quality which distinguishes from a greyed colour. [When you take out all colour from any colour there is no colour. You will get a grey, provided you are only talking about photographing/ recording that colour in black & white. In fact to preserve colour for more than a hundred years, is to shoot it, in B&W, in the original Technicolor way!! Or may be make primary colour separation negative in B&W, from the original colour negative.]

The C.I.E. [Commission Internationale d'Eclairage] distinguishes between colourfulness and saturation, defining the latter as the amount of colourfulness judged to be present in a visual sensation in proportion to its total brightness. So saturation is relative colourfulness. Judgement of saturation remains remarkably constant while overall brightness varies. Thus, suppose a green dress is seen in various conditions of {'white'} light and shade: its brightness will vary, and so will its apparent colourfulness, but the saturation will remain constant.

The less white [not grey] a pigment colour contains, the more saturated it is - a pure ultramarine paint can be desaturated to sky blue, for example, by adding white.

While, when you are talking about 'tonality' you are referring to the reflectivity of the object surface, which determines it to be placed in a specific point in a grey-scale.

[Refer Ansel Adams, Zone System]. When you talk about 'tone' in the context of colour, it is a colour differing slightly in any way from a specified colour ['a tone of blue']. And a colour that appreciably modifies another ['blue with a greenish tone'].

'Intensity' in fact is the measurable brightness of a light source and a synonym for saturation. Judgement of saturation remains constant in light or shade, but its overall brightness and apparent colourfulness will vary. [ The amount of light falling on a colour will not vary the perception of saturation!]

Suggested reading:

"COLOUR" Ed. Helen Varley, pub.by ME [Marshall Editions, London -1980

"COLOUR" by Alison Cole, pub.by Dorling Kindersley, London -1993

"A HISTORY OF COLOUR" by Manlio Brusatin, pub.by Shambhala, London -1991

"EXPLORING THE COLOUR IMAGE" Kodak

Themes

THE THEME OF 'DARKNESS' IN CINEMATOGRAPHY

by sunny joseph

Presented at the Second Cinematographers' Combine Meet, October 2000, Mumbai.

When Vivanji started his video film on the Calcutta installation, he immediately shouted, "It is too dark.". We stopped the projection, increased the brightness and then, everything was washed out! It was the opposite, it was too bright. Then we stopped the screenings again, and changed the element of darkness/brightness within the frame. Finally we realised that there is only one optimum level of tonal values as intended by the filmmaker, which will without doubt give/attribute the right meaning to his image. In fact this is a rare paradox. The darkness/brightness duality within a cinematographic image is simultaneously mutually exclusive as well as mutually inclusive.

The second incident was when Rahul Ranade played his music. Most of us closed our eyes and listened to it. It is true that whenever great music is played people tend to close their eyes. Does the feeling of darkness, by closing our eyes connect us to a primordial womb like experience?

One of the meanings given to the word 'dark' in the dictionary is, ignorant, unenlightened: My attempt here is to take on a small journey to explore the realms of imagination and image creation. No ultimate truths, but only a loving attempt to communicate with all of you.

Narayana Guru once [1920] placed a small notice at the place of a gathering of world religious leaders: "Not to argue and not to win, but to know and to inform." I believe that this understanding will be a beautiful basis for any kind of dialogue.

As a cinematographer I believe in the power of images. I am also concerned about how an image is used in a particular context. The knowledge about our world today is transmitted more with images and as 'image makers' working in cinema, we cannot escape from the socio-political and philosophical questions as well as the aesthetic questions, on the process of creation and Use of the images. Until now, 'mythology' had a great role the evolution of culture and societies. In the new millennium it will be 'IMAGOLOGY' which is going to be decisive in the evolution of a new man.

All through my student days and even now, I stand in awe of the power of the moving images. I am always surprised about the ability of the human eye, 'the persistence of vision'. When did this ability originate in human physiology? Does this ability in any other way help the evolution of human species? Why this trait did not disappear from the species? "Persistence of Vision" must have been present even in the cave men! These are some questions I am constantly asking myself in wonder. In the distant past, the predominant sense organ for knowing our reality was the "EYE" and vision itself was an integral part of the endeavour. What the eye saw could be described, catalogued, and even subjected to mathematical analysis.

Plato's [350 BC] awe of eye and vision was stated thus:

"Vision, in my view, is the cause of greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heaven. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also the means of research into the nature of the Universe."

Now, as we have seen earlier, the best way to experience a near to DARK-DARKNESS experience is to shut our eyes. Of course a permanent closing of our eyes would be the experience of the ultimate darkness - death. Or is it the beginning of the ultimate experience of light? Who knows? If I were not to be attending this seminar, I was to attend another seminar in Trivandrum - again on darkness, another kind of darkness - 'suicide'. Any way it was nice of the doctors to invite an artist to be in dialogue with them, as we are doing here with writers, music directors, painters and directors.

Coming back to the theme of darkness, the first thing I did was to put the word 'darkness' in yahoo search and click 'go'. The search gave at least more than 16000 sites related/referred to the word darkness. My aim was to find out about what would be the very first account/description of darkness in literature. That will also connect me with the main theme of our seminar - 'word to image'. And as far as I could gather the information, by all probability it is in "Rig Veda", in the hymn of creation:

"In the beginning darkness was wrapped [hidden] in darkness."

TO BEGIN WITH, IN CREATION…."THERE WAS ONLY DARKNESS WRAPPED IN DARKNESS". BUT PARADOXICALLY IN CINEMATOGRAPHIC CREATION 'DARKNESS IS WRAPPED IN LIGHT'. WE ARE IN FACT TALKING ABOUT A 'VISIBLE DARKNESS'.

Cont....

Nature and essence of "Darkness"

I asked Sudheer: What is the 'theme of darkness'! Will it be primarily the element of filmic viewing experience or of the practice of the creation of the image; of the lighting -'chiaroscuro' or of the darkness used to focus or of the darkness used to hide, or is it darkness as a matter of low budget/NFDC regional-film look /elementary Vs abundance/spectacle/lack of darkness in the mainstream films etc?

Sudheer answered: " The 'theme of darkness' is an abstract quality of nature, matter, time, light, emotions, nostalgia etc.etc; perceived differently by different people and artists/artforms. I think the 'darkness' in the discussion is, as you perceive as an artist & a cinematographer, might not be a political note. I am not sure let me put it very crudely, as one of the ways…[How do you react to a script of a film/scene which has night, evening, dark day interior etc. in different ways and what is the thought process before you get down to the numbers [of stock & foot candles etc.]. It will be this mental process that will lead to the calculated cinematographic image…"

And we cinematographers, in the darkness of a studio shout, "Lights On." Much before us, within the fathomless 'great void', someone wished:

"Let there be light."

People around the world seem to feel that darkness precedes light. Darkness is somehow older, more primitive, more fundamental, and light penetrates a darkness that was there before it. 'From non-being lead me to being', Says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 'from darkness lead me to the light, from death lead me to immortality'. For the Jews and Arabs, the Germanic Peoples, the Celts and many others, each day begins in the evening - the night comes first and the light afterwards. Similarly at the very beginning of things: 'at first', according to a creation hymn in Rig Veda, 'there was only darkness wrapped in darkness'. In Hesiod's Theogony, 'Out of Void came darkness and black night, and out of Night came Light and Day, her children'. In Genesis, in the beginning there was darkness and God, said, "Let there be light". It was only after making light God went on to fashion his other creations.

Some people, however, have maintained the opposite tradition, that the light existed first and darkness came later. One explanation of why this happened is that the Creator grew weary of endless light and created darkness for relief from it. Or some say that light and darkness have co-existed from the beginning. In China the two great opposites of Yin and Yang correspond to darkness and light respectively. According to a Scandinavian myth, there was a great abyss of emptiness, which was charged with magic power. To the south of it was a realm of blazing heat and to the north a realm of freezing darkness. It was the meeting in the abyss of ice from the north and sparks from the south which made life, so that creation that creation resulted from the mingling of the opposites, of light with dark and heat with cold.

Among the first experiences of a baby must presumably be the sensation of coming out of darkness into light, and all our lives-long, one of the fixed characteristics of our environment is the alternation of light and darkness, on which we pattern the basic rhythm of our lives. In daylight we are active, at night we turn off our conscious energies and go to sleep. Light let us see, darkness walls us in makes us blind, groping and afraid. The light and heat of the sun bring Nature to life in the spring, the winter comes in with darkness and cold.

As a result, light naturally means good, activity, creativity, spiritual vision, while darkness means evil, fear and doubt, inactivity, sterility and spiritual blindness. What is done in the light of day is open, public, innocent, but what is done in the dark is secretive, furtive, harmful or shameful. The crowing of the cock at the first glimmer of dawn puts to flight the evil beings, which infest the night.

LET US NOW TRY TO VISUALIZE - TRY TO RECOLLECT IMAGES/FRAMES CORRESPONDING TO THE MEANINGS GIVEN TO DARK<>DARKNESS. THEN LET US TRY TO APPLY THE MEANING BACK TO A MOMENT IN A GIVEN STORY AND IDENTIFY THE ELEMENTS WITHIN AN IMAGE, WHICH WILL CREATE THAT MEANING!

dark adj.

1 a) entirely or partly without light b) neither giving nor receiving light 2 giving no performance; closed !this theater is dark tonight" 3 a) almost black b) not light in color; deep in shade 4 not fair in complexion; brunet or swarthy 5 hidden; secret 6 not easily understood; hard to make clear; obscure 7 gloomy; hopeless; dismal 8 angry or sullen !responding to criticism with dark looks" 9 evil; sinister 10 ignorant; unenlightened 11 deep and rich, with a melancholy sound

n. 1 the state of being dark 2 night; nightfall 3 a dark color or shade

vt., vi. [Obs.] to darken in the dark uninformed; ignorant keep dark to keep secret or hidden darkish, adj. darkly, adv. darkness, n. [Slides, video clips to be projected, discussed and technology analyzed. The 'how' of how things are done]

[The day I started for Mumbai, I photographed some more slides and stills from films. But I did not develop them. I will also request you to remember images from Bergman's "SILENCE" [cin. Sven Nykvist], "WILD STRAWBERRIES" [cin. Gunnar Fischer] and "CRIES AND WHISPERS" [cin. Sven Nykvist], Robert Wiene's "CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI" [cin. Willy Hameister], Sergei Eisenstein's "BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN" [cin. Eduard Tisse], Orson Well's "CITIZEN KANE" [cin. Gregg Toland], Federico Fellini's "LA DOLACE VITA" [cin. Otello Martelli], Alain Resnais' "HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR" [cin. Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi], Guru Dutt's "KAGEZ KE PHOOL" & "PYASSA" photographed by our master VK MOORTHY, and Satyajit Ray's "CHARULATHA" & "PATHER PANCHALI" again photographed by our great grand master SUBRATA MITRA.

Also I wanted to show you some photographs by RAGHU RAI, a photograph of Mother Teresa, with the apt use of extreme tonal values, and the well known photo of the half buried kid in the sands, of Bhopal tragedy, where he avoids blacks and whites, it is all a cool gray, you almost feel cold death. It will be also interesting, if you could think of also the paintings of Vivanji, especially of those painted after visiting the Nazi camps in Poland]

In fact in the very process of doing this exercise will reveal to us the elements of cinematographic practice and realization.

[I would now like to project some slides, copies of paintings from masters who worked on the element of light. I want you to consider these paintings just for the use of light/darkness to evoke a certain definition/meaning of the word darkness. In its narrative, the slides also take you from a feeling of sinister darkness/shadow/hidden effect to a bright/open/tangible feel of light. Just watch/meditate on these slides. The masters are - Caravaggio, Vermeer, Joseph Wright, Velazquez and Rembrandt.]

Before I joined the film institute, I read one article written by James Broughton, an experimental filmmaker from America. He tells us the story of young boy who wakes up in the middle of the night and cries out:

"Turn on the lights, I want to see my dreams."

And I thought that it was me, and I joined cinema.

In the cinematic experience there are two realms in which we can observe the 'theme of darkness'. They are the viewing experience in a darkened cinema hall and the use of tonal values from black to white to represent forms/images.

The experience of darkness, shared in a cinema hall is unique in its revelations. It is the most primordial, womb-like and cave-like experience we have. We are unified in the 'dark void' with expectations and wonder. Probably, it is also the most secular experience we have today available in the society. Within the enlightened darkness, rays of love and wisdom, even subverts the power of money. ["Money is the alienated human ability" - Karl Marx.]

Hugo Munsterberg, in his 1916 classic book, 'The Photoplay: A Psychological Study", wrote about the power of Cinema:

"The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us."

Immediately after the first screenings of Lumiere Brothers, a critic emphatically wrote of the new invention:

" DEATH IS NO MORE AN ABSOLUTE TRUTH."

Let us now look at the element of darkness within a photographic image as the variations in tonal values:

On its own, darkness or brightness/lightness are formless. Mixing of light and dark create forms/images. [We can refer to the practice in cinematography by two terms: contrast ratio and lighting ratio.]