Camerimage: “We have to be part of the change”

Now in its 32^nd year, Camerimage festival in Poland holds a prized place on the Oscars awards circuit and is traditionally held in high esteem among cineasts, but remarks by its founder and director ahead of this year’s event have cast its future in doubt.

Marek Żydowicz had suggested that pressure to increase gender diversity at his festival was “a fanatical revolution that destroys the cathedrals of art.”

“Can we sacrifice works and artists with outstanding artistic achievements solely to make room for mediocre film productions?” he wrote in an op-ed that left no room for misinterpretation.

Blitz director Steve McQueen promptly pulled his participation from the festival’s opening night, followed by Coralie Fargeat, director of The Substance.

Actor and producer Cate Blanchett did not, choosing to fire back from within. At a public Q&A, the jury chair of this year’s Camerimage main competition said: “We’re all part of the conversation. We can’t walk away from it. We have to be part of the change.”

The optics weren’t good given that the festival had controversially decided to premiere the western Rust on which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot. Director Joel Souza, who was injured on the set, and Bianca Cline the DP who finished the film, were in attendance.

The film’s closing credits begin with the words ‘For Halyna’, followed by a question attributed to her ‘What can we do to make this better?’

Souza said that he and Cline tried to preserve every single frame Hutchins had shot in the final picture. He told Screen: “We’d recreate the set, recreate the light, recreate everything. It was a look that Halyna and I had developed together, and then a look that Bianca and I redeveloped together.”

Representation of female filmmakers

Multiple other professionals in attendance voiced their views on equality and representation. Hélène De Roux of Zeiss countered: “Ladies thank you all for coming. We are delighted to continue to help you build whatever cathedrals you want. Camerimage should be as happy for you to be here as we are to come here.”

Wolfgang Lempp, co-founder of Filmlight said: “We don’t have a women’s colourist award or a foreign language colourist award but we do recognise there is no level playing field in the real world. We unapologetically promote female participation. We would like to see more female colourists and DoPs and we’d like to see more women elected as presidents.”

Nancy Schreiber (Mapplethorpe) said: “It’s not a fair world. There’s no diversity [in the audience] here in terms of other cultures. We just have to believe there are other people out there who accept we are competent and will give us a chance.

The 75-year-old added: “Besides being a woman, I got the age thing. Am I still walking? Yes, I work out six days a week but there is ageism in our industry. Even white males are having a rough time at the ASC if they are of a certain age.”

Rachel Morrison, who was the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography (for Mudbound) was at Camerimage presenting her first film as director. The Fire Within, written by Barry Jenkins, is a sports biopic about Olympic boxer Claressa Shields who fought for gender parity in the sport.

“As a female DP, I know what it’s like to be in a craft that people do not picture women in, where it isn’t enough just to be good at your job,” Morrison said. “There’s still a tendency to have women tell only women’s stories. The industry thinks of women for rom-coms, or melodramas, and it’s the men who are given opportunities in action movies or sports stories. Cinematography still has further to go in terms of combatting the perceptions women face. For my entire career, people have been looking around for the DP and I’ve had to say, ‘Wait, I’m the DP.’ But it’s slowly changing.”

Lachman lifetime award

Honoured with a lifetime achievement award was the American cinematographer Ed Lachman. He learned the craft working for the great European lighting cameramen Vittorio Storaro, Sven Nykvist and Robby Müller, before going on to shoot films with Werner Herzog (Stroszek), Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), Wim Wenders (Tokyo-Ga) and Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich) and Pablo Larraín whose latest film, Maria, screened during the festival. It’s a biopic of opera singer Maria Callas starring Angeline Jolie and was shot in Budapest (standing in for Paris) on 16mm and 35mm.

“It was very important for Pablo that we shoot in La Scala (opera house, Milan) itself because that was such an important part of her life. But it was very expensive. For just four hours it cost us $250,000 and I had to figure out a way to light it within the least amount of time, like 45 minutes. They wouldn’t even let us prep lights in there because they have productions going non-stop. All of that had to be done in the time slot we were allocated.

Lachman worked with the lighting director of La Scala and just a handful of crew to light the auditorium.

“I knew we needed a stronger spotlight on Maria so we had that light resting in the elevator ready to go up to the lighting booth as soon as our four hours began. That was the most difficult thing for me to do on this film because of the tight time frame, the multiple scenes we had there and because primarily that scene is shot with Steadicam.”

AI and Cinematography

A session organised by the American Society of Cinematographers explored the growing use of AI tools like Runway for content creation and revealed a mixture of feelings.

While open to the idea of generating storyboards to help with the design process, most seasoned DPs were sceptical and wary of using GenAI any further.

Catherine Goldschmidt (The Last of Us) said: “I have dabbled with AI because I am interested in using it as a brainstorming tool but to be honest I got a little bit nervous because I feel like the prompts need to be so specific - and we’ve signed NDAs – that I was worried about putting that out into the ether. I don’t totally understand what happens to it.

“As far as would I draw a moral line, I would worry that if I trained the tool to produce an image with such specificity and show it to a director that then I would be making what [cinematographers] then do on set obsolete. I’m sure that’s a lot of people’s fear in the room. It’s a fine line between approaching it as a storyboarding tool or a jumping-off point and copying. If all your references are other films then you can slip into just copying other films when what you actually want to do is synthesize [references] and shoot something that is singular, special and unique and unrepeatable.”

Salvatore Totino (Spider-Man: Homecoming) said: “I do have some anxiety and fears about it. My fears stem from starting to rely too much on feeding prompts to AI that I’m cutting off my brain from actually going farther than it would have had I not settled for whatever it was giving me at the time.

“The part that I have a hard time with is asking a computer to try to visualise an idea or thought that I’m having. When I do a project I draw a lot of references from music, photography and films and also everyday experiences that invoke a certain feeling in me that I might then be able to translate to the visual image. But if I’m trying to give specific prompts to a computer then my brain is no longer invoking my emotions or sparking any of my own thoughts. The computer is going to give me a result but it feels like the end of a process not the evolution of your imagination.”

DP turned director

Aside from Morrison, another DP making their directorial debut was Rodrigo Prieto - a multiple Oscar, BAFTA and ASC Award-nominated cinematographer, best known for Brokeback Mountain (2005), Babel (2006), Argo (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Irishman (2019). For his directorial debut, he chose an adaptation for Netflix of the 1950s novel Pedro Páramo by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, which screened at Camerimage and on which he shared photography duties with Nico Aguilar.

“I had been thinking about directing because I do like working with actors,” Prieto said. “Also, this is a novel that I’ve loved since I first read it in high school. So when I got the call from [producer] Stacy Perskie that Netflix had bought the rights and they’re looking for a director, it was an automatic ‘yes’ from me.”

“I spoke to some of my director friends looking for advice. The first person I turned to was Martin Scorsese because at the time we were together in Oklahoma prepping Killers of the Flower Moon. He told me to just make sure I stick closely to the original material because if not, [the producers] will kill you.”

New talent

In a session aimed at encouraging young talent into the industry, Jamie Ramsay (All of Us Strangers, Living) said: “I grew up in South Africa where mentorship was not really a thing. When I did have the opportunity to be on set with older DPs I always declined. The reason is I wanted my style to be born completely out of darkness. I didn’t want my choices to be influenced by someone else. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be done. I wanted it to be born out of my own failures. Now I’m in a position where I can offer advice to the younger generation of DPs I find the process so rewarding.”

Kate Reid has just shot the series What it Feels Like For A Girl in Wales. She advised: “Try to choose the projects that resonate with you because then you are likely to find your voice. Shooting faces, even in corporate video and commercials, teaches you how to light. Treat every opportunity you get to work as an opportunity to learn.”

Lighting animation

Adam Habib and Jonathan Pytko - the cinematographers behind this year’s animated smash Inside Out 2 - shared their process working with virtual cameras and lighting.

“Everyone has heard of the phrase ‘lights, camera, action’ – we have the same thing but the order is changed so it’s ‘camera, action, lights,” Habib said. “That refers to three big production departments of the film – layout, animation and lighting. The challenge for us becomes how do we collaborate across the pipeline to create the cinematography of the movie.”

They begin with environmental lighting appropriate for the time of day of each scene. “We try to emulate live action techniques by using soft lights to create a night time atmosphere,” Pytko said. “Of course, being an animated film, we need to be able to break all those rules whenever we need to for visual purposes. So we have thousands of practical lights and then our main character (Joy) is also a light source. If you were to actually photograph a light bulb it would look very flat, so we’re breaking those physical properties to make her look like a shaped character.”

They talked about developing a ‘colour script’ which describes the relationship between colour, light and camera that is themed throughout the film. They painted scenes for colour references and also used movies such as Tim Burton’s Batman and Punch Drunk Love for other scenes.