What does a cinematographer do?

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Nothing
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#26 Post by Nothing » Fri Apr 13, 2007 4:31 pm

Shrekk, it's interesting that you bring up Coppola and Bertolucci, two directors I find entirely overrated. Whereas Scorsese, of course, has a command over both his actors and his mise en scene...

The style doesn't have to be extravagant or even overt, I'm just saying the director should know what they are doing... and, of course, many don't. But you can TELL. And I do hope I have loped off more than half of the directors' guilds in the world.

As for the US/European dichotomy, of course you have US filmmakers who are closer to the European tradition and vice-versa, however I was making reference to the attributes that tend to be more valued more within these respective cultures - American film culture is undoutably more focused on performances and narrative, whilst French film culture is traditionally focused more around the director and the mise en scene although, admittedly, most films from all parts of the globe seem to be merging into one great big homogonized stinking stew these days, but then I try not to think about that...

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Person
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#27 Post by Person » Sun Aug 12, 2007 10:16 am

There are many great films where the visual style - precluding the sets and costumes - is almost purely down to the cinematographer. This is why I often prattle on about DPs on this forum. Sidney Lumet primarily concentrates on refining the script, casting and rehearsing every scene before shooting. But he has almost always chosen to work with a grade-A cinematographer: Boris Kaufman; Gerald Hirschfeld; Oswald Morris; Gerry Fisher; Geoffrey Unsworth; Owen Roizman; Andrzej Bartkowiak; David Watkin, etc. The style of his early black and white films is consistent, with deep focus being employed throughout. The color films shot by Gerry Fisher also employ deep focus. Fisher was one of those DPs who could stamp his style on a movie and many of the films that he shot have similar camera angles and movements.

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Faux Hulot
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#28 Post by Faux Hulot » Mon Aug 13, 2007 12:44 pm

It's also a dirty little secret that DPs often direct by default, especially when it comes to confidence-deficient first-timers. For instance a friend who was involved says that Edward Lachman should have at least received a co-directing credit for "Virgin Suicides."

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MichaelB
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#29 Post by MichaelB » Mon Aug 13, 2007 12:46 pm

I don't have my copy to hand to check the exact wording, but didn't Bruce Robinson insist on the camera operator on Withnail & I getting a disproportionately big opening credit because he did so much that was well beyond his job description?

(Robinson has always freely acknowledged his debt to the Withnail crew - he had no directing experience whatsoever and was totally reliant on experienced professionals to handle the technical side of things).

In fact, now that I've brought up the subject of camera operators (as opposed to DoPs), I thought I'd dig out this heartfelt obituary of Mike Roberts, one of the best in the business, yet someone pretty much totally unknown outside his immediate professional circle.

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Oedipax
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#30 Post by Oedipax » Mon Aug 13, 2007 3:58 pm

Faux Hulot wrote:It's also a dirty little secret that DPs often direct by default, especially when it comes to confidence-deficient first-timers. For instance a friend who was involved says that Edward Lachman should have at least received a co-directing credit for "Virgin Suicides."
Interesting. Herzog mentions on the Stroszek commentary that Lachman was a great help in communicating with some of the local non-actors during filming. And Lachman did receive a co-directing credit with Larry Clark on Ken Park.

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Person
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#31 Post by Person » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:22 pm

Mike Roberts was a genius with a camera. He was one of Gerry Fisher's operators on Sidney Lumet's, The Offense (1972). The Company of Wolves has some amazing camerawork.

Ronnie Taylor is probably my favourite operator. John Harris was also brilliant. Ernest Day deserves a mention.

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miless
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#32 Post by miless » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:37 pm

I would say that my favorite living cinematographer would have to be Robby Muller... it's just too bad that he isn't really doing anything these days (although his work with Bela Tarr on the prologue to Visions of Europe is possibly the most beautiful single shot I've ever seen)

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Magic Hate Ball
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#33 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:14 pm

I've just got to ask: what is a mise en scene? I've heard the term tossed around a lot but never really applied to anything.

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Person
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#34 Post by Person » Tue Aug 14, 2007 5:31 pm

Magic Hate Ball wrote:I've just got to ask: what is a mise en scene? I've heard the term tossed around a lot but never really applied to anything.
The totality of where actors are positioned in the frame; the position and angle of the camera and the lighting.
Last edited by Person on Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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zedz
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#35 Post by zedz » Tue Aug 14, 2007 5:53 pm

Person wrote:
Magic Hate Ball wrote:I've just got to ask: what is a mise en scene? I've heard the term tossed around a lot but never really applied to anything.
The totality of where actors are positioned in the frame; the position and angle of the camera and the lighting.
Even more generally, what appears in the frame: so it extends to blocking, set decoration and art direction, camera position, camera angle, movement within the frame (actors changing positions, curtains blown by the breeze) and movement of the frame (tracking, panning, zooming). Sometimes it's easier to pinpoint what doesn't count as mise-en-scene: good vs bad performance (apart from physical movement and positioning), dialogue, music and sound (though you could argue that diegetic sound is often dependent on the mise-en-scene), montage. Though there's not always agreement about which of these elements are actually excluded.

This topic is a potential rabbit-hole, or rabbit warren, or black hole, or rabbit-in-a-black-hat, so it might be worth spinning off into its own universe if there's interest in exploring it further.

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tryavna
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#36 Post by tryavna » Tue Aug 14, 2007 7:55 pm

zedz wrote:This topic is a potential rabbit-hole, or rabbit warren, or black hole, or rabbit-in-a-black-hat, so it might be worth spinning off into its own universe if there's interest in exploring it further.
Where's David Hare when you need him?

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Andre Jurieu
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#37 Post by Andre Jurieu » Wed Aug 15, 2007 10:49 am

The term is also a pretty good indicator of whether or not you are talking to some pretentious asshole who likes talking around a film instead of about the film. They will often say something like "the director's mise-en-scene was perfect," but they won't actually tell you why they found it to be flawless. Sorry, just a pet-peeve of mine.

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MichaelB
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#38 Post by MichaelB » Wed Aug 15, 2007 11:57 am

Andre Jurieu wrote:They will often say something like "the director's mise-en-scene was perfect," but they won't actually tell you why they found it to be flawless.
Surely "the director's" is redundant anyway?

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zedz
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#39 Post by zedz » Wed Aug 15, 2007 6:43 pm

Andre Jurieu wrote:The term is also a pretty good indicator of whether or not you are talking to some pretentious asshole who likes talking around a film instead of about the film. They will often say something like "the director's mise-en-scene was perfect," but they won't actually tell you why they found it to be flawless. Sorry, just a pet-peeve of mine.
Yeah, it's such an all-embracing term that evaluating it as good / bad / strong / weak is meaningless without further elaboration. I think another factor is that there's a large degree of ambiguity about what's in and out of mise-en-scene (so people using the term in a discussion may not necessarily be meaning the same thing), and, I suspect, a lot of people use the term without a clear idea of what it means, even to themselves.

And, of course, not every director is Mizoguchi, and a large part of a film's mise-en-scene may be determined more by convention (shot / reverse shot conversations, traditional establishing shots, etc.) than by creative decision making on the part of the director or other collaborators.

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Magic Hate Ball
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#40 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Wed Aug 15, 2007 7:34 pm

I'm going to just assume it's sort of a bullshit term and use it to get into film school.

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Magic Hate Ball
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#41 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Wed Aug 15, 2007 11:30 pm

So you might say Ingmar Bergman or Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Anderson all have fairly individual mise en scène? Ingmar Bergman (from what I've seen) has claustrophobic cinematography, natural (or attempted-to-be natural) lighting, and sparse soundtracks, Alfred Hitchcock has somewhat airy cinematography, somewhat "stage-y" lighting, and Bernard Hermann dramatic soundtracks, and Wes Anderson...is Wes Anderson.

Am I getting the idea? Or am I just way off?

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zedz
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#42 Post by zedz » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:21 am

Wikipedia is at least useful in documenting some of the confusion!

As to Magic Hate Ball, I guess if you can look at a single frame from a film and recognise the director's visual signature (as you probably could with Wes Anderson and absolutely could with Yoshida Yoshishige), then you're recognising an "individual mise en scene" (but that's not to say that another "individual mise en scene" might not be more subtle and not so evident from a single frame). Music (the use of which may, as you point out, be very much a part of a director's style) is generally not considered an aspect of mise en scene.

David, above [EDIT: in his first post, not the interceding second one, which I generally agree with], is alluding to the (in my opinion false, or at least misleading) dichotomy between mere "metteurs en scene" (guys who film stuff that's in front of the camera) and full-fledged "auteurs" (artists who employ the tools available to them - including mise en scene and decoupage - for individual expression), which has fuelled decades of often unenlightening point-scoring and demarcation disputes about who the "real" film artists are.

Which is a whole nother kettle of fish. But it does add to the confusion in the sense that "metteur en scene / mise en scene" has historically often been used as a putdown (which is really unhelpful when somebody's trying to explain how it's an auteur's use of mise en scene that establishes that he - inevitably a he, in those discussions - is no metteur en scene). Aargh!

Personally, unless you really are talking about the totality of the visual expression (and have something meaningful to say about it), it's much more useful to frame discussions in less ambiguous, more precise terms (framing, lighting, blocking, movement). Your observations not only have a better chance of being understood, they're also likely to be more focussed and valuable.

Further to David's second post, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Hawks is not a mise-en-scene director. He's got his own visual compositional 'language', though it's not as distinctive as the more individual stylists we've mentioned, and he uses it expressively. In Hawks' case, this comparative lack of distinctiveness may be a mark of how much he drew from - or informed - "classic" Hollywood storytelling. And with Hawks, you can point to an awful lot of non-mise-en-scene elements that indicate his directorial personality (specifically in his treatment of characters and themes).

Within the 'classical Hollywood' tradition, Walsh and Ford strike me as good examples of "more mise-en-scene" than Hawks, in the sense that I think David's using this expression. The essential meaning of key shots in their films is often conveyed in purely visual terms, particularly in terms of the relationship of figures to landscape and each other (e.g. the killing at the centre of Pursued, the appearance of Indians on the background crest as the characters ride along in the foreground in The Searchers).

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Andre Jurieu
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#43 Post by Andre Jurieu » Thu Aug 16, 2007 11:20 am

Magic Hate Ball wrote:I'm going to just assume it's sort of a bullshit term and use it to get into film school.
That sounds like a good idea, but based on the horror stories in our film school tread, the acceptance committee might not know what the hell you're talking about.

Joking aside, my perspective on mise-en-scene closely matches zedz. Every movie has a mise-en-scene, but it's kind of up to the viewer to determine whether that mise-en-scene is of value (and what that value is), whether it is unique to the filmmaker, whether it is applied in an innovative manner, whether it successfully conveys it's intended purpose, or whether it significantly adds to the narrative. Actually, a pretty good starting point is this feature at Reverse Shot (I would start with the introduction, though the discussion of sound being used within the shots is not mise-en-scene).

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zedz
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#44 Post by zedz » Thu Aug 16, 2007 5:58 pm

I'd add to that, as a kind of link to the territory that David's been exploring, that you can also start to explore to what extent a characteristic treatment of mise en scene is essential to a given filmmaker's style. It occurs to me that Ozu is a good case study: so much of what's distinctive about his work is mise en scene (camera position, framing of architecture and bodies, movement and stillness, set decoration for pictorial effect rather than logical consistency, treatment of colour), but there are also other very distinctive authorial characteristics that are not (use of music, non-Hollywood cutting, style of performance, story themes, content and structure).

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#45 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Tue Feb 24, 2009 9:58 am

Sorry, I hope this isn't swerving too off-topic but it's a question broadly about cinematography.

What's the technical term for a shot where a character appears to float, as if to represent a dreamlike psychological state? So the actor/actress is of course pulled towards the camera by some movable object or other. The example; in The Young Victoria, this occurs she meets Prince Albert again, having decided she's in love, and she almost floats over to him, leaving those previously at her side behind. I'm probably not explaining it well. Hope it makes sense.

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bdsweeney
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#46 Post by bdsweeney » Fri Feb 27, 2009 12:04 am

thirtyframesasecond wrote:What's the technical term for a shot where a character appears to float, as if to represent a dreamlike psychological state? So the actor/actress is of course pulled towards the camera by some movable object or other. The example; in The Young Victoria, this occurs she meets Prince Albert again, having decided she's in love, and she almost floats over to him, leaving those previously at her side behind. I'm probably not explaining it well. Hope it makes sense.
I'm not familiar with The Young Victoria, so my suggestion may be completely wrong.

However, the description you've given sounds very much like one of Spike Lee's 'signature techniques'; the 'moving sidewalk talk' where the characters are not so much walking towards a camera as it tracks back but are seemingly being pulled along with the camera on the dolly. The effect is that they are rolling or floating rather than walking.

It appears in Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and Inside Man, among others.

If that's the shot you mean, then I 'spose the term for it is a reverse tracking shot--but I'm not sure what to call it if the actor(s) is/are pulled along with the camera on the dolly.

Sorry I haven't been much help.

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Matt
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#47 Post by Matt » Fri Feb 27, 2009 12:56 pm

bdsweeney wrote:one of Spike Lee's 'signature techniques'
which he stole from Scorsese, but that's neither here nor there. Uncommon shots and techniques don't always have a name. In this case, it's just a tracking/dolly shot where the actor sits or stands on the dolly. It's not a reverse tracking shot, which implies that you are dollying away from the subject (and which is often confused with a dolly zoom or retrograde zoom).

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exte
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#48 Post by exte » Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:26 pm

Which film did Scorsese use that in?

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Antoine Doinel
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#49 Post by Antoine Doinel » Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:46 pm

Mean Streets

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SoyCuba
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Re: What does a cinematographer do?

#50 Post by SoyCuba » Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:57 pm

Wasn't a similar shot used in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as well?

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