American Cinematographer - August 2020 - 30

The Future of Cinematography

phers find validation in a defining
principle of our art: the collaboration
between director and cinematographer that is near sacrosanct.
Nowhere has it been more clearly
expressed than in Orson Welles'
shared main-title credit with Gregg
Toland, ASC at the end of Citizen
Kane. Our greatest directors have
long given credit for the success of
their work to the cinematographer's
magic cocktail of light and composition.
Legendary cinematographers
like Shamroy and Toland were not

camera? What's the
composition? What's the
choice of lens? Will the
camera move? Is it highkey or low-key lighting?
What's the direction and
the color of the light? Are
these visual elements
serving the idea, mood
and emotion of the
scene? Apart from the technical know-how, I always remind
my students that what separates us from each other are intuition and taste.

- Iain Marcks

merely impresarios of the camera,
outsized alchemists of the nowreceding photochemical age. They
understood that cinematography's
key elements of composition, movement, shot selection and light
creation and control were means to
visually express our shared human
story: created by writers, given the
breath of life by actors, and molded
into a coherent, emotional whole by
directors, cinematographers and
editors. It is this, the frame-to-frame,
shot-to-shot, scene-to-scene creation
of fictive imagination become real

Richard Edlund, ASC, on the future of
cinematography and visual effects
When a new technology appears, the creative and
ambitious cinematographer will grab hold of it and make
something out of it. The show I'm working on now is a
10-year study of Cuba from the rise of Fidel Castro to the
assassination of J.F.K., and we have to resurrect several
recognizable historical figures in a believable way. We're
working with several scientists to develop a machinelearning/AI process that uses existing footage to teach
the computer to re-create the personality of the person
you want to re-create. The results are stunning. When I
started working on Star Wars in 1975, it took 40 to 90
people two years to finish 365 effects shots. Today a movie has thousands of shots
and hundreds of artists with virtually god-like power over the image. Pretty soon you
won't be able to believe everything you see because image-manipulation technology
really can do anything. The future is exciting ... and scary.
30

August 2020

- I. M.

American Cinematographer - 100 Years

- "the movies" - that informs the
past, the present and the future of
our art.
Last November, I was honored
with the Lifetime Achievement
Award
at
the
Camerimage
International Film Festival in Torun,
Poland. Festival Director Marek
Zydowicz asked me to introduce
screenings of half a dozen films I had
photographed. I told him I preferred
not to present work that showed
only artful imagery, but movies that
presented cinematography supportive of the film's visual/dramatic arc.
I have often spoken of Ordinary
People and The Accidental Tourist as
two films that I hope exemplify how
cinematography
informs
the
contours of a movie while being
subsumed into a unity of drama and
character.
I've referred to myself as "an
accidental cinematographer," not
one gifted with a Kodak Brownie in
my cradle. As a student at USC
Cinema, I envisioned a career as a
writer of film history and aesthetics,
certainly not what the trades still
dismissively label a "lenser." One
evening after work in 1969, when I
was still a new camera assistant
recently initiated into the IATSE
camera local, I went to see The
Conformist with my mentor, the
techno-whiz cinematographer Jim

Edlund photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

Dejan Georgevich, ASC, on training and education
The effect of institutional education on the craft of cinematography is largely defined by who's teaching it. I believe in
a real-world nexus with the film department's program and
aim to provide my students with a bridge to the professional
motion-picture arena. To successfully merge with the professional world, it's important to have a basic understanding of
tools and protocols currently in practice. It's critically important having School of Visual Arts' institutional support for
investing in new tools so we can augment past practices with
new technologies. The tools may constantly change, but we're
still re-creating the real 3D world in a 2D medium with varying
degrees of light and perspective. As we've evolved into the
digital realm and adopted its applications, cinematography is
still that same craft asking the same questions: Where's the

American Cinematographer - August 2020

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