American Cinematographer - September 2007 - 56

Baroque Visions
Right: Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC conducts a seminar on Caravaggio ’s use of light and shadow with The Calling of St. Matthew behind him as an example. Below: Judith Beheading Holofernes, which Storaro believes marked a turning point in Caravaggio’s creative journey, was the first in a series of paintings he made depicting decapitation. “I imagine he began to paint the scene in the natural light of day, as he usually did, but then realized the light was not right for the emotion he wanted to convey,” says Storaro. “I imagine he then closed the window and lit an oil lamp, using artificial light for the first time.”

Matthew, which I later learned was a work by Caravaggio. The thing that struck me was the extraordinary vision of something that I was actually putting in scenes back then: a clean separation between light and shadow. I was so bowled over by that painting I felt immediately impelled to try to understand and deepen the relationship between these two elements. I had to take my studies to a level that enabled me to grasp the intrinsic significance of that representation. It was necessary in order to succeed in expressing the most profound meaning of what I was doing on the set, depicting conflicts and har-

monies with light and shadow. What impact did that moment have on your subsequent work? Storaro: The Calling confirmed for me something I’d read in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The protagonist says: ‘ … Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components?’ This phrase showed Faulkner was able to describe on a literary plane the ray of light that Caravaggio represented pictorially. Without having read that

phrase, without having looked at that painting, I would not have been able to make The Conformist or Apocalypse Now. How could I have described Col. Kurtz, who becomes the denunciation of how civilization hides within itself the appropriation of other cultures through oppression and violence? It was fitting to represent him not merely as a human being, but as a transcendent symbol denouncing horror and violence. Whereas Vermeer used suffused, wintry, Nordic light to show the way people lived through a unity of light and shadow, Caravaggio went precisely in the other direction with his sharp light. He expresses a radical division between our unconscious morality, represented by shadow, and the part of life we live searching for ourselves, expressed through light — a split between the matter from which we are formed and the divine for which we yearn. For me, Caravaggio’s ray of light visualized the relationship between the human and the divine. His genius caused an earthquake in the figurative arts, and they have never been the same. Caravaggio was ahead of his time, an artist who consciously decided to break with the Mannerist style of painting of that era. How did you represent this revolution in the film? Storaro: By seeking to learn why he took a particular artistic path, and to deepen my understanding of how he lived. Every work of art is linked to a precise moment of the artist’s life and therefore has a specific significance with regard to the artist’s trajectory. Creative steps forward and concrete steps in their own lives are never unrelated. I am not an art critic or painting expert, but my own analysis led me to a personal interpretation of how Caravaggio came to accomplish his works through a need to discover and understand the meaning of his

56 September 2007

American Cinematographer - September 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2007