American Cinematographer - March 2004 - 34

fogged, overexposed black-and-white
footage of B-29s dropping their payloads
on a flaming Yokohama.
Donahue
singles out a shot of paratroopers falling
out of a plane: "It has a sepia-smoky
mood. A news reporter shot it with some
old Ektachrome reversal stock, and it's

brilliantly beautiful." And Morris chuck¬
les at the "full, crazy color" of a 1960
promotional piece from the Ford Motor
Company archives: a massive telescope
spots three animated shooting stars that
"land"

new

socialites who

Fords
are

near

shocked

partying outside

an

observatory.
The Fog of War begins with
perhaps its most ironic images: a
Department of Defense reenactment,

shot

on

35mm, of two 1964 North

Vietnamese

torpedo attacks

on

the USS

Maddox, episodes that led to the infa¬
mous
one

be

Gulf of Tonkin resolution. At least

of those attacks

was

later proven to

phantom radar blip caused by freak
weather conditions. "Why did they reen¬
a

act those
Whenever the

subject turned to
Vietnam,
McNamara
became

"quite

defensive

...

sometimes he

stood up

and took
off the

microphone,"
recalls

cinematographer
Bob Chappell.

vivid house

style. "McNamara is a
major figure of the 20th century, and we
couldn't treat him lightly."
The cinematographer therefore
decided to retain

some

canted and asym¬

metrical

framings but reduce movement
to a slow creep. Morris was pleased:
"One move Bob did extraordinarily well
occurs when McNamara is talking about
being a war criminal with respect to
the fire-bombing of Tokyo." When
McNamara stops talking, he stares
directly into the lens, as though daring
Morris to respond. But the camera
continues its snail-paced zoom and slight
Dutch, and "that pause becomes very
powerful," says the director.
Though Chappell never knew
which topic might come next during the
wide-ranging interviews, he tried to
frame his subject expressively. On
camera

left, he shined

a

diffused 4K HMI

through a Chimera box. On the right, he
positioned only a white bounce card.
"We had a pretty strong ratio on his face,
which

was

intended to create dark shad¬

under his

eyes," he notes. He
applied "lots of blacks" in front of the
lights that illuminated the background
ows

30 March 2004

panels, a tactic that created darkness
and depth behind McNamara. "When
we put black behind, say, the second
panel, we'd get a blurry, black blob that
seemed to work for the composition,
particularly when the discussion turned
to death and war."

The

Fog of War exemplifies

McNamara's lessons through a combina¬
tion of archival footage and original

footage created after the interviews. The
latter was shot on 35mm mainly by Peter
Donahue, who had worked with Morris
on

Mr. Death and several commercials.

The archival

footage consisted of several

film and video formats and
from the

was

culled

Kennedy and Johnson presi¬

dential libraries and

a

number of other

it was all transferred to HD D-5,
color-corrected (at Globe Department
Store in Boston) and then recorded back
sources;

to film. The result is a veritable

history of

film and video textures. "We tried to

the character of the changing
photography," asserts Morris. There's
high-contrast black-and-white film
footage of Chinese laborers smoothing,
by hand, a runway that the Allied forces
will never use. There's also the slightly
preserve

occur,

incidents, one of which didn't
within 10 days of their supposed

occurrence?" wonders Morris. "One
could cynically say the government was
trying to perpetrate some kind of fraud,
to convince people something had
happened that hadn't happened. But I
look at it differently. I think they reen¬
acted it to try to understand what had
happened because they themselves
were deeply puzzled about the events."
Much of the footage Donahue
captured poetically illustrates details of
McNamara's speeches. When the
former president of Ford says "Cadillac,"
we see a shiny new Cadillac, its rear fin
shimmering, its bright red taillight
popping in front of Donahue's black-andwhite sky drop. When McNamara says
"punch cards," Donahue actually gets his
lens inside an IBM sorting machine as
thousands of cards stream by. Donahue's
camera,
CineMagic's
Revolution,
employs a multi-hinge snorkel system,
two right-angle bends and knuckle joints,
a

combination that allowed the cine¬

matographer to get his lens into very
unusual places. But the amount of glass
in the mirror system between the
Revolution's lens and its focal plane
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