Notes of a Cinematographer
By Freddy Sweet
The following article was published in The Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, on Sunday, April 11, 1971, which was Easter Day.
There is a glamour that people often associate with film making. As children we read “Photoplay” and dreamed of being on a Hollywood set, playing a scene with Richard Burton or Elizabeth Taylor. Then someone comes along in exposé articles to tell us that movie making is little more than a dream factory, which is something we had suspected all along, because our fantasies had been too perfect.
After working on a few films with large crews. The film maker often becomes aware that it is the long delays, the pettiness, the ambitiousness of cast and crew, and the continually unfulfilled promises that have buried his initial dream, and replaced it with endless hours of hard work, with the last tycoon peering over his shoulder.
For me, Pamela and Ian, for which I did the cinematography, was the restoration of the dream. My renewed excitement with large crew filming (we often had as many as ten people of the technical crew), I attribute as much to the spirit of all the people involved, the extremely high level of their sustained enthusiasm, as well as the inventiveness of David Greene’s scenario. David Greene, a student in the Residential College, wrote and directed Pamela and Ian.
He had been planning and writing Pamela and Ian for over a year. Shooting took us to the Rive Gauche, the Arcade, the Ann Arbor Streets, the new R. C. auditorium, and a cemetery on a hill about a half hour outside of Ann Arbor on the coldest day this winter. On that day the sub-zero weather froze the camera to a stand-still—the same camera that is advertised “If you can take it, the Arriflex can.” We packed up the frozen camera, pushed the cars out of the snow, and went back to the small house on Prospect, where we shot some interiors, under the warmth of thousands of watts of quartz lights.
After the completion of the major part of the filming, I sat down with Greene, Seamon, and Stulberg to discuss the film and our views on scripting, directing, and acting. This article is based to a great extent on our discussion that night.
Greene decided to make the film in order to explore certain notions that he had about the medium, which were a result of a conversation in the summer of 1970 with his roommate, “Michael Priebe and I were talking about Robbe-Grillet. He read a passage which said something to the effect that the characters in a film had no existence outside the film before it begins, and they die in the end. That night I worked for hours and hours writing . . . the whole thing took shape right then.” He added, that the gain their existence for the first time when their first image appears on the screen and that when the screen blacks out at the end they lose their existence.” The fil is not intended as an essay in cinema. The exposition of theory emerges in tandem with the development of the characterization. The viewer discovers the characters, as they explore their lives as images.
Like most film directors, Greene imagines situations that are almost impossible for his technical crew to carry out. In one scene he wanted us to track the camera up a flight of stairs, from the downstairs living room to a second-floor bedroom. We accomplished this gymnastic feat by mounting the camera on a unicycle, and by pulling it by a clothesline up the fourteen-foot wooden planks we laid on the stairs.
In another scene the directions called for the camera to track in circles, at lightning speed, around a table where four actors would be eating dinner. The room was hardly large enough for his actors and the dining room table. We would certainly not be able to fit a huge dolly, supporting a camera, its operator, and focus puller in the room. We also had to find room for the sound man and boom operator to move, and they were to be connected to the camera by an umbilical sync cable. We had to find a way to keep the microphone and lights out of the picture during the camera’s constant rotation around the table. Greene explained why he planned a continuous 360-degree tracking shot. I wanted somehow to devise a situation in which the characters were going in and out of the frame, in order to see if there would be any difference in their moods or in the way they felt when the camera went by them. I wondered whether or not the fact that they were moving in and out of frame would do anything to them as images.”
Through trial and error, we found a technical solution. Put the camera in the center of the table on a fluid head tripod so that two people can spin it freely from their position on the floor in front of the actors sitting eating at the table. Put the lights on the floor below the table; bounce the light off strips of aluminum foil glued to the ceiling. Tape the microphone to the camera so that as the camera turns and faces a person, he is also on mike. Tape the sync and mike cables to the ceiling. Make some thirty turns in the cables in the opposite direction in which the camera will be rotating. We had planned the shot for six o’clock and had all the food ready for the actors to eat on camera. Nine hours later with cold Spanish rice and a loss of appetite, we were ready to shoot.
Long set-ups were the rule. One sequence took almost an entire day and entire night to set up and shoot. In this scene Pam and Doug are in bed. Greene’s plans were to conclude the dialogue sequence with a slow motion shot of Pam and Doug kissing. He then wanted to cut immediately to a shot, framed identically, of Ian and Doug in the same position; so that he would be able to juxtapose the two shots in the editing room for dramatic effect. Technical difficulties of lighting for moonlight in a totally white room and keeping the frame of the two shots constant were complicated by the fact that throughout the entire film Greene did not tell Pam that Doug was also involved with Ian. Greene is interested in exploring the relationships between film and life, crisscrossing the planes of cinematic fiction and reality. He feels that keeping certain information from the actors works in with his theories of the characters as images. By selectively telling his actors only part of their script, he can explore their celluloid dependency and emphasize their mortality and his God-like omniscience as director.
After shooting Doug and Pam in bed until 6:30 in the morning, Greene took Pam home, woke up Ian, and brought him into the exact position next to Doug that Pam had just left. I asked Greene his thoughts about the scene. “I was so uncomfortable when we shot Ian and Doug’s kiss, because it was so overtly contrasted to the mood while filming Doug and Pam in bed. They were very relaxed, and there was no problem at all. All of a sudden, Ian came and everything froze, and no one said anything. Everyone was trying to avoid what was there. We all busied ourselves with our tasks. You became very involved with your camera work, and Mary began running around with lights. The actors couldn’t even rehearse it; they’d move their heads together without touching and run away from it.”
Because of Greene’s numerous secrets, every member of the cast and crew had individual scripts. We were all quite uneasy about it, because we weren’t sure what was known even by the people we were working with the most closely. For four months we consented to the secrecy in part because of the pleasure of the game. Yet David’s relationship to his actors is that of lord to his serfs. He plays at God. No one, not even the script assistant, knew what was being planned for shooting. David furthermore relied on the interplay between reality and fiction as a way of collecting material for future scenes. The script was living organism that grew by ingesting week-long aspects of David’s relationship with his actor-friends. David observed: “There is nothing that I heard, nothing that happened during one filming weekend that didn’t creep into the script for the next week.” Ian says, “we were scared to say anything, because we were afraid it would come up in the next day’s lines.”
Though much of the shooting was rushed, the mood on the set was one of relaxation. Comparisons to life on board ship or in communes are not imprecise. Adding to the enjoyment during filming was the fact that most of the members of the cast and some crew members are musicians. The singing and composing of songs carried all of us through many long nights of rehearsal. David utilized Doug’s musical skills by getting him to write a song for four people which we shot out in the snow at Island Park. In fact, we filmed so many music and dance sequences that some of us began to feel like we were trying to resuscitate a genre done in by Vincent Minnelli and Gene Kelly.
Because of the low budget we were very sparing with the film stock; yet there were times when we filmed some of the spontaneously hilarious incidents that continually occurred during the shooting. For instance, one long scene that we shot involved a dance to an Odetta record and a simultaneous playing to the camera of a vaudeville routine. We rehearsed the scene all afternoon. It was supposed to be daylight outside; so as the sun went down, we found ourselves placing lights outside the window in the snow, facing the living room drapes in order to create the illusion of daylight. We continued rehearsing all evening. The artificial sunlight from outside created the sensation that we were in a world beyond time. For the opening of the scene, the script called for Pamela to come in from outside, take off her coat and admire Ian’s new trousers. On the final run-through, Pam and Ian planned a humorous switch. Pam stepped in as usual, took off her coat, but she revealed that she was wearing only a bra, which Ian then proceeded to admire. Here the technical crew was one up on the director. We had the camera and sound running.
I asked Greene about his preoccupation with death and God, which comes through this film as well as through his earlier works. “A film works nicely as a metaphor for life and death. The director is playing the role of God. When I think about the whole creative process involved in a film, I’m amazed to realize that I can sit back and think about something, and whatever I think will materialize to a certain extent. I can imagine anything I want, and that becomes the film, the characters, their lives, their existence. I’m creating their world. It’s rather interesting to imagine a world where the creation can talk to the creator—especially when they’re aware of the fact that they’re going to die. My creative drive has to do with what Bazin calls the entology of the photographic image. The photographic image survives after death, and to a certain extent I can gain a sort of immortality, or I can survive longer than a human being can, via film. Yet as creator I’m bound, too, by fate. A film has to begin and has to end, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
One of the ways in which the film grew was by a dramatic opposition between actors and director. David relied on his only brief outlines of the scenes. They would make suggestions in rehearsal, proposing additions to the script. Through this dialectic the final film emerged—a work in which director and actor collaborate to produce the end result. David’s method often frustrated the actors, who expressed their complaints openly to the director. Through these heated discussions everyone’s understanding of the film became fuller. Ian often wanted to know in advance just where a given scene would appear in the film. “You’re very off-handed,” he’d say to David. “You know that we’re going to be in front of a camera. We want to feel secure. Though I doubt that knowing your designs in a scene will change our acting. But just as a human being, I’d like to feel I had some control. I don’t know whether I’m an actor or just a piece of material for you to work with. It’s like we’re blind and have to be led around.”
David justifies his method: “It’s a process of selection. You present to me different things and I pull out what I like and reassemble those things. It’s very mechanical. It’s frustrating for me, too. I’m not an actor and I can’t sit down and show you exactly what I want. All I can do is wait for the right expression on your face and say ‘that’s it’.”
We worked together for four months during the shooting, and Greene is still amazed that he was able, at the age of twenty, to pull it off, directing actors with more experience than he, leading a crew, some of whom were ten years older than David. He had to come on strong, but was never totally comfortable with his executive mask. I asked him what he learned in shooting his first feature film: “ … that making film is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, that it’s brought me more happiness and more suffering than I’ve ever felt, and that it’s more involved than I’ve ever thought, and that it is more rewarding than I imagined, and that I definitely want to do it all my life.”
We talked at length about the kind of films he wants to do in the future: and though he wants to continue to explore the “virgin art” he considers his explorations through Pamela and Ian to be completed. Though he hopes to work with the same actors and crew again, he is looking forward to doing something new.
Towards the end of the long discussion he read us part of a letter which his mother had written him. She wrote, “I hope when you finally bring your characters to the end of their celluloid existence, you will have found that meaning lies outside the celluloid, and the film can end in hope and beauty and not in trauma.”
The following article was published in The Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, on Sunday, April 11, 1971, which was Easter Day.
There is a glamour that people often associate with film making. As children we read “Photoplay” and dreamed of being on a Hollywood set, playing a scene with Richard Burton or Elizabeth Taylor. Then someone comes along in exposé articles to tell us that movie making is little more than a dream factory, which is something we had suspected all along, because our fantasies had been too perfect.
After working on a few films with large crews. The film maker often becomes aware that it is the long delays, the pettiness, the ambitiousness of cast and crew, and the continually unfulfilled promises that have buried his initial dream, and replaced it with endless hours of hard work, with the last tycoon peering over his shoulder.
For me, Pamela and Ian, for which I did the cinematography, was the restoration of the dream. My renewed excitement with large crew filming (we often had as many as ten people of the technical crew), I attribute as much to the spirit of all the people involved, the extremely high level of their sustained enthusiasm, as well as the inventiveness of David Greene’s scenario. David Greene, a student in the Residential College, wrote and directed Pamela and Ian.
He had been planning and writing Pamela and Ian for over a year. Shooting took us to the Rive Gauche, the Arcade, the Ann Arbor Streets, the new R. C. auditorium, and a cemetery on a hill about a half hour outside of Ann Arbor on the coldest day this winter. On that day the sub-zero weather froze the camera to a stand-still—the same camera that is advertised “If you can take it, the Arriflex can.” We packed up the frozen camera, pushed the cars out of the snow, and went back to the small house on Prospect, where we shot some interiors, under the warmth of thousands of watts of quartz lights.
After the completion of the major part of the filming, I sat down with Greene, Seamon, and Stulberg to discuss the film and our views on scripting, directing, and acting. This article is based to a great extent on our discussion that night.
Greene decided to make the film in order to explore certain notions that he had about the medium, which were a result of a conversation in the summer of 1970 with his roommate, “Michael Priebe and I were talking about Robbe-Grillet. He read a passage which said something to the effect that the characters in a film had no existence outside the film before it begins, and they die in the end. That night I worked for hours and hours writing . . . the whole thing took shape right then.” He added, that the gain their existence for the first time when their first image appears on the screen and that when the screen blacks out at the end they lose their existence.” The fil is not intended as an essay in cinema. The exposition of theory emerges in tandem with the development of the characterization. The viewer discovers the characters, as they explore their lives as images.
Like most film directors, Greene imagines situations that are almost impossible for his technical crew to carry out. In one scene he wanted us to track the camera up a flight of stairs, from the downstairs living room to a second-floor bedroom. We accomplished this gymnastic feat by mounting the camera on a unicycle, and by pulling it by a clothesline up the fourteen-foot wooden planks we laid on the stairs.
In another scene the directions called for the camera to track in circles, at lightning speed, around a table where four actors would be eating dinner. The room was hardly large enough for his actors and the dining room table. We would certainly not be able to fit a huge dolly, supporting a camera, its operator, and focus puller in the room. We also had to find room for the sound man and boom operator to move, and they were to be connected to the camera by an umbilical sync cable. We had to find a way to keep the microphone and lights out of the picture during the camera’s constant rotation around the table. Greene explained why he planned a continuous 360-degree tracking shot. I wanted somehow to devise a situation in which the characters were going in and out of the frame, in order to see if there would be any difference in their moods or in the way they felt when the camera went by them. I wondered whether or not the fact that they were moving in and out of frame would do anything to them as images.”
Through trial and error, we found a technical solution. Put the camera in the center of the table on a fluid head tripod so that two people can spin it freely from their position on the floor in front of the actors sitting eating at the table. Put the lights on the floor below the table; bounce the light off strips of aluminum foil glued to the ceiling. Tape the microphone to the camera so that as the camera turns and faces a person, he is also on mike. Tape the sync and mike cables to the ceiling. Make some thirty turns in the cables in the opposite direction in which the camera will be rotating. We had planned the shot for six o’clock and had all the food ready for the actors to eat on camera. Nine hours later with cold Spanish rice and a loss of appetite, we were ready to shoot.
Long set-ups were the rule. One sequence took almost an entire day and entire night to set up and shoot. In this scene Pam and Doug are in bed. Greene’s plans were to conclude the dialogue sequence with a slow motion shot of Pam and Doug kissing. He then wanted to cut immediately to a shot, framed identically, of Ian and Doug in the same position; so that he would be able to juxtapose the two shots in the editing room for dramatic effect. Technical difficulties of lighting for moonlight in a totally white room and keeping the frame of the two shots constant were complicated by the fact that throughout the entire film Greene did not tell Pam that Doug was also involved with Ian. Greene is interested in exploring the relationships between film and life, crisscrossing the planes of cinematic fiction and reality. He feels that keeping certain information from the actors works in with his theories of the characters as images. By selectively telling his actors only part of their script, he can explore their celluloid dependency and emphasize their mortality and his God-like omniscience as director.
After shooting Doug and Pam in bed until 6:30 in the morning, Greene took Pam home, woke up Ian, and brought him into the exact position next to Doug that Pam had just left. I asked Greene his thoughts about the scene. “I was so uncomfortable when we shot Ian and Doug’s kiss, because it was so overtly contrasted to the mood while filming Doug and Pam in bed. They were very relaxed, and there was no problem at all. All of a sudden, Ian came and everything froze, and no one said anything. Everyone was trying to avoid what was there. We all busied ourselves with our tasks. You became very involved with your camera work, and Mary began running around with lights. The actors couldn’t even rehearse it; they’d move their heads together without touching and run away from it.”
Because of Greene’s numerous secrets, every member of the cast and crew had individual scripts. We were all quite uneasy about it, because we weren’t sure what was known even by the people we were working with the most closely. For four months we consented to the secrecy in part because of the pleasure of the game. Yet David’s relationship to his actors is that of lord to his serfs. He plays at God. No one, not even the script assistant, knew what was being planned for shooting. David furthermore relied on the interplay between reality and fiction as a way of collecting material for future scenes. The script was living organism that grew by ingesting week-long aspects of David’s relationship with his actor-friends. David observed: “There is nothing that I heard, nothing that happened during one filming weekend that didn’t creep into the script for the next week.” Ian says, “we were scared to say anything, because we were afraid it would come up in the next day’s lines.”
Though much of the shooting was rushed, the mood on the set was one of relaxation. Comparisons to life on board ship or in communes are not imprecise. Adding to the enjoyment during filming was the fact that most of the members of the cast and some crew members are musicians. The singing and composing of songs carried all of us through many long nights of rehearsal. David utilized Doug’s musical skills by getting him to write a song for four people which we shot out in the snow at Island Park. In fact, we filmed so many music and dance sequences that some of us began to feel like we were trying to resuscitate a genre done in by Vincent Minnelli and Gene Kelly.
Because of the low budget we were very sparing with the film stock; yet there were times when we filmed some of the spontaneously hilarious incidents that continually occurred during the shooting. For instance, one long scene that we shot involved a dance to an Odetta record and a simultaneous playing to the camera of a vaudeville routine. We rehearsed the scene all afternoon. It was supposed to be daylight outside; so as the sun went down, we found ourselves placing lights outside the window in the snow, facing the living room drapes in order to create the illusion of daylight. We continued rehearsing all evening. The artificial sunlight from outside created the sensation that we were in a world beyond time. For the opening of the scene, the script called for Pamela to come in from outside, take off her coat and admire Ian’s new trousers. On the final run-through, Pam and Ian planned a humorous switch. Pam stepped in as usual, took off her coat, but she revealed that she was wearing only a bra, which Ian then proceeded to admire. Here the technical crew was one up on the director. We had the camera and sound running.
I asked Greene about his preoccupation with death and God, which comes through this film as well as through his earlier works. “A film works nicely as a metaphor for life and death. The director is playing the role of God. When I think about the whole creative process involved in a film, I’m amazed to realize that I can sit back and think about something, and whatever I think will materialize to a certain extent. I can imagine anything I want, and that becomes the film, the characters, their lives, their existence. I’m creating their world. It’s rather interesting to imagine a world where the creation can talk to the creator—especially when they’re aware of the fact that they’re going to die. My creative drive has to do with what Bazin calls the entology of the photographic image. The photographic image survives after death, and to a certain extent I can gain a sort of immortality, or I can survive longer than a human being can, via film. Yet as creator I’m bound, too, by fate. A film has to begin and has to end, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
One of the ways in which the film grew was by a dramatic opposition between actors and director. David relied on his only brief outlines of the scenes. They would make suggestions in rehearsal, proposing additions to the script. Through this dialectic the final film emerged—a work in which director and actor collaborate to produce the end result. David’s method often frustrated the actors, who expressed their complaints openly to the director. Through these heated discussions everyone’s understanding of the film became fuller. Ian often wanted to know in advance just where a given scene would appear in the film. “You’re very off-handed,” he’d say to David. “You know that we’re going to be in front of a camera. We want to feel secure. Though I doubt that knowing your designs in a scene will change our acting. But just as a human being, I’d like to feel I had some control. I don’t know whether I’m an actor or just a piece of material for you to work with. It’s like we’re blind and have to be led around.”
David justifies his method: “It’s a process of selection. You present to me different things and I pull out what I like and reassemble those things. It’s very mechanical. It’s frustrating for me, too. I’m not an actor and I can’t sit down and show you exactly what I want. All I can do is wait for the right expression on your face and say ‘that’s it’.”
We worked together for four months during the shooting, and Greene is still amazed that he was able, at the age of twenty, to pull it off, directing actors with more experience than he, leading a crew, some of whom were ten years older than David. He had to come on strong, but was never totally comfortable with his executive mask. I asked him what he learned in shooting his first feature film: “ … that making film is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, that it’s brought me more happiness and more suffering than I’ve ever felt, and that it’s more involved than I’ve ever thought, and that it is more rewarding than I imagined, and that I definitely want to do it all my life.”
We talked at length about the kind of films he wants to do in the future: and though he wants to continue to explore the “virgin art” he considers his explorations through Pamela and Ian to be completed. Though he hopes to work with the same actors and crew again, he is looking forward to doing something new.
Towards the end of the long discussion he read us part of a letter which his mother had written him. She wrote, “I hope when you finally bring your characters to the end of their celluloid existence, you will have found that meaning lies outside the celluloid, and the film can end in hope and beauty and not in trauma.”