Michael Chapman, ASC (1935-2020) – recipient of the 2003 ASC Lifetime Achievement Award and two-time Oscar nominee – was one of the brightest, most insightful of cinematographers. While re-reading a 1984 interview conducted by Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato for their seminal book, Masters of Light, I was once again bowled over by his take on something we rarely examine.
The topic was angles and the question began, “Do you think there are a lot of subconscious things that go into the selection of an angle?” Chapman replied:
“Yes. I realized that the first time I was a director of photography. If you were doing it as well as you could and working as hard as you could, there was a lot more unconscious material that went into what you did than you had any idea of. I thought it would be much more in the open than it is. I found that I was drawing on unconscious sources more than I would have any idea that I was. Anybody who was going to be honest about it would say the same thing. Unless they are just hacks. If they really are trying, and trying to do something for the first time, then you are using unconscious material surprisingly intensely. And I think one of the ways that that unconscious material reveals itself is in angles: in what it says about the relation of characters or the relations of characters to place. Or what it says about dominance and submission. It’s genuinely mysterious. And I don’t like mystery. You should never count on anything being mysterious or new or wonderful. Or that in the joy of doing something, you’re going to create something new. I think the more planning, the more meticulous, the more anal-retentive you are, the better off you are. But there’s no sense pretending that that mystery isn’t there. I don’t think you should ever count on it or ever even think about it until afterwards. That’s all pretty abstract, I realize.”
It may indeed be abstract, but what Chapman says is true. Beyond satisfying the mechanics of blocking a scene, what influence could there be apart from intuition for settling on one out of an infinite number of choices regarding where to put the camera?
He was so philosophical. I agree and feel that deep seated memories of moving through environments as we grew up will influence us as directors of photography.
It is not just a mechanical process but a heavily emotional process involving those memories that helps motivate us to choose the angle.
I was just thinking about Raging Bull yesterday and Michael Chapman’s beautiful Black and White work. Michael Chapman, Conrad Hall, and Haskell Wexler all have a magical, philosophical – technical approach to cinematography .
Masters in our craft, Alchemists of light
I feel that my visual sensibilities were affect by two things: growing up in the desert and having a lot of Japanese art on the walls of our house. And yet those two things are somewhat opposites, the Japanese art often dealt with simple elements like a leafy tree branch in the snow, with often what felt like a flattened telephoto perspective, and my feelings about the desert were about this wide-open space extending to the horizon, a sort of wide-angle perspective. So I seem to alternate between responding to depth, wanting to see the geography of a space… or seeing things in terms of graphic shapes against other shapes, sort of a flattened poster-like feeling.
Just yesterday I was thinking about a quote by Gordon Willis, which I cannot find now, when talking about the landscape shots in his few Westerns, and he said something to the effect that sometimes flatness was interesting graphically.
Yes, David…I think that Gordon Willis remark came out of the two westerns he did – Bad Company and Comes a Horseman.