Leitner's Cinematography Corner

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the black and white prologue of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

If names like Truffaut, Godard, Fassbinder, Scorsese, or Almodóvar mean anything to you—directors whom the annual New York Film Festival helped introduce and promote—you’ll realize what riches await at Lincoln Center every September for those lucky enough to attend.
Unlike other film festivals, the NYFF doesn’t hawk premieres. Instead, it skims the cream off the best festivals in the world, particularly Berlin and Cannes, and assembles a premium slate of about 30 features, mostly dramas, with a few documentaries thrown in for good measure. Which is why, for me, NYFF selections are essential viewing each year.

Charlotte Gainsbourg strolls through a sinister forest in Antichrist.

This year’s lineup included Wild Grass, the latest from 87-year-old master Alain Resnais (whose résumé includes Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad), Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, Lee Daniel’s Precious (premiered at Sundance, now on the Oscars fast track), and Clair Denis’ hair-raising White Material.
It’s impossible to argue that any mere collection of 30 films contains all the best films in the world in any given year, but NYFF tries and if nothing else, achieves a collection of the most provocative. Such was the case this year with Antichrist, the latest by inveterate provocateur Lars von Trier (“A film should be like a rock in the shoe”), which at its Cannes premiere in May polarized critics and reportedly sickened audience members.
Von Trier, you’ll remember, was the Danish enfant terrible behind Dogme 95, the filmmaking manifesto in the late 1990s that eschewed artificial lighting and music editing and embraced roughhewn documentary-like camera technique, ultimately turning to use of consumer MiniDV camcorders. (The international hit The Celebration remains the best-known example of Dogme 95.)
Starring two estimable actors, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist depicts the twisted tale of a bereaved couple who retreat to a remote forest cabin after the accidental death of their only child. Twisted, because Von Trier fashions a psychological “horror film” (his words) in which sex, love, violence, and sadism are indistinguishable. Psychosis is probably too mild a term for what comes between this couple. With its notorious self-mutilation scene, Antichrist is not for everyone, general audiences included.
In selecting difficult work like Antichrist to present to New York audiences, the New York Film Festival chooses artistic merit over convention or propriety. As a consequence, year after year the NYFF provides a brief but vivid snapshot of the condition of Cinema itself. That’s why, through the years, I’ve noted in print when video-originated filmmaking first appeared at NYFF, when the first digitally originated films arrived, when NYFF first embraced video projection (hint: not that long ago).
This year, in presenting Antichrist, the NYFF showcased some of the most beautiful footage ever to originate from a Red Digital Cinema Red One camera. To the lamentations of a Händel aria, Antichrist opens with a black and white prologue of lovemaking in the shower, cross-cut with a sequence of the couple’s young child making his way to an open window high about the street. Gut-wrenching for any parent (and I am one) to contemplate.

Dafoe and Gainsbourg in Antichrist, photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle.

The breathtakingly handsome cinematography is from none other than Anthony Dod Mantle, one of the world’s truly great DPs. You know him from Dogme #1, aka The Celebration (cited above), 28 Days Later, The Last King of Scotland, or perhaps a recent little number called Slumdog Millionaire.
After the foreboding prologue, Antichrist switches to color, a palette that’s pallid and shallow, with mists and fogs shrouding every landscape. This column is not a review and I’m not here to dissect narrative or form, but Von Trier and Mantle have collaborated on surreal images that echo scenes of damnation in Hieronymus Bosch, black horror in Goya, tangled limbs in death camps, and Spencer Tunick’s naked crowds.
They’ve done this by achieving exquisite control of lighting within the limits of the Red One’s digital capture—avoiding burnt highlights, for one—while extending artistic control into postproduction by their careful choices in debayering Red’s .r3d compressed RAW images and transcoding them to DPX files for output to film. (I saw a 35mm print of Antichrist projected at widescreen 2.40 aspect ratio.)
To appreciate what they’ve accomplished, one simply has to encounter Antichrist in a theater, putting aside possible objections to content.

Steven Soderbergh with a Red Digital Cinema Red One on the set of The Informant.

Or, as a counter example, view a 35mm print of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant, also shot with a Red One.
Reviewing The Informant in the Washington Post on Sept. 18, staff writer Ann Hornaday writes that:
As with his last two projects, the “Che” films and “The Girlfriend Experience,” Soderbergh filmed “The Informant!” on the Red Camera, a digital system that is lightweight, nimble and particularly well-suited to filming without added lights. The result with “The Informant!” is a desaturated palette and spontaneous style that recall movies made in the 1970s. (In many of the scenes, the protagonists are backlit by blurry, unruly flares of light — shots that most directors would reject as unusable. But Soderbergh embraces what might be considered a technical flaw and makes it a design element.)
I mean no personal disrespect, but what a load of hooey. Not the part about the style of movies made in the ’70s (also questionable), but the part about being “particularly well-suited to filming without added lights.” On what does she base this remarkable insight? That Red One is more light-sensitive than either film or other digital cameras (wrong, wrong), or handles highlights or shadows in a superior manner (wrong)?

Use of available light in The Informant.

The roots of motion picture lighting can be traced back 100 years to the single-digit ASAs of early orthochromatic Kodak motion picture negatives and the simultaneous breakthroughs in expressionist lighting on the Berlin stage by Max Reinhardt. Once a requirement, it is now an artistic and creative choice, since virtually all cameras today produce acceptable images in available light.
At a screening earlier this year of the “roadshow edition” of his epic biographical diptych, Che, at IFC Center in New York, Soderbergh told me he intends never to shoot film again, given the convenience and expediency of filming with his Red One. An early adopter of Red, Soderbergh also famously serves as his own DP under the pseudonym Peter Andrews. (Che premiered at Cannes 2008 and first screened in the U.S. at the 2008 NYFF.)
He also told me that out of 129 minutes in Part 1 of Che and 128 minutes in Part 2, a total of three shots involved the use of additional lighting.
Soderbergh has made an artistic choice here, one having nothing to do with the particular creative possibilities inherent to a Red One. As I suggested above, watch his latest film, The Informant, in a commercial theater. The “blurry, unruly flares of light” noted by the Washington Post film critic are the result of using some sort of diffusion or low-contrast filtration on the lens.

Windows bloom from the use of lens diffusion filter in The Informant.

Perhaps Soderbergh thought that scattering highlights would ameliorate unsightly clipping.
To my eyes, the consequent flattening of tonal scale coupled with reliance on available light yields an artless look, one more in keeping with found documentary images—or, ironically, the rules of Dogme 95.
I’ll admit that as Matt Damon’s extraordinary performance takes hold—the other casting is pitch-perfect and Soderbergh’s directing is flawless—you forget about technical choices.
But I knew by its grain-free, low-light look it was shot digitally. By comparison—and this came as total shock to my system—I didn’t realize Antichrist was shot digitally until the credits rolled.
This much is certain: Digital motion pictures are poised to breathe new creativity into serious Cinema. Look to top-shelf festivals such as Cannes and the New York Film Festival to showcase more and more of them. The final hurdle, 4K digital projection at festivals, can’t be far off.