In 1973, Gayne Rescher, ASC shot a
film called Claudine, which was
about the romance between a
housekeeper (Diahann Carroll) and a
garbageman (James Earl Jones). To
convey the reality of life for these two
regular people, the cinematographer
crafted gritty, desaturated images.
Recently, directors Coodie and Chike
wanted to create a similar feeling in a
video for Cruna's "Take Me Higher,"
and they asked cinematographer Frey
Hoffman to reference Rescher's work.
Hoffman was able to glean inspiration
and advice straight from the source.
He recalls, "I sent Gayne an e-mail,
and a few hours later, he gave me a
call. He was great to talk to, and I
picked his brain on what he did."
In the video, Cruna's girlfriend
is being hounded by a man who
lies to her, claiming that Cruna has
been fooling around with other
women. As the girlfriend works in her
beauty salon, Cruna talks to her over
the phone, trying to tell her that the
stories aren't true, while his competitor
tries to convince her that they are.
Eventually, at a nightclub show, Cruna
steps off the stage and whisks his girlfriend
away, leaving the disappointed
antagonist to walk off on his own. "The
characters are ordinary people trying
to make love and life work," says
Hoffman.
In forming his approach,
Hoffman at first thought of trying to
obtain the camera, lenses, lights and
film stock that Rescher had used 32
years earlier. But it quickly became evident
that he'd never be able to precisely
re-create the same shooting
conditions. The first problem was the
stock: Kodak discontinued Eastman
5247, Rescher's stock, long ago, and
the grain structure of the company's
emulsions has changed dramatically in
the intervening years. In the 1970s, the
grains in Kodak stocks were composed
of polyhedral silver-halide crystals;
each grain had many multiple planes,
rather like a clenched fist, and light
tended to bounce off the crystals in
various directions. But during the
1980s and 1990s, Kodak began to
incorporate flattened, tabular grains
(T-grains) into its emulsions. These
grains could be oriented so that they
would absorb more light, which meant
that they could be smaller and less
numerous, resulting in images with a
less grainy appearance.
After doing a lot of research,
Hoffman concluded that the best solution
was to use Kodak Vision 500T
7279, underexpose it by one stop and
then push-process it by one stop. "It
might seem odd to go to a 500-speed
stock when the 5247 was rated at
125," he notes, "but if I'd shot a 125-
speed stock, the grain structure would
have been so fine that even underexposing
and push-processing would
have gotten me nowhere near the
grain of the original. I knew I had to
have larger crystals, so I went with
7279."
Once Hoffman realized that
capturing the essence of Rescher's
work could be accomplished without
reassembling Rescher's tools, he
decided to work with other modern
gear as well. Rescher shot Claudine
with a Mitchell BNC and Cooke lenses,
and Hoffman used an Arri SR-3 and
contemporary Cooke primes, a 25-250
Cooke zoom and an Optex 8mm.
In planning the look of
Claudine, Rescher and director John
Berry agreed that because Carroll's
character and her five children lived in
a Harlem tenement, the lighting
shouldn't look bright. "The tenements
were mostly pretty run down and old,
and I wanted to retain that look," says
Rescher. "The main thing was to keep
saturated colors out of the picture. On
most of the pictures back in those
days, everybody was splashing color
all over the place, but a few of us were
taking it off." Rescher recalls that on
Rachel, Rachel (1968), he took the
desaturation so far that his operator
asked him why he didn't just shoot the
movie in black-and-white.
To create a desaturated look
on the Cruna video, Hoffman sought
the assistance of colorist Carlos
Rodriguez at Moving Image in New
York, and showed him Claudine as a
reference. The cinematographer also
decreased sharpness and contrast in
camera by using Tiffen Low Contrast
#1 and a 1/8 Double Fog on the lens.
The most important element
of Rescher's work that Hoffman strove
to re-create was the lighting. On
Claudine, Rescher tried to use practical
or directly motivated lighting, and
he was among the first to use soft light
to key actors. At the time, soft sources
were used for fill, and Rescher notes
he was initially reluctant to use them
for keylight because he feared the
resultant images would be flat. "But I
soon discovered I could control it," he
says. "I had some of what I called egg
crates made up by Frank Leonetti. They
slid in front of the light and made it
possible to direct the light. They
weren't quite as easy to use as a conventional
light, but they had a wonderful
look."
To make his lighting as naturalistic
as Rescher's, Hoffman lit every
setting except the nightclub by
enhancing practicals, with either Kino
Flos with Cool White bulbs or a Lowel-
Light K5BR fixture with EAL 500 watt
or PH 213 250 watt bulbs, plus a few
Tweenies. In the beauty shop, for
example, he and his gaffer, Suzanne
Carter, put Kino Flo banks between the
existing fluorescent fixtures on the
ceiling. "If we'd done all sorts of stylized
lighting with color or highlights or
gobos to punch up a shot, it would
have worked against us," says
Hoffman. "It would have looked like a
trick, and we were trying to keep the
visuals simple."
Claudine was shot on location
in New York, and its makers captured
much of the feeling of the city in
that era. Rescher even rode through
traffic with the show's B camera, an
Arri IIC, clamped to the handlebars of
his own bicycle. "That was one reason
Claudine spoke to Coodie and Chike: it
was consistent with what they've done
throughout their work, which is capture
the spirit of a place," says
Hoffman. "Take Me Higher" is set in
Nashville, Tennessee, where Cruna
grew up, and Hoffman tried to follow
Rescher's lead by making the city a
character in the video. "There are signature
shots that people from
Nashville will recognize," says the cinematographer.
"They might only be in
there for a few seconds, but they're
special for the people who are from
the area. For others, it's like a mini
National Geographic."
Rescher says he was glad to
give Hoffman some advice. "I always
like to help young people. This business
gets so complicated at times that
it's hard to teach, because each situation
is different. You can't just lay
down rules; you have to look at a problem,
analyze it and fix what needs fixing,
and then move on to the next one."
To solve the puzzle on "Take
Me Higher," Hoffman had to let go of
many of the lessons he has learned. "It
was a little scary initially, doing everything
you're not supposed to do and
knowing that the whole production
was riding on it," he says. When the
lead actress in the video first appeared
on set, Coodie and Chike looked at the
heavy makeup she was wearing and
immediately asked to have most of it
removed. "That could be used as a
metaphor for the cinematography,"
says Hoffman. "We didn't put any
makeup on it. It wasn't about showing
off, and perhaps what we did can be a
stepping stone for someone else."
.....
Written by Stephanie Argy