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DOCUMENTARY: VISIONS OF LIGHT, THE WAR ROOM

© Sean Gallagher

I come from a generation where a documentary was what you saw in school spotlighting some kind of problem, or being similar to a National Geographic special. In other words, the primary purpose of the documentary, or so I thought, was medicinal; it tastes bad, but it's good for you. Documentaries, however, have had just as much to do with film art as fiction films have, ever since Robert Flaherty's NANOOK OF THE NORTH. And in the mid-to-late 80's, with films like SHOAH, THE THIN BLUE LINE, and ROGER & ME, documentaries began finding a bigger audience than usual. They also courted controversy and tough subjects, as those films covered, respectively, the Holocaust, an innocent man being in prison, and the effects of a GM plant closing in a Michigan town. 1993 wasn't a great year for documentaries, but it did bring two fine examples of them: Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels' VISIONS OF LIGHT: THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY, and Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's THE WAR ROOM.

While film is of course a visual medium, cinematography is often overlooked or misunderstood when it comes to talking about films. It's not that we don't know that a cinematographer is responsible for how a film looks, it's we're ignorant of what that means, or how the look of the film contributes to telling the story. VISIONS OF LIGHT is a good education, but it's also a fascinating film for other reasons.

The primary responsibilities of a cinematographer are how to light a scene, where to put the camera, and how to shoot it. As far as lighting the film goes, of course, it can depend on the setting and the genre; when watching a horror film, for example, you can expect a lot of darkly lit shots to increase tension. It can also depend on when the film is set; period films tend to be lit differently than films set in the present. As far as where the camera is put, this can help determine the point of view of the film, or, if there are two people in the room, how you emphasize one person over the other. Also, some actors are more photogenic on one side of their face than the other. How a film is shot, or what lenses are used, can often go hand in hand with the lighting of a film.

Glassman, McCarthy (a critic for "Variety"), and Samuels gathered together clips from roughly 125 films, and interviewed over 25 top cinematographers, including such greats as the late James Wong Howe (SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS), Sven Nykvist (the Bergman films), Vilmos Zsigmond (MCCABE & MRS. MILLER), Allen Daviau (E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL), Conrad Hall (CHINATOWN), Haskell Wexler (WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF), Owen Roizman (THE FRENCH CONNECTION), Vittorio Storaro(APOCALYPSE NOW), Laszlo Kovacs (PAPER MOON), Gordon Willis (the GODFATHER movies), Michael Ballhaus (GOODFELLAS), Michael Chapman (RAGING BULL), Caleb Deschanel (THE BLACK STALLION), John Bailey (ORDINARY PEOPLE), Nestor Almendros (DAYS OF HEAVEN), and Ernest Dickerson (DO THE RIGHT THING).

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