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AGAINST THE GRAIN |
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by Lindsay Amos |
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Walter Lassally exclaims in mock exasperation: “I didn't set out to be a rebel, but I suppose I've ended up being one in many ways. What did Robbie Burns say? There's a verse about that isn't there?” There is indeed: |
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O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
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To se oursels as others see us! |
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Somehow, It didn't seem to be even slightly unusual for the German-born, British-based Lassally to be invoking a Scottish poet. On a 10-day visit to Australia as a guest of the Sydney Film Festival the seventy-year-old, self-described “itinerant cameraman” kept to a punishing schedule. As well as the Film Festival's two-night seminar were workshops at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School and screenings of his 1966 documentary, The Greeks, at various Greek community clubs. At Sydney's Castellorizian Club, Lassally, a fluent Greek speaker, was welcomed as one of their own, and he took the opportunity to shoot interview material for a follow-up documentary on Greek migrants using his ever-present Hi-8 camera. |
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Perhaps Lassally's political instincts were honed right from the time he photographed his first film - a 3-minute trailer warning of the dangers of smoking in bed. This was 1950, and the intervening period has seen Lassally working (on features and documentaries) with British directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz - the so-called Free Cinema era - and become a regular collaborator with Michael Cacoyannis, James Ivory and George Schaefer. His filmography is studded with now-famous shorts like Momma Don't Allow, Every Day Except Christmas & Labyrinth as well as the features, Electra, A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Savages, Tom Jones and Heat and Dust. |
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Lassally's first feature was the independently financed Another Sky, directed by the then editor of Sight & Sound, Gavin Lambert. This rarely-seen film (shot in Morocco) recently premiered in New York. Lassally comments: “It was a very good experience for me and was the first time I was able to incorporate documentary techniques in the making of a feature film. There are a number of instances in Zorba (and almost all of my other features) where documentary techniques stood me in good stead. But I always considered that there was a large overlap between features and documentaries, a certain cross fertilisation which takes place between them”. But Lassally's determinedly low profile means that you've probably seen more of his work than you realise. |
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At the seminar on his work the Lassally seemed unfazed by any of the questions thrown at him. If he thought the questioner was confused, he'd say so. When there weren't any questions forthcoming, he asked his own. To illustrate the discussion, Lassally screened long excerpts from Zorba the Greek, A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones and Heat and Dust, all of which exemplify what Lassally still agrees is his favourite review of his work: “Very discreet, precise and without tricks”. |
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Alan Bates and Anthony Quinn: Zorba the Greek - "very definitely in B&W" |
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“Did you shoot Zorba the Greek in black-and-white for artistic reasons?”, queried one viewer well into the first evening session. “Yes! Very definitely, yes!”, Lassally emphasised: “Zorba is in black-and-white, but only just. If this film had been a project in 1966, I wouldn't have stood a chance in hell of making it in B&W. Colour is very much harder to control that B&W. The nice thing about B&W is that it can be stylised - you can make your own style, and you can shape that style much more successfully than you can in colour. I can only think of a handful of colour films where colour is effectively used. Most of the time it's just there, and it's something you have to put up with. |
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“An interesting example is if you look at three of Cacoyannis's Greek tragedies, Electra, Iphegenia and The Trojan Women, and it's striking to me how the B&W film (Electra) is 100% more effective than the colour ones. Electra is to my mind the best film I've ever shot. It has a wonderful unity of style and it was a very difficult movie to make from that point of view. Everything had to be controlled very tightly and if you put one foot outside these stylistic limits it was immediately apparent”. |
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None of this means that Lassally is hankering for the past. He readily admits that the great B&W era is over and has tackled the problems of shooting in colour with characteristic audacity. Zorba the Greek, Lassally's fifth film for Michael Cacoyannis was actually made two years after Lassally's first colour film, Tom Jones. It happens to contain certain key scenes which illustrate the techniques used in achieving the kind of stylisation he enjoys. Even today, these skills are still relevant. The occasional music video, commercial, documentary or feature made in B&W still looks arresting, instantly signalling class, elegance, even art! |
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Lassally's relationship with the Cacoyannis seems close to ideal: “The interesting thing about him - almost unique in my experience - is that he wrote all his own scripts, not in scenes but in shots, certainly for A Girl in Black, not quite to the same extent in Zorba, but it was written in a very detailed way and fortunately his visual sense overlapped my own to a great degree, so we could indulge in the considerable luxury in the light of later experience, of him leaving the visual side to me and yet getting exactly what he wants. He didn't have to constantly check through the camera. We established this working relationship on the very first movie we made together; by the time we made Zorba, it had become second nature”. |
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Lassally screened two sequences taking place on board ship which occur near the beginning of the film: the ship's main lounge area and a deck exterior. He explained how they managed a pretty convincing storm simulation: “The interior was entirely shot with a hand-held Arriflex with all the apparent motion of the ship done by me waving the camera about in a special manner which I developed. The movement of a ship in a storm is really quite complex - it consists of a number of shocks and shudders combined with tilts and sudden movements in one direction and a slow recovery in the opposite direction, so I developed a special technique for filming those scenes. The only proviso was it was necessary to choose between hand held and sync sound - you couldn't have both, because then there were no hand-holdable sync sound cameras. It wasn't until 1972 that the Arri 35BL1 was developed. |
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“The second sequence is an exterior on the ship (deck), for that part of the shooting the sea was actually quite rough but because it's a sync sound sequence, the camera had to be blimped, it had to be tied down. Now if the camera moves with the ship, it's only by reference to the horizon that you can tell that anything unusual's going on and that makes it much less effective visually - it doesn't show the motion of the ship as effectively as the previous sequence”. |
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To demonstrate lighting a location interior, Lassally used as an example, a room representing Alan Bates' modest lodgings, also explaining the difference between “sunlight” and “daylight”: “You can fairly easily simulate the effect of a sunlit room by the use of spotlights, but it's much more difficult to simulate the effect of just daylight coming in through the windows and you also have a problem if you use the windows to light through. My solution was daylight filtered appropriately through ND filters on the window. It's always a question of balancing the exterior and interior and maintaining the detail on the curtain, to make sure it doesn't become a brilliant white triangle. |
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“For the lighting inside, we had a kind of primitive grid system fixed to the ceiling so we could hand spotlights from the ceiling, which fortunately was quite high. So the room's lit with a mixture of 2Ks and 1Ks hanging from the beams, taking care that you don't get any strong shadows anywhere because in a situation where you've got daylight coming through the window but not sunlight, a very strong shadow would look unnatural”. |
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Lassally then screened what he called the most difficult scene he's ever had to photograph, where Alan Bates visits the widow (Irene Papas): “It's a scene played in white and light greys, it was very difficult because it starts with an oil lamp on in the room and in the first third of the scene she blows that out; there is no moonlight so one is left with a situation where you have to have non-source lighting, so once the lamp is extinguished you can't really say where the light is coming from and the second difficulty (in colour it wouldn't be so difficult) is that in B&W there is a certain minimum contrast that has to be maintained otherwise the scene goes muddy or flat and looks very unattractive so I had to work very hard to maintain that minimum contrast which in this case is all in the upper range of the tonal scale”. |
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The murder of the widow is a chilling scene which combined a mobile hand-held camera with static shots. Lassally explained: “Hand-holding is being used where the action gets violent, then stopping so it starts with a zoom then you're panning rapidly from one to the other and going through it fast - being hand-held we can follow Georges Foundas rushing through to the front of the group and it's all very shaky - deliberately - but at the moment where he turns and faces the crowd the camera freezes. It's very important when you do this kind of hand-held work that the start and end of it should be very precisely matched to the action. It's like moments of silence in a musical score emphasising the climax that follows; it's a choreographed sequence which includes moments of extreme violence with moments of extreme stillness to counterpoint the violence”. |
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Irene Papas: Zorba the Greek |
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Lassally suggests treating actors' faces like a landscape: |
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“The most important thing is never to approach an actor with a wide-angle lens and you see it done all the time these days. The result is that the whole face is distorted. On the other hand some faces can do with a degree of flattening, for others it's fatal. Irene Papas had a very difficult eye problem; she had considerable bags under the eyes most of the time, make-up can help but it can never be entirely eliminated and you have to rely on special lighting techniques to get rid of those - which Irene needed in virtually every shot; there's usually a special light in use just to eliminate the bags under the eyes. |
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Lassally agreed that the lighting equipment he used would today be regarded as fairly primitive: “The biggest light in use on Zorba would have been a 5K of which we would have had no more than three. On this scene we would have had two of three 2Ks, half a dozen pups, 1Ks, which in those days tended to be either 500W or 750W and some very small inky-dinks which are still in use today - they're 200-250W. Those would be augmented with some floodlights which I developed specially for the daylight interiors, just a very primitive tin can with 4 or 5 mushroom floods in it diffused with some spun over it and that light I would have used on any of the daylight interiors because that would throw a much more indistinct shadow than that from a 2K or a baby. I tend to favour lighting interiors from entirely within the room and only very rarely use lights through the windows”. |
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Lassally is particularly proud of his pioneering use (first on A Taste of Honey) of three different filmstocks which are intercut un-noticeably throughout the film: “Zorba was shot on (Ilford) Pan F, FP3 and HP3, and Taste of Honey was shot on FP3, HP3 and HPS (which no longer exists). Of course I was advised not to do that - it wouldn't work. So when you cut from interior to exterior you're cutting from one filmstock to another which at the time was considered a very dangerous thing to do, they thought it would become very obvious on the cut but of course it isn't. |
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“The great advantage in Zorba in shooting all the exteriors on Pan F was that you get a wonderful tonal range and a particularly good range of tones in the highlights and that stands you in good stead when you're dealing with extreme whites and extreme blacks in the same frame. I believe (French cinematographers Raoul) Coutard and (Henri) Decae actually got the idea of using Ilford films from me. They were watching us and we were watching them”. |
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A Taste of Honey (1961) was the first British full length feature film produced entirely on location, though not the first time Lassally had collaborated with Tony Richardson: |
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“My relationship with Tony goes back to (the short film) Momma Don't Allow (1954). A Taste of Honey is usually thrown into the “kitchen sink” school of realism but it isn't really. It's realism, but it's poetic realism, I think it's the most poetic of all those movies - The Entertainer, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. |
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“I decided to use the Ilford stocks that I'd tried out on documentaries like Every Day Except Christmas and We Are The Lambeth Boys and actually using the granularity of the filmstock to blend in with the architecture; the interiors on A Taste of Honey were shot on HPS (400 ASA) using a lot of reflected light, principally bounced off the ceiling - at a very low light level (20 foot candles at f2.8), about a fifth of what one would normally use on a feature. Later, the tone becomes more romantic and I used the finer grained HP3 and the exteriors were filmed on FP3. |
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“Interiors were shot in a flat in Chelsea, very simply, a couple of photofloods bounced off the ceiling. Deceptively simple - the exact placing of the spot on the ceiling from which you reflect the light and the size of the circle of light can be very important, just moving it a few inches can have a big effect on the balance of the foreground to the background, the face against the wall behind which needs to be separated. But HPS filmstock had a peculiar characteristic which goes against the general rule, generally speaking the faster the filmstock, the less contrast, but this filmstock had a basic inherent contrast which allowed one to light it very flat and still maintain that basic contrast that is so important in B&W - something you would not get with any other filmstock”. |
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Lassally's preference for simplicity extends to his preferred equipment: “I always work with blimped Arriflexes so both those films were shot with similar camera equipment, but it means that no magazine holds more than 400' of film but it makes for a very compact camera. To this day I prefer to use prime lenses on the camera for interiors and on exteriors I leave the zoom on and use it as a variable prime. To have a flexible, convenient camera package is very important to me”. |
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To illustrate his approach to colour, Lassally selected excerpts from Tom Jones (1962) and Heat and Dust (1982): |
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“I went to a great deal of trouble to find a technique for Tom Jones. Basically colour filmstock exaggerates the contrast; the fact that you're seeing an illuminated image in the black surround also enhances the apparent contrast, so in order to get back to something that I would consider normal or natural one has to fight that. What the film does is make the light colours lighter and the dark colours darker so that you're getting an extended range of colour in an exaggerated contrast so if you use a net or some other form of pastelisation like a low contrast filter...it's a way of decreasing the contrast. |
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“I looked for a pastelising agent and finally settled on a particular black silk net which was a piece of a woman's hat veil of the 1920s which came down to me through various hands from the famous French cameraman Georges Périnal, and we only had a very small piece of net which could not be replaced. The net was the outcome of a search for a single filtration medium that would serve two purposes at the same time - (1) To pastelise the colour and (2) to diffuse the image. Having found such a net (and later the star filter), every shot in the film is photographed through that particular filter. The other great advantage of this particular net was that it had almost no exposure factor, you could virtually put it on the camera and ignore it - at the most about 1/3 of a stop. |
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“So part of my technique was the use of the net, part was the use of a particular kind of filter for the day-for-night sequences, but the most important part was the lighting - I did not use spotlights extensively in the lighting of the day scenes. I used spotlights in the night scenes, in the day scenes I used floodlights, very simple lights, mostly six mushroom floods mounted in a simple box with some spun glass in the front. Most of the film is lit with those floodlights”. |
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The major exterior was the hunt scene, still regarded as a tour de force of staging, especially for a period film: “We decided to stage it as an event and we used three cameras to cover it as though newsreel cameras were covering it as an event. So that entire sequence had to be post-synched. It was staged twice from beginning to end. It starts on a hilltop and finishes in a valley. It is a very clever combination of helicopter shots and a very low tracking vehicle which later led to the development of the Mini-Moke. |
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“In the final part of the sequence and Susannah York's horse vaults and she's rescued, one camera was mounted in the back of the truck getting the long shots and I was crouched in the passenger's seat with a hand-held camera with a 75mm lens getting the close-ups. Hand-holding a 75mm lens isn't easy but this was glossed over by the fact that it suited the action because the close-ups can wave all over the place - it's the sort of sequence that I would normally cover hand-held anyway. |
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“Tom Jones breaks all the rules of editing; things go left to right, next minute they go right to left, all of which doesn't matter because a lot of these rules are nonsense. The rules about which side of camera people should look; they are there for a reason but they are also there to be broken and the important thing for a filmmaker is to learn how to break them, not how to stick to them. The hunt sequence breaks all those rules; there's no point made that they change direction. The editing in Tom Jones is as revolutionary as any other part of the film. |
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For Heat and Dust, made 20 years after Tom Jones, Lassally used a different pastelising agent: “This time it's a star filter, which is really like a net between glass and that is used on every shot of this film and every other colour film I've photographed. Heat and Dust is a challenge to the cinematographer because it is two stories intercut; a story which takes place in the mid-20s and a story which is contemporary and after discussion with James Ivory it was decided to have a subtle difference between the two but not something as simple as using a filter and not using a filter. I was able to persuade James Ivory with whom I'd built up a comfortable working relationship, that if he left it to me there would be a differentiation but it wouldn't be too obvious. I did it by making the modern sequence more colourful and the '20s sequence more pastel. |
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“In the contemporary sequences there was more camera movement or more rapid camera movement, and in the 1922 sequences I would have more gentle camera movement and also if there was a more strident colour in the scene, I would try and get it removed. But a scene with lots of colourful saris for instance is perfectly OK. It's a subtle sort of thing of putting the concept at the back of your mind and then every time you look through the viewfinder if there's something that jars against that concept then you try to get rid of it. |
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Between The seminar and his screenings at the Greek Castellorizian Club I asked Lassally to elaborate on some aspects of contemporary filmmaking which particularly concern him: |
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From the point of view of the cinematographer, the worst thing is the schedules; if you're lucky enough to find a good script and a sympathetic director and team, then you still have to overcome that hurdle. In America, where I've made several TV movies, the maximum schedule you can get is 21 days, which is sheer murder. |
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I said I would much prefer to work 25 ten-hour days as against 22 twelve-hour days, but it's the actors that stop that, because for an actor who has say 7 days' work over 22 days it is much more expensive if you have him for 7 days' work over 25 days, because he has to keep himself free for another 3 days. |
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One of the other things is the format question. It's just a chaotic situation where no standard exists and we haven't had a standard for 40 years, which is pretty ridiculous. I recently discussed with the BFI's director Wilf Stevenson, saying that there doesn't seem to be a forum where these extremely important questions can be discussed. We still have to get the Americans on board, but there is a chance to go ahead with making 16:9 a new universal frame. You will still have cinemascope for a really wide screen but there's no reason to have all these confusing formats in between. |
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After the Oscar-winning Zorba, you had the choice of at least two big projects, but you annoyed their respective producers by saying you didn't like the scripts! Then you went off to work on the Canadian Film Board documentary, Labyrinth. This suggests someone who wants to be involved in a film on more levels than simply photographing it. |
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I've always wanted to stay, not exactly in the margins, but working with filmmakers with individual ideas and on a modest scale. I expect to start with an interesting script and in the course of making the film I expect to have an influence on the director or have a creative relationship with the director. That I do expect. I've been available for all kinds of projects at all levels. But the big films I've avoided. |
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In the most recent of your features seen here, Ballad of the Sad Cafe, you worked with a novice director. As somebody with firm ideas yourself, how did you approach this project? |
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It worked out extremely well. It's a difficult subject, not particularly for me, but very difficult overall to make a film of that novel and to do it justice. I had a strange relationship with the director, Simon Callow. He's a very intelligent person and a film scholar, very well versed in film history and so on. We had a lot of discussions before we started, which were very fruitful. We looked at films like Night of the Hunter; we talked about John Ford and the atmosphere of the little town that we were trying to create. |
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I thought it was going to be a good relationship, but very soon I discovered that Simon didn't know a thing about blocking! The picnic scene would have been immensely complicated on stage because it had parallel action - four things happening simultaneously. In film that isn't a problem, but Simon didn't realise that. So I ended up doing the blocking as well, in consultation with him - mostly a case of saying: 'shall we do it this way?' and usually he would accept it. |
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It's a question of how to stage any particular scene for the camera. It's a question of coming onto the set and saying, “How are we going to shoot the scene?” Well, Cacoyannis had it in the script but that's very unusual. Normally one does it the night before or just before you shoot it. Tony Richardson would say to the actors: Show me the scene. Then he'd discuss it with the operator. Experienced operators in England work that way. |
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But it was something strange which I didn't expect; it is, of course, a different aspect of filmmaking. It's one thing being a critic and an erudite person who appreciates good movies but it's quite another thing being able to block a scene yourself, even if you're a good theatrical director, because it's not the same as moving people around the stage. |
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One of your pet hates is night scenes which are overly blue. It's a convention you break at you peril as you found out in Ballad of a Sad Cafe. |
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Well, in Ballad of the Sad Cafe, some people in the industry said, what were you trying to do there? It doesn't look right at all. I realised that what they were really saying is that it isn't blue therefore it can't be right. |
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In day-for-night or magic hour shooting I used this Wexler's Moon (invented by Haskell Wexler). It's just a way of lighting quite a large area in an even way. It would be integrated with other lights which blend in with it and the scene would be printed the way I always request it: Cool, but not blue. |
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You seem particularly irritated by the way close-ups are shot in current films. Do you prefer to emulate the techniques used in Hollywood's heyday, or did I misinterpret you? |
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There are parameters which are universal and which to my mind are just a part of good portraiture, of photographing faces in a meaningful and interesting way - flattering if it's appropriate. Times have changed and people talk a lot about realism, which isn't really realism - it isn't even naturalism in many cases. I can understand that nobody these days is aiming for the ultimate in glamour although I'm sure that if you're photographing Madonna she's just as fussy as others were in the past in conforming to her image, as she sees herself. |
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If you know the basic techniques of what makes a face (look) good, and study a face, then you can apply them in different ways and different styles. But I think the whole art has got lost and nobody seems to care anymore how the people look beyond a certain point. Even a very realistic movie needs to have people presented in an appropriate manner for that film. It is always modified by the person behind the camera. |
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But close-ups must be photographed with an appropriate lens; these days that rule is broken all the time. I think people trained in television don't even know about it; they just slap on the widest lens because it enables you to work in confined spaces and so on. Any film in film made in Hollywood between say 1935 and 1955 would always have beautifully photographed close-ups, whatever the subject. There isn't a single Hollywood film of that period which has sloppily photographed close-ups in it - not one! |
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I'm interested in your ideas on emotion and intellect as applied to film (as a viewer). You see them as independent yet interdependent? |
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Film is a very emotional medium and all you can hope to do as a filmmaker is to engage the audience and keep them occupied, keep them attracted, interested in the subject. I think you have a better chance of achieving success if you plant the seeds of what you want people to think about so that they germinate when the film is finished. Engaging is the word I would use. I expect the audience to be engaged, and in being engaged in the subject they are also being entertained. I always see the intellect and emotions as two pillars of the psyche, in parallel but able to interfere with each other. |
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You make it sound difficult to achieve a particular emotional mood - you have to find a balance. |
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Some directors, cinematographers - and students who rationalise things or who do things that they think will communicate themselves to an audience are actually engaging in a spurious piece of logic, and film isn't logical, it's emotional. For instance if somebody comes into his room from a sunny exterior, and although the curtains are open everything suddenly goes very gloomy, then he takes a drug overdose, the reason it's gloomy is not because the actor's going to take an overdose, but because they've tried to match the atmosphere of the room to the mood of the actor. But with a perfectly normal exterior and a gloomy interior, the audience is likely to think, well what's the connection? Only when he commits suicide do you realise in retrospect that it's meant to introduce you to that mood. It can be done, of course, but it has to be more subtle than that. You have to be aware that a concept in your mind will not necessarily transfer itself 100% to the audience. |
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What's your approach to teaching cinematography? |
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I believe in letting the students do as much as possible. Not talking at them but giving the best opportunity for practical work. In one particular workshop I did in Munich, that was modelled on the workshops I did in Rockport, Maine in the U.S., they expected me to show them how to do it. I said, “Actually that is not how these workshops operate. The workshop operates by giving you the opportunity to do it and if you do something very stupid or very time-consuming, I show you a better way.” That particular group resented that. How can you in a week or fortnight's workshop teach somebody to be a cinematographer? All you can do is make certain suggestions and point them in the right direction. |
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I always say to students, the important thing to realise is that with film and TV the similarities far outweigh the differences. It's now actually doing the industry a lot of harm that people in various areas: critics, directors, other people working in the industry, insist on keeping them separate. Only in the U.S. does it make sense to say: this is a theatrical feature, this is a movie for TV. Everywhere else in the world they overlap to such an extent that it just doesn't make sense to separate them. |
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You seem eager to adapt your ideas and knowledge to television. At the seminar you suggested that Hi-8 was “the future”. What are you thoughts at this stage on TV, at what you could say is a crossover period? |
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It is important these days to be there on the telecine session when a film is transferred to tape. Actually the electronic grading systems are much better than film these days. You can make more subtle grading changes, you can affect the highlights without affecting the shadows, you can affect one colour without affecting the opposite colour very much. I made quite a few improvements in the grading of Ballad of the Sad Cafe when we transferred it to tape. |
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I've already made two Hi-8 documentaries. One I made with several other cameramen, called North Sea Follies. The other I made myself a couple of years ago when I travelled by cargo boat to Brazil. I called it Box Boat to Brazil. I think Hi-8 is amazing. In the stuff I shot out of the cabin window, you can see the moon and the clouds around the moon and even the reflection of the moon and clouds on the water. |
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Originally published in Cinema Papers, Australia, June, 1998 |
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