AIC, 1988 - AIC Associazione Italiana Autori della Fotografia ...

AIC
sminuire il lavoro compiuto da
Storaro per il film di Bertolucci.
Tutt'altro. Voglio soltanto
mettere in luce — e dico
"mettere in luce" di proposito —
come, fra tanti che hanno
trovato "bella" la fotografia di
L'ultimo imperatore perché
magari l'hanno confusa con il
lavoro dello scenografo o
dell'arredatore, nessuno abbia
notato quanto "giusta" fosse la
fotografia del bistrattato Ishtar
con il contrasto tra le tonalità
bianche nella parte newyorkese e
le tonalità dorate del deserto.
Naturalmente esagero un po'
quando parlo di premiatori ed
estimatori ignoranti; ma,
appunto, esagero soltanto un
po'. La nostra sarà pure una
civiltà delle immagini, ma è un
fatto che le immagini non
sappiamo ancora leggerle. La
nostra è rimasta finora una
cultura letteraria. Un esempio?
Tutti apprezziamo un dialogo
shakespeariano, ma se due eroi
western o due gangster parlassero
con toni shakespeariani, a
nessuno di noi verrebbe in
mente di dire: il film è brutto,
ma ha bei dialoghi! E invece
quante volte diciamo "film
brutto, ma belle immagini"
soltanto perché la fotografia è
decolorata o ci presenta dei
tableaux iwants! E come se
avvertissimo i dialoghi come
parte integrante di un film e la
fotografia invece come optional.
Il risultato è che poi ci si trova
nell'impossibilità di capire'e
gustare film dove tutto si è
trasformato in immagini: Ali
That Jazz One from the Heart,
Una commedia sexy di una notte
di mezza estate. Vogliamo fare,
ciascuno di noi per la parte che
ci compete, qualcosa in merito?
Io suggerirei, come prima misura
soltanto e (in senso paradossale),
che i critici paghino pegno ogni
volta che scrivono "bella la
fotografia" senza spiegare perché,
e che i direttori della fotografia
prendano l'espressione come un
insulto personale. Passando al
tono serio, dovrei invitare i
"maestri della luce" a farsi
maestri della parola, a compiere
opera di educazione alle
immagini nei loro incontri col
pubblico. Alcuni di loro già lo
fanno, a L'Aquila e altrove;
sarebbe bene lo facessero in
tanti. Ma sarebbe anche meglio,
ed a questo li invito, che i
"maestri della luce" fossero più
maestri e meno discepoli, fossero
cioè più creativi.
Da un po' di tempo si sono
formate delle convenzioni
figurative che hanno finito con
essere dei veri e propri luoghi
comuni. Non c'è un film in cui il
ricordo del passato non sia
immerso in una luce dorata,
sfavillante. Possibile che a
nessuno venga in mente che il
passato, specie se il ricordo
riguarda l'infanzia, può
presentare colori saturi e un po'
naif, che si avvicina più alla luce
primaverile che a quella estiva,
con un cielo azzurro quale poi
non si vede mai? E prima ancora:
a nessuno viene in mente che
tale configurazione del passato
non è neppure una immagine ma
è soltanto la traduzione visiva di
una immagine verbale? Età
dell'oro, si dice, e quindi tonalità
dorate.
È solo un esempio, ma per dire
che ci vuole più coraggio
espressivo, più inventività.
Magari ci saranno
incomprensioni, ma perché
farsene un cruccio quando la
fotografia di Ishtar non viene
capita e quella dell'Ultimo
imperatore fraintesa?
There are days when 1 think that
yellow is the colour of death. In
Proust's A la Recherche du temps
perdu, the ailing writer, Bergotte, dies
because of the effort it costs him to
view Vermeer's painting, View of
Delft, in which "a small, yellow wing
of wall is depicted, as delicate as any
Chinese vase painting, and a work of
art in itself'; as he dies, he actually
murmurs: "a small, yellow wing of wall
with a lean-to, a small, yellow wing of
wall". Yellow, therefore, can strike to
the heart and kill.
Then, certain of Van Gogh's
sunflowers suddenly come to mind,
bursting with yellow and filled with so
much light, they seem to come right
out of the canvas at you: far from
signifying death Van Gogh's yellow is
the colour of life! And Goethe, Itten,
and Storaro are perfectly right to
explore the psyswlogical, psycholgical
arid symbolical significance of colour.
Life. Death. Of course, yellow can
signify both! It depends on the context,
upon the images and emotions which
surround it. I know this is really quite
obvious, but one can often forget the
fact.
Just like one forgets something else
that's very obvious. We journalists,
who certainly should know better, even
forget it; so you can imagine what
chance the "ordinary cinema-goer" has
of remembering, especially when we
have never even educated him to the
fact. We have forgotten that saying
the photography's beautiful, is the
worst compliment one can pay to a
film. Directors of days gone by, in fact,
would get really angry when an
"outsider" admitted to the rushes,
would try and cover up his ignorance,
by saying nice things about the
photography; and they were damned
right! The photography of a film
should never be "beautiful" in itself,
detracting the cinema-goer's attention
from the rest of the film. The
photography has to be right, expressing
the poetry and drama of a film in the
most effective way.
There is a lot of conventionally
"beautiful" photography around in the
cinema today; and as soon as 1 see it, 1
immediately become suspicious, as it is
an excellent way of passing off a bad
film. Let me give you an example: one
could not possibly help but notice the
photography Jeffrey Kimball created
for Beverly Hills Cop II: shafts of
light, backlighting, lighting sources in
shot, decolorized images — the lot! And
the effect certainly was "beautiful",
and unusual, but completely wrong for
the film: it turned a comedy into a
drama! It was as if Giuseppe Rotunno
had used the same kind of lighting for
both Casanova and Non ci resta che
piangere; or Storaro had created the
same colour tones for both The Last
Emperor and Ishtar.
And how many awards the
photography of The Last Emperor
won! However, I have often asked
myself during the past few months, if
whoever assigned all those awards
knew precisely why, or if they found
the photography of The Last Emperor
beautiful, in the sense that the
photography of Ghandi or The Killing
Fields must have seemed beautiful to
whoever awarded them the Oscars: if,
in fact, photographic interpretation
had not been confused yet again with
things photographed which inevitably
results in the photography of an "epic"
film being considered beautiful, and
deserving of awards, and is actually
considered to be one of the ingredients
of an epic, along with the length, large
format and crowd scenes.
I don't want to in any way belittle the
photography that Storaro created for
The Last Emperor. On the contrary: I
would merely like to point out that,
amongst the countless people who
found the photography of The Last
Emperor beautiful — perhaps because
they even confused it with the work of
the set designer and his assistant — not
one of them was able to perceive how
"right" the photography of the
much-maligned Ishtar was, with the
bleached tones of the New York scenes
contrasting with the golden tones of
the desert.
Naturally, I'm exaggerating when I
speak of jury members and cinema
experts being ignorant; but not that
much. Ours may be a civilization built
on images, but the fact is we still have
difficulty in interpreting them. Our
culture is still a literary one. Another
example! We are all capable of
appreciating Shakespearian dialogue;
however, if two cowboys, or two
gangsters for that matter, were to start
speaking like Hamlet, no one would
ever think to comment: "Lousy filmgreat
dialogue". How many times
though, have we come out of the
cinema and heard ourselves saying:
"Awful film... beautiful photography!"
— and only because it happens to be
decolorized, or depict a series of
tableaux vivants! It as if we
considered the dialogue to be an
integral part of the film, and the
photography as an optional. And the
result is that we are unable to
understand and appreciate films in
which everything is expressed through
the image: All That Jazz, One from
the Heart, A Midsummer Night's
Sex Comedy, etc.
Now, do we want to do something
about all this, each in our particular
area! For starters, I would suggest that
all — meant in the paradoxical sense, of
course — critics pay a fine every time
they describe the photography of a film
as beautiful without qualifying this in
any way, and all Directors of
Photography take any such comment
as a personal insult! Joking apart, I
think it is time all photographic
maestros became maestros of the
spoken word, so that they can teach
the public, during their various
contacts with them, to understand and
appreciate the image. Some Directors
of Photography already do this, at
L'Aquila and other meetings; but it
would be better if many more did it.
What would be better still, and 1 hope
this is another suggestion that is taken
up, is if our photographic maestros
were more like maestros and less like
disciples, more creative, that is.
Certain "classic" photographic
interpretations have come into being
over the last years, which have
inevitably finished by become clichés.
Hardly a film exists, in which
memories of the past are not bathed in
a sentimental, golden light. Is it
possible that nobody thinks of
decipting scenes from the past,
especially those of childhood, in bold,
somewhat naif colours! Or creating a
light that communicates a feeling of
spring rather than the eternal summer
and blue skies, that perhaps some
children never saw! And even more
important: doesn't anyone realize that
depicting the past in this manner is not
creating images, but merely translating
verbal concepts visually! The golden
years of childhood, therefore, golden
tones
This is just an example, to try and put
across that one has to have the
courage to express something new, to
invent! Certainly, one might not
always be completely understood, but
what's so bad about that, when the
photography of Ishtar was not
understood, and that o/The Last
Emperor maybe misinterpreted!