AGAINST THE GRAIN
Scott Macaulay discusses the aesthetics of digital imagery with The Celebration d.p. Anthony Dodd Mantle.
Anthony Dodd Mantle on the set of Julien Donkey-Boy. Photo: Michael Ginsburg.
Prior to its release, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration must have seemed an unlikely poster boy for the digital revolution. Refusing to fetishize the hard lines and hyperreal quality of the digital video image transferred to film and narrating not some 21st century cyber-tale but instead an Ibsen-like drama of the destruction of the European family, the film seemed far away from the sorts of projects associated with this new technology. And indeed, The Celebration’s ultimate success and extraordinary influence stemmed not from its technical virtues but from its connotation of digital video with a joyful aesthetic freedom. Liberated from the tyranny of footage counts, short ends, dolly track, and lengthy lighting setups, d.p. Anthony Dodd Mantle shot hand-held (per Dogma 95 directives) single-chip video, spinning, thrusting, floating his camera across the action. When the film’s long evening entered its darkest hours and natural light faded away, Mantle let the image beautifully degrade, its decomposition following the psyches of the characters. The result, of course, was a film that excited audiences and critics around the world and inspired a new generation of young filmmakers to think about narrative moviemaking in different terms.
Mantle, who also shot the Berlin Film Festival hit (and upcoming Sony Classics release) Mifune’s Last Song, traveled from his home in Denmark to New York recently to shoot Harmony Korine’s new feature, Julien, on PAL mini-DV and a slew of spy and infra-red cameras. A couple of hours before his flight back we sat down and discussed the so-called DV revolution.
Filmmaker: You’ve shot films in both film and video, but having shot two DV features now, you’re becoming known as something of a digital video specialist. What’s your first response when you get a call asking you to shoot a feature in DV instead of film?
Anthony Dodd Mantle: I’m always cautious and skeptical if the first thing I’m told is that it’s DV. I don’t want to know that. I want to know about the story, the director, who the producers are, what they’ve done. I’m not the least bit interested in knowing that it’s to be shot on DV. What’s going to excite me or lose me is the story and the energy surrounding the project. If you have a director or producer slamming his hand on the table, saying, "This is a DV film!" I’ll just walk away.
Filmmaker: Let’s say that you like the story and get on with the director. What comes next in your decision-making process?
Mantle: After I find out the story and meet the person behind the story, I have an initial feeling about what kind of images, what kind of world I would see in the film. It could be color or black and white, celluloid or electronic, abstract or realist. And then days go by and you talk to the director and realize that there may be production reasons why the film has to be shot this or that way. There are always financial limitations — every film has a certain audience — but I think we’d all agree, ultimately, that the artist behind a project will know what medium would be best to use. For Julien, Harmony wanted to shoot 80 hours of material. That would have meant a devastating budget if it were to be shot on film. But I wouldn’t have shot Harmony’s film on electronics if I didn’t feel that the world he wanted to show us was suitable for that medium.
Filmmaker: What motivated your and Thomas’s decision to shoot The Celebration on digital? Was it for financial or aesthetic reasons?
Mantle: It was a low-budget film, between $800,000 and $1 million, and I’ve never made so many tests on a film! I felt very strongly after the first test that the film should be shot handheld, on 35mm, with two cameras in a documentary style. We worked very hard on the budget to make that approach work. I did tests in 35mm on various fast stocks that I could shoot in low light. If the film had been shot that way, it would have wound up looking a little bit like it looks on video anyway. I then tried a mixture of 35mm and 16mm, but the budget still didn’t work. Then I worked on a deal with Oliver Stone’s company to do the whole thing in Super 8 on Vision stock, have it developed in the States on a wet roller system, and transferred in Sweden. By the time we finished budgeting for that, the budget was close to the 35mm budget! It was getting close to shooting and the producer was starting to panic. I was desperately looking for the right language and the film was growing — it was being rewritten and rewritten and I could feel that it was going to be a hell of a film. Then, very close to starting shooting, I decided to commit myself to these small cameras. The production company tried very hard to get me to shoot on Beta — the traditional "camera on the shoulder" — to get a better image. I refused. It was mini-DV or nothing for me.
Filmmaker: Why didn’t you consider Beta?
Mantle: By this time, I had begun to see how I would shoot the film. I was going to be groveling around, crawling around, letting myself go with that camera. I was going to behave like one of the actors, and I wanted to be as lightweight and as emotional as possible. Some of the camera moves that occurred in the filming were emotional and spontaneous, and with a Betacam camera, you twist around and hit someone on the head. It’s heavy! And you can’t move into the spaces. I wanted to be in people’s pockets, down their trousers, in their skirts. The scene in The Celebration that is the best example of this approach is the scene where the daughter is in the bathroom looking for the arrows on the wall, the message that her sister has left. I didn’t know where the sign was either, and I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to hunt. I could have done that with a larger camera, but the way I crawled around the plastic curtain, went up in the corner of the room – those things I could have never done.
Filmmaker: Was The Celebration your first experience with video?
Mantle: No. There’s a film, Gazantum, by Gunther Wallrathe, a German journalist who has been put on a death list by the extreme right wing. He went underground and made this film about illegal slave labor in Germany, disguising himself as a Turk and carrying two hidden spy cameras. He told his whole story with these cameras, an hour-and-a-half film. And this [video] image communicated something so current, so illegal, so scary, so dangerous, that it made an indelible effect on me. When I went to film school in Denmark, I arranged a screening of it. And when I made my graduation film in 1989, I got hold of an infrared black and white video camera and did shots in video. The funny thing was, after making that film, it wasn’t the directors and cinematographers who were saying, "Wow, this is interesting." It was the producers asking me what it was like to shoot a film on video. They wanted to know how to make films cheaper. And then I didn’t touch video for eight or nine years until I shot The Celebration.
Filmmaker: Was The Celebration strictly shotlisted and storyboarded?
Mantle: The Celebration was shot in five or six weeks with a lot of actors and a lot of subplots, but we didn’t storyboard at all. Thomas and I spoke driving to the set every day, and then I basically shot the scenes emotionally. Thomas watched on the video monitor, and if there was something missing, we would talk. But, basically, it was very free. The camerawork was improvised. I was never in the same place, and I told the actors before we shot they would never see me in the same place twice and they should stop asking me where I was going to be.
Filmmaker: One of the things that The Celebration did away with is the old bromide that if you have video in a film, its use has to be motivated in some way. People used to say that you had to have a character with a video camera, or the film had to have some sort of particularly contemporary, technological theme to it.
Mantle: That justifying of technique and form comes from too much analyzing. And it’s not an outdated thing. A d.p. will often think like that because he wants to find the mind and the heart of a story for the director. We had considered, in The Celebration, having somebody in the family have a video camera, but it became too intellectual. The audience just has to go along with the first two-to-five minutes of the film and fall into the language. Once it gets a hold of you, you’re there.
Filmmaker: I’ve been surprised by the way you talk about shooting video. You use a very abstract, tactile language. For example, you’ll talk of "smashing the image." And, while a lot of supporters of digital video talk about its high image quality, you’ll often go for a "dirtier" look.
Mantle: I do use very loose terminology. It’s not technical; it’s more emotional and abstract. The Celebration was shot on DV and the image was destroyed, smashed, and decomposed. But that approach was quite obvious for me. The family was slowly breaking down, and I thought the allegory, the metaphor, for this breakdown was to take the image, whether it was on film or video, and slowly destroy it. I would have done the same thing in another way on film. And there are similarities in the way I’ve worked on Julien. I felt that this image too, as an electronic image, had to be broken down and destroyed so that a new kind of organic emotional message could appear on the screen. I felt with Julien that the whole concept of the main character being a potential schizophrenic would suggest that we work with more than one vision for the character. I had this conversation with Harmony, and he didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want any "system" in the shooting or in the sound design. He just wanted to go. And that was the hardest phase for me on the film, feeling that I was doing the right thing for him by picking up camera number one or camera number nine. As the shoot went on, though, it became more of an intuitive process. Now that we’ve finished shooting, it does seem like I’ve done shots in a certain way referring to the characters’ psyches. But it’s been a process that’s happened along the way. I haven’t been able to force a system, and Harmony isn’t the kind of director where you can force a system. But I think I could have only done films like The Celebration and Julien because I know what happens to video when it’s transferred to film. I know the limitations and potential of the various technical tricks. The digital video world we are moving into is becoming more and more complicated. You can’t just throw yourself off a cliff and play. I mean, we’ve played on this film, we’ve improvised, but you can be sure that before we started I knew where the cul de sacs were and where the avenues lead to.
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