During “The Long Night” episode of Game of Thrones’ final season, the Twitterverse erupted when the sprawling Battle of Winterfell was deemed “too dark” by some viewers. People who had previously given little thought to the job of television cinematographer were suddenly offering very vocal opinions on the profession. The uproar highlighted the challenges DPs face in this new Golden Age of Television. They must create stories that retain their visual appeal across a myriad of devices, resolutions, color spaces, and screen settings. A show must work on a 60-inch OLED television and on an iPhone, on a finely tuned […]

Fred Elmes invited me to a DI Theater at Harbor Picture Company, a post-house bustling around the corner from Film Forum, to talk about his work on Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. There was just an hour left of the allotted time to finish the HDR version of the film when I arrived at the DI suite, but Fred retained his cool as he lulled us to the finish line. In my time there, he liked to vignette the edges more or less, and bring faces up or down a level or two. Usually down.  Our meeting there was […]

Born in Brooklyn, Ken Kelsch enlisted to fight in Vietnam when he was still a teenager. He became a decorated officer in the Army Special Forces, and with over four decades as a cinematographer, has amassed more than 50 credits in film and television. His work alongside Abel Ferrara, with whom he has collaborated over 15 times, includes Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, The Addiction, The Funeral, and recent Tribeca Film Festival entry, The Projectionist. Along with actor Annabella Sciorra and composer Joe Delia, Kelsch will be doing a Q&A at MoMA during the screening of The Funeral on Thursday, May […]

In Guava Island, a musician (Donald Glover) incurs the wrath of a tropical despot when his plans for a celebratory music festival threaten to shutter the fictional isle’s silk factory for a day. The film, which runs 55 minutes with musical interludes from Glover’s alter ego Childish Gambino, features many of the talents behind the FX show Atlanta. That includes Emmy winning cinematographer Christian Sprenger (The Last Man on Earth, GLOW), who spoke to Filmmaker about working on location in Cuba and his magic formula for making the Alexa LF look like 16mm film. Guava Island is currently streaming on […]

Cinematographer Matt Mitchell lensed Little Woods, which world premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival where writer/director Nia DaCosta won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Nora Ephron Award. Shortly thereafter, the film was acquired by NEON and is currently in theaters. Little Woods is a modern Western about two women in rural America. Shot in Texas, but set in North Dakota, the film is a carefully composed drama, while also very much feeling like an emotionally-charged thriller. I sat down with Mitchell before last year’s festival premiere to talk about how he went about creating the look and feel of the […]

There’s an elephant at a circus in Manzhouli that sits and won’t move.“Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks,” Yu Cheng muses to his close friend’s wife, but the elephant still won’t budge. This is one of four characters whose lives eventually intersect en route to the seated behemoth. In the bleak mining city of the late writer/director Hu Bo’s slow epic An Elephant Sitting Still, people tend to linger as they’re being hurt too, in spite of the obvious exits that beckon them.  Somewhere in the time it takes to endure this 230 minute trial of misanthropy, you […]

On the night of her 36th birthday, New York video game developer Nadia (played by the show’s co-creator Natasha Lyonne) stumbles out of a party in her honor and is killed by an oncoming car. Thus begins a cycle of “resets” in the new Netflix series Russian Doll, with each demise bringing Nadia right back to the same birthday party bathroom mirror on the same night. The Groundhog Day comparisons are unavoidable, yet as Russian Doll unfolds across its eight episodes it reveals layers of emotional complexity and existential angst that extend beyond that Bill Murray classic and its Christmas Carol-esque […]

The debut feature from writer and director Hu Bo, An Elephant Sitting Still, caused a sensation when it screened at the 2018 Berlinale. Nearly four hours long, the movie unfolds over the course of a day in and around a blue-collar housing development in a third-tier Chinese town. Interlocking narratives follow a bullied high school student, an elderly parent pressured to move into a nursing home, a gangster who must avenge an attack on his brother and a girl’s illicit relationship with a married teacher. The movie’s running time, difficult subject matter and troubled production have left an air of […]

I screened the amorphous Madeline’s Madeline twice in preparation for my interview with DP Ashley Connor; on the second go-around, I realized I’d be as nonplussed on a third or forth. I didn’t write any questions because I couldn’t. But perhaps an improvised approach was truer to the spirit of Madeline’s Madeline, which refuses to be pinned down. One of New York’s most prolific working DPs, Connor’s fervent demand for a higher standard of nuance, diversity, and inclusivity in the film industry naturally formed the backbone and throughline of our oscillating conversation which features, amongst other things, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, Grand […]

Corporate Animals gives Demi Moore a rare chance to show her comic skills. As Lucy, the awful CEO of a new company, Incredible Edibles, Moore orders her employees on a team-building exercise/retreat via a New Mexico cave. When the workers are trapped, it’s only a matter of time before they becomes the Incredible Edibles. Via email, DP Tarin Anderson addressed the challenges of making a film tracking eight characters in a closed setting. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? […]