Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Lena Herzog’s Camera Finds “Lost Souls”

December 19, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Lena Herzog, born Elena Pisetski, photo by Rachel Lorenz.

There was an electrical power blackout the day that seventeen-year-old Elena Pisetski first encountered a collection of jarred fetuses in the galleries of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera Palace, where an eerie light seeped in from the windows. Pisetski was a student at the university’s Philology Faculty located on the embankment of the Neva River, next door to the beautiful aquamarine-colored mansion housing the scientific specimens of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch was Dutch, one of the legions of seekers of new knowledge who, during the age of exploration of the New World, collected thousands of related and unrelated artifacts from his native Holland as well as from distant lands, into what were called Wunderkammern (Cabinets of Wonder). Continue reading ‘Lena Herzog’s Camera Finds “Lost Souls”’

Matthais Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part Three

December 5, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Cinematographer Gregg Toland, ASC

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Gregg Toland is widely regarded by most contemporary cinematographers as the essential locus for a discussion of breakthrough movie image creation. The most cited of his films is the collaboration with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, a film that looms large in anyone’s movie canon, as much for its narrative innovation as for the deep focus and wide angle camerawork that heralded its signature style, a style that seems largely to have stuttered after Toland’s death in 1948. The irony is that this deep focus technique has found new standing in digital 3D cinematography, even as 2D video cinematographers labor to remove the onus of the wide-angle “video look,” and as CCD imagers have grown ever larger. With the improving dynamic range of 35mm. sensors and by selection of longer focal length lenses, this video “look” is eroding; at its highest quality HD video now closely matches film.

Less well known than Toland’s collaboration with Welles is the cinematographer’s multi-film collaborations with other directors such as Howard Hawks, but especially with John Ford, who like Welles, shared with Toland his single card credit on The Long Voyage Home.

Shared credit card "The Long Voyage Home."

Continue reading ‘Matthais Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part Three’