Terry
Gibson (stuntie) driving, David Eggby (DOP) during filming of Mad Max (1979).
Courtesy David Eggby
Jane Freebury, The Age, reports
A
glossy history of Australian cinematography is an unabashed tribute to those
who have captured some of the finest moments in moving pictures, Jane Freebury
writes.
Cinematographers will do anything to get the shot and sometimes
the lengths they go to are "just ridiculous", says film scholar
Martha Ansara. She would know what risks they take to get that shot. She is one
of the first women in Australia to work as a cinematographer and, in honour of
the profession, she's undertaken a big, glossy commemorative book about it, the
first history of the profession Down Under.
The
Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia, has
just been published by the Australian Cinematographers Society.
It's hard to credit that there is a group of Australians who do
really high-profile work in the international film and television industries
yet few of us could name them. They win top awards for their work, but actors
and directors attract acclaim and recognition in a way that cinematographers
don't.
This oversight has been rectified with the publication of The
Shadowcatchers, recently launched in Sydney by veteran director Bruce
Beresford. He says he considers the book "absolutely unique".
"No other country has produced such an amazing tribute to its
cameramen ... I've never heard of one, never seen one. It is an astonishing
record of an under-appreciated group of artists."
He thinks cinematographers have a much lower profile than still
photographers, and he has a point.
Yet Australian cinematographers have been at the top of their game
for a long time. In recent decades they have contributed in large measure to
the success of Australian cinema and their top-drawer skills are being used
regularly overseas.
Predator, Moulin
Rouge! and Romeo & Juliet were shot by Don McAlpine; Witness,
Cold Mountain and The English Patient by John Seale (who is
soon to begin work on the new Mad Max with George Miller); Chicago,
Memoirs of a Geisha and Collateral by Dion Beebe; and Master
and Commander, White Men Can't Jump and The Way Back
were shot by Russell Boyd. And there's Dean Semler (Mad Max II and III,
Dances With Wolves, Apocalypto), Peter James (Mao's Last
Dancer, Paradise Road and Black Robe) and Andrew Lesnie
(The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong and The Lovely
Bones). Five of these eminent established cinematographers have been
awarded Academy Awards for their work.
The book highlights the fearlessness, adventurousness and
adaptability of the profession. Ansara understands the chances her male
colleagues will take for the sake of the shot. "Terrified" of big
dippers herself, she has climbed aboard with her camera anyway, while others
have wielded their cameras as they ride backwards on horseback, stand on the
top of moving cars, brave crocodile-infested swamps or ride pillion on the back
of speeding motorcycles. Perhaps it is significant that many cinematographers
hail from the country.
Many of the photographs collected for the book are striking images
captured on set. DOP David Eggby rode pillion on a motorcycle driven by one of
the "stunties" on the Mad Max shoot in 1979. Another shot
captures a man filming while prone on the road while a stunt driver balances
his car on two wheels as he passes over him. Another has snapped a
cinematographer shooting a commercial within centimetres of the head of a
bucking bull for the advertisement.
"One of the things I hope emerges in the book is that
commercials production, especially once television started, has been the
foundation of the industry," Ansara notes. Most cinematographers actually
work in commercials and "here it is the only way to survive".
Risk taking is by no means a recent phenomenon. Before the advent
of television, Movietone and Cinesound news cameramen filmed from the roofs of
moving cars while they covered events. Frank Hurley, cinematographer on six
Antarctic and various other perilous expeditions, set the standard for
courageous and adventurous camerawork.
"One of the great dangers of being a cinematographer is
walking backwards off cliffs," she observes, adding, "Not that any
Australians have been killed that way." Though there is a shot of director
Charles Chauvel and his cinematographer Carl Kayser on a make-shift dolly of
wooden planks rolling towards the edge of a cliff escarpment while shooting Jedda
(1955). It puts a new slant on the famous scene of Robert Tudawali and
Rosalie Kunoth on the edge of the precipice.
The
Shadowcatchers offers an insider's view of the world of the Australian
cinematographer from 1901 to the present, through the lens of still
photographers past and present. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand
words. In one great shot news cameraman Ross Wood, working for Fox Movietone
News in 1944, is seen precariously perched on an open platform filming inner
city construction in Sydney.
Australian news cameramen Damien Parer can be seen at work in the
Pacific during World War II. He was killed in 1944 while on patrol with
American soldiers, and his name is the first on the list of 20 cinematographers
who died while on assignment. Neil Davis, who survived covering the Vietnam War
but died during a short-lived coup in Thailand in 1985, is also listed.
Some of the men were reporting from war zones, but peacetime also
has its hazards. "Helicopters are equally dangerous, it turns out,"
observes Ansara. Indeed, there have been several deaths in helicopters quite
recently.
Risk is routine, and it's not just the 20 to 30-year-olds.
Cameramen in their late 50s and early 60s, says Ansara, appear to think nothing
of tying themselves to the front of a moving car in pursuit of the right shot.
The
Shadowcatchers is based on oral history collected from people who really knew
the business. It is accessible, readable history with personal quotes and
anecdotes. The specially researched text includes individual biographies of
significant cinematographers combined with a pictorial record of more than 380
photographs of cinematographers at work on film sets. Beresford describes the
beautiful glossy coffee table book as "a triumph of research, both in its
text and photos".
It is printed in five colours so that the blacks would be really
good, "because cinematographers" says Ansara, "love their
blacks". The dimensions of 340mm x 245mm "are as close as we could
get to the 35mm Academy screen ratio". The book committee just wanted it
like this, "no matter what".
About a quarter of the photographs come from the National Film and
Sound Archive. The archive is hosting an exhibition of photographs from the
book that coincides with its publication and will run for 12 months.
The
Shadowcatchers: A history of cinematography in Australia is
published by the Australian Cinematographers Society, softcover $66, hardcover
$250. www.shadowcatchers.com.au. The free exhibition in the NFSA foyer runs for
12 months.
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