In dialogue with Ed Lachman: from the movie set to a gallery space in Paris
The public knows Ed Lachman as the director of photography of movies such as Far From Heaven, Erin Brockovich or A Prairie Home Companion. But Mr. Lachman’s work has also a pure photographic side, which will be on show from tomorrow at Galerie Cinéma in Paris. CFA met him a few weeks ago in Paris, here what we said.
Could you tell us more about your show at Cinéma in Paris?
Part of the exhibition will be on black and white polaroids that I took during the shooting of the film “I am not there”. Traditionally still photographers, when film was more prevalent than video, would shoot polaroids to check the exposure and the contrast before they would actually shoot on film. I was too using that technique shooting on a film set. I would take still photographs with my polaroid camera to check the contrast and the lighting. But what I found out was that I would be with the actors moments before we would actually do the filming, and I had a special relationship, an intimacy with them that a still photographer would never have. I was part of them, either in the characters they were going to play or in their private moments. I’ve taken thousands of these polaroids over the years, on different films that I’ve shot, but it was actually during the film “I am not there” – shot in black and white – that Cate Blanchett asked me if she could have some of the stills. This made me start to think that there could have been an interest in the stills that I was taking purely for utilitarian reason. So I started to collect the ones I did on this film and to save them.
Then, there is a second part.
Yes. The other part of the show is what I call “motion stills”. When still photographers are on the set as specialists to take pictures for the advertising department, they generally want just close ups, they never really want to shoot the set and they never shoot from where the motion picture camera is, where the lighting is, where the movement of the camera is. They always shoot from some other points of view, which is wrong. So, when the digital world became part of cinema, I was allowed to capture the image from where I stood and I could pick an image that was an abstraction of the story. When I am color correcting, I have the ability to say “could I have that still?”. So I would take an high resolution still of the motion picture frame. A frame that anyone would have ever seen unless I stopped this image in motion. I picked the moment.
Is it all?
No, there is a part three, that is about “Shadow”. To me cinematic images aren’t about how you use space and time, but how you move through space and time to tell the story. What is interesting about the concept of this gallery is that it isn’t about just images from cinema but about the way images are used like cinema. This is what I am trying to do with the exhibition, that is to show different facets of the idea of how images become cinematic, how they are used to tell a story. The last part is something I have been working with for several years, that is using montages of stills. In other words, I have taken dissociated images and put it together like a film. They are in a sequence and they tell a story. I am using stills that can be open ended images but put them in a narrative. Basically, I edited images and use them to tell a narrative.
What is photography for Ed?
The first camera I would ever pick up was a motion picture, a super 8 camera. I would make little films with this camera but I would always think about stylisation and ideas about the way painters always came from a social and a political point of view about why they painted the images, and how they painted the images through whatever movement or style they were in. So I thought, why couldn’t you do that in cinema? Why couldn’t you tell stories through the language of images, but through a painterly approach towards storytelling? Therefore I made this kind of imagistic films; they were portraits of people.
Which are your main references?
The two movements, which were somehow similar yet contradictory, that I was mostly interested in art school were the Dottist, with the use of the found image, and the German expressionism in which there was more of a subjective point of view towards images.
How did you come to photography?
Cinema records reality and then you interpret that reality and use it to express your idea. I have always used still photographs as a kind of research for film projects I’ve done but I’ve also kept it as a personal thing because after I became a cinematographer I have lost the personal play, except in my work, of using emotion picture cameras. I’ve always kept still to photography as a kind of notebook for ideas. I did a photo roman which was published in France with the edition of Le Minuit in which I shot exactly like a film, like in Italy the “fumettis”. I shot on a tripod, I had actors, I did lighting. I did it originally to try to raise money for a film I wanted to direct but I got so far into it, it took me two years, that I actually made a film that didn’t exist, in a weird way but it looks just like a film. It looks like they were frames out of a film. It was called “show strap”. A very inexpensive form of entertainment.
Is there a film that inspired you to enter the movie world?
I took these courses with Gydian Backman at Harvard, a film appreciation course and the other course was about neorealism. One of the films that first excited me was an early film of De Sica “Umberto D” mostly held together by images, there was hardly any dialogue. That was a revelation to me because I never took cinema that seriously as an art form. The idea that you could construct images to tell a story without words was like “wow” and that was when I got excited with the idea. I was frustrated as a painter because it takes years to really develop a technique. But here I could pick up a camera and with found images, like the Dottist used, I could tell a story. For me images are always the language of story telling. That’s really the film that got me interested in cinema in a way.
Do you consider the story telling as the main difference between doing cinema and doing an art piece?
I was going to make a comparison between motion picture, images and still photographs. This is what I tried to address at in the show as I believe these to be different ways of using images. The way I like to look at it is that in a film the order is beginning, middle and end. In the storyteller however, even if the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end, the language of images is to tell some narrative story, or a non-narrative story, but in the sense there’s an evolution of the story teller. That is completed by the images. In a still photography, or in a painting – to prove that I did a tableau vivant of Edward Hopper where I created an installation of a Hopper painting – is that the images are more open, allowing the viewer to participate with the image itself and create his own story. In a painting or in a still photograph the narrative is generally open ended, and this is the strongest point indeed. The tableau vivant I did was “Morning sun”, that’s a woman sitting on a bed looking out the window. What’s interesting for me about Hopper is that he is so cinematic. For me his paintings have this open ended narrative which allow the viewer to complete the story. You could put yourself into the character and the character became a mirror, a reflection of yourself. And that’s what to me the strength of an image like that.
Cinema brings to viewer to emulation. Do you think you can have the same process in fine arts?
People have been trying to do that with Brechtian Techniques. For instance, I worked on a movie, “Far from Heaven”, which is a reference to Douglas Sirk. He was creating a world of artifice, a world of abstraction to allow the viewer to enter it. That’s what real melodrama works on. You are aware that you are going to enter some world that is not naturalistic but that, in some way, allows you to respond to your emotions.Then when you see films, so called naturalistic or documentary, you already know that they have been manipulated. People have become more and more sophisticated that you know the film has been shot and edited from the perspective of the filmmaker and that you are going to partecipate through his point of view that is not necessarily real. There is nothing real. Film is the illusion of reality, but reality is an illusion in itself.
Which movie or director would you suggest to a young visual artist today?
In America I think Todd Haynes, who is the greatest proponent of understanding story telling through the visual language of images. Some of his movies are “Far from Heaven” or “I’m not there”, this latter being a real work of cinematic language. In France I love the work of Gaspar Noé or Leos Carax.
How about the opposite? Which contemporary artist would you suggest to a young film maker?
I love Marina Abramovich because her work has so much of a political context. And Hopper, absolutely. He created his own language, images which were symbols. I probably have a tendency towards a social or political art.
To do a movie, you need money. While doing art can be really cheap.
Well, nowadays with the video world, it’s becoming a more equality-based art form. I don’t know if this means making better films, because more people have access to it but at leasts it gives the ability to learn how to tell stories with images.
The boundaries between movie making and art making seems to be fading away…
I always find interesting that artists want to make film, and film makers want to make art. Now there’s more and more a cross over. I did this installation at the Whitney, that will be exhibited here in Paris which is about “lost images” of the last film I shot with RiverPhoenix, called Shadow. When I work with artists who work in visual language, I find they want less of a narrative than we do in cinema. However this restricts what the real ability of cinema is.
Which is your point of view on video art?
I like some video art, even if it’s conceptual, that brings the viewer into another kind of story telling. I don’t see the distinction between video art and cinema. It’s just another way to tell a story.
However, video artists shouldn’t think of video art as the fourth dimension in still painting. I’ve just seen a movie at the New York Film Festival, called Stray Dog by Tsai Ming-liang, a Taiwanese director. He is a narrative film maker, who is making films more like video installation. I don’t know if this totally works but it’s such an interesting film making that you have to respect what he is trying to do.
September 22, 2014
