2023-06-21 12:01:54
José Luis Alcaine has five Goyas for Best Cinematography to his credit and has worked with directors such as Bigas Luna, Vicente Aranda, Fernando Fernán Gómez and Pedro Almodóvar on more than 150 films. The cinematographer starred this Tuesday in the inauguration of Campus La Immortal at the Zaragoza Film Library with a master class.
If something has marked his career it is the defense of natural light in photography, little intervened.
The viewer is comfortable when they are in something recognizable and then if you tell the story acceptably, with a light that can more or less exist in reality, it integrates better with what they are seeing. In addition to that, there is another characteristic that I think is important in cinema, which is time, the passage of time, giving the passage of time on the screen through photography so that the viewer can locate himself. Time is part of our life and that seems to be somehow forgotten in cinematography around the world, we forget that life is above all the passage of time.
Confess me, now I don’t believe anymore, but how much effort has it cost you to assert your ideas?_
The directors accept my ideas, they are very open, and that’s because normally if they call you they know in some way how one deals with light, with framing and this kind of thing. The director does not have time on set to have very fluid communication with the cinematographer or with the other members of the team because he is generally absorbed by the actors and their work. In that game, it’s very difficult for me to pay too much attention to cinematography.
“‘Citizen Kane’ you can rewatch it several times because you always discover something”
Don’t they talk on set?
You know? Now there is a great advantage, we have monitors on the set that give the image that we are shooting, that did not happen 30 years ago. It was not known how what we were filming would turn out until it was seen in projection two or three days later. That mystery of how this was going to turn out was only known to the cinematographer because not even the director knew how the image was going to turn out. That led to the change brought about by the nouvelle vague. To have greater control of the image, they instituted that the cinematographer also bring the camera. Until then, it was dedicated to light, actors and sets and the camera operator was dedicated only to manipulating the camera, framing it and correcting it. They wanted to change the cinema to go to natural interiors, a new concept. Nobody talks about it but natural interiors do not appear in neorealism. The change appeared with the nouvelle vague that they went to natural interiors and that changed photography because cinematographers were used to the studio and there had to be a new batch that was taken in natural interiors. That changed photography and its concept.
Was it a positive change?
The figure of the cinematographer and the operator joined. But now, the fact of shooting digitally with those big monitors means that everyone sees what is being done and it is not necessary to go see it on projection in three days. Control and framing is done on monitors already. The fact of carrying the camera is only for a creative reason, but the one who carries the camera and who takes the picture at the same time is inclined towards one thing or the other because the two things are very different, bets or for the light or to carry the camera, and that’s not too good.
How much does the cinematography influence the success of a film?
I think photography, its direction and the creation of the image of photography have a great influence, but almost no attention is paid to them. It is considered that photography is to make a story beautiful and not. I believe that the photography, the framing, the camera, the light and the diaphragm have to do with the results of the film and how the audience joins the film. Due to a series of circumstances, cinema is now influenced by platforms and series because, after all, we are the same ones who do one thing and another except for some privileged ones like Almodóvar who does not do series at all. It is not the same to work for a big screen than for a smaller one. In the last 30 years, something has been discovered that comes from advertising and that has later been transplanted to the series. There has been a direction of the viewer’s gaze to follow some stories in a certain way, focusing only on what the director and the cinematographer want the viewer to see.
“It would be necessary to achieve criticism with images, cinema is still image”
How do you do that?
For that they discovered that by opening the diaphragm a lot and having a character in focus, you followed that character. What is the problem? That this gives a kind of flatness to the huge screen, there is almost no relief. It makes the viewer not integrate into the vision because if you give an image on the screen where most of it is in focus, the viewer can pick up where to look and get involved with the story, and somehow the movie they are watching leave a mark I believe that current cinema, not Scorsese, not Almodóvar, Eastwood, is greatly influenced by what he intended to direct the viewer, but the direction of the viewer makes them stand up when the film is over and say, well, it’s another film and at the end of the film quarter of an hour he forgets about her. That is because they have not participated, it is very important for this to happen and that is the work of the cinematographer and they have to discuss it with the director and get the participation of the viewer and that is achieved through the diaphragm, a depth field in which the scene is not placed flatly where the director chooses.
It seems that it is a topic that has been studied a lot.
It all comes from some reflections that I made during the pandemic watching all the old movies that had made me love cinema. I said to myself ‘why don’t these movies tire me? If this happens it has to do with my job.’ Looking at them, I realized that all the films that had impressed me as a young man had a great depth of focus. The quintessential example is Citizen Kane, you never tire of seeing it because there is always something you discover, there is so much information that you can see it several times and that does not happen with current cinema.
“Photography greatly influences the success of a film but almost no attention is paid to it”
Why do you think that has now changed?
The current cinema system takes many cameras for filming. If you shoot with four cameras, there is one that is the general shot and then at the ends of the free field left by the central one, you put the other cameras that capture shots of different characters. There is a general shot and then close-ups everywhere, there is no interplay between one and the other, and then the use and abuse of the telephoto lens and the wide-open diaphragm appear. That is, there is a character and everything else is very out of focus. But, what happens?_That this way of counting and filming is cheap, it is filmed that way because the production thinks it’s great because that means a lot of savings and you have the supposed material for the film. The problem? Which is misreported.
Do you think that the drop in audience has to do with all this that you are explaining?
I am convincent that is yes. Criticism that doesn’t see these problems I’m talking about. As always, criticism has a big problem, explaining the image with writing, and that is a very clear problem. He does not look so much at the form but at the bottom, the story. And the story walks based on shots but does not integrate the viewer, it rejects it. And that is what we should be able to change. There is a cinema that works, that of superheroes. It bores me, but those films have a particularity, as they are artificially created with splendid backgrounds, they have focus and people see the film in a different way. It is the only genre that has focus and is the one that is successful.
There is less and less young audience, how do we get them to return to theaters?
It would be necessary to achieve that the critics are made with images, which can be done on the websites to study the way in which cinema is being made. It would be necessary to do something like that, because cinema is still image. In this sense, I believe that the great cinema that I have seen in the last 70 years has been created by people who had grown up on silent films. The important thing there was the image because the viewer had no other reference. There was no sound and that shows.
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