· : ‘Birdman’ Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Revolutionizes the Film Industry
For those readers who are not familiar with the work and legacy of Emmanuel Lubezki, this is a short overview of his work. However, it is recommended that you read about him and see his works beforehand(you have probably watched some of it already without realizing so) because this article is more focused on his visual style, as well as the visual style and works of other cinematographers and directors who share the same aesthetics.
From working in the Mexican Television in the 80s, his first Feature Bandits in 1991 and his first collaboration with Alfonso Cuaron (who would then became his longtime partner) to his first academy award nomination for Great Expectation in 1998, Lubezki immensely and passionately experimented with cinematography and camera work until mastering his craft and becoming known to many people today as the best cinematographer of the millennium.
Ever since his first Oscar nomination until this day, he collaborated with Iconic film directors (other than the 3 mentioned above) such as Scorsese, Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, Michael Man, and the list goes on.
I think the biggest occasions where Lubezki got international acclaim were after the release of Tree Of Life, Into The Wonder, and Birdman.
Birdman was his most discussed film in the social media film community at the time it was released. Many people were very fascinated by the fact that this is a one-take film and praised the masterfulness of the director and cinematographer who captured all of this in one seamless take as if cinema was a competition of who can hold his breath longer.
As a matter of fact, Hitchcock had done it more than 6 decades ago in his film Rope, and in both cases (in Iñárritu’s Birdman and Hitchcock’s Rope), it wasn’t a real one take like the case in Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) which was the first film to be completely captured in one shot.
What first caught my attention on Birdman is the fact that this is a film on a play, and plays are about rehearsals and long extended performances; and they sure rehearsed for that one a lot, and so it was like a modern play that was represented in a different medium. What really blew my mind near the end of the film was the idea the elimination of the montage, in a film that turned out to be one of the most rhythmic films I have ever watched.
For a long time, when we thought of “film rhythm”, the first thing that came to mind used to be “Montage”. The idea of rhythmic cutting, the pace of the shots cut together, orchestrating the cuts with the drama, and adjusting the frame rate.
The frame in a film is the note in music, like Tarantino puts it. But what would happen if we eliminate the montage? what would happen if there were no cuts? How could we possibly achieve the rhythm or musicality of a film?
Truth Told 24 times a second
The French new wave filmmakers strived to revolutionize cinema, break Hollywood’s conventions and capture truth in their films.
A film used to be told 24 frames a second, Jean-Luc Godard once said “Cinema tells truth 24 times a second”, so when French film-makers used revolutionary techniques like jump cuts, and freeze frames it meant something else, and conveyed meaning on a different level than Hollywood films; and that’s because they thought the standardized film language didn’t express enough.
For the French new wave filmmakers, the Auteur Theory was the main theory that defined their movement. A theory that introduces us to the idea that a film director is an author, and that the camera in the hands of a director is an equally expressive tool to the pen or typewriter in the hands of an author, or maybe the brush in the hands of a painter. This makes the filmmaker obligated to use the language of that camera honestly, stylistically and to the full extent to express his story, in what we know as “Camera Stylo”.
Martin Scorsese puts it better when he describes film language as visual literacy. This visual literacy has a vocabulary and grammar of its own that is manifested in all possibilities of what you can do in a film, whether it’s a camera movement, focal length, color, composition, or mise en scene.
I think it would have been more accurate to say that this visual language doesn’t have vocabulary or grammar; it has things far more sophisticated and far more expressive, things that we still don’t have words for, but things that evolved from silent cinema and first talkies to cinema today, and those things keep getting more and more expressive as we explore more in film craft.
It’s safe to say that Lubezki is a master of the French Camera Stylo, a master of visual literacy, and a master of the language of film.
In Lubezki’s Birdman, The Tree Of Life, Into The Wonder, and other great titles, he mastered the camera Stylo alongside great directors like Inarittu and Malick. The flawless camera movements in Tree Of Life, and the deterministic portrayal of nature, the past and things that are happening far away, against the main events in the film, makes it a very multi-dimensional experience that couldn’t be fully grasped in a single time of watching.
There’s a dolly zoom, a tracking shot, a track-in shot, sliding shot, and many other terms that we use to describe camera movement, but there is no way to describe the various signature techniques that Lubezki explored or developed in his films.
In Luebzki’s films, the film has a personality and the camera has that same personality, it’s not afraid to show it, it speaks itself in sophisticated expressive means of language that are capable of stretching in all directions, expanding in all dimensions and resonating on all levels.
The word that can best describe Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is “Impression”. He captures the emotional and psychological impressions in a scene, expresses them in camera movement and direction, mise en scene, lighting, colors and the overall personality, then he sends the impressions he captured back to the audience on the big screen. In an artistic sense of the word, we could say that Lubezki is an Expressionist.
His cinematography is sometimes spiritually transcending, sometimes shocking and disorienting, and at other times perplexing and ambiguous. He doesn’t get credit for that alone. Radical directors like Gasper Noe alongside the cinematographer Benoit Debit experimented with camera work combined with sound design to convey a shocking and nauseating experience in his film Irreversible (2002), a trippy experience in Enter the Void (2009), and a rollercoaster of emotions in Love (2015). Sokurov’s made the first one-take film and used sophisticated camera techniques to tell a story visually without compromise.
All these film-makers share a desire for exploration, expression, and reaching beyond the conventions. A desire that is similar to the desire directors likes D.W. Griffith, Eisenstein, and Kuleshov had when they tried to, and succeeded in revolutionizing editing and Montage in the early cinema, people who strived to find the best ways of telling their stories; because a good story has to be well told and believable like Robert Mckee explains in his wonderful book.
Now let’s examine one of the best of Lubezki’s scenes where the story is well told: The bar scene from Birdman, where Riggan (Michael Keaton) is talking to the play critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan), in the most awkward and unpleasant situation, about his play.
During this I wished that they would cut to somewhere else so that we could see the aftermath of the scene without having to go through all the suffering and the embarrassing details, but the camera is just staying there, keeping you suffering, there is a reluctance in watching, and it doesn’t just come from the dialogue or the situation, it comes from the perplexed reluctant camera. The camera that comes close to the catastrophe that is about to unfold, then steps back away, and then comes close again and moves around slightly, restlessly, and seamlessly.
it’s like the camera has feelings, but since we can say in a hyper-realistic sense that there’s actually no camera in the film, we could rather say that it’s like the film has feelings towards its characters, the film is alive, honest, true, and undoubtedly believable.
Let’s now put in regard the word “Rhythm”, recall what Godard said about montage, and examine the bar scene again.
Rhythm used to be associated with cuts, but how could I get all this rhythm without a single cut? Why is the camera in this scene so persistent to stay and watch all this suffering without a blink or a visual break? Why do I have to go through all these “breathless” sequences? Why is there not a single cut from one frame to another? Because simply put, there are no cuts in life, and this is life, and the camera wants you to suffer all feelings in this life one frame at a time, and 24 times a second.
A New school of Thought
This is the film-making that we have missed out on for almost a century because we were too busy cutting films and trying to reach new milestones in special effects. But combined with montage in experiences like the films of Terrance Malick, filmmakers were able to explore the full range of what you can achieve with cameras alone, and the full range of what you can achieve with montage; and the combination of both to reach a new far compelling and far expressive techniques of storytelling and of orchestration of film rhythm, that could be regarded as one of the best things to ever happen to cinema since the Soviet Montage School of thought and the French New Wave.
More than 95 years ago, The Soviet Montage School Of Thought introduced us to the idea that the collision of 2 ideas or images could give birth to a new idea or image, and the new idea would collide with other ideas and other ideas in infinite reactions that would transcend the limits of conventional film communication and meaning, in the art we know today as “Montage”.
Today the works of Emmanuel Lubezki, Terrance Malick, Gasper Noe, Benoit Debit, Sokurov and many others, have paved the way for a new school of thought that celebrates visual literacy, transcends the limits of storytelling through Camera Stylo, and extends the range and spectrum of what you can convey with video alone, and Video vs Montage to tell, create and convey new transcendent ideas and meanings, and expand the horizon of film.
A school of thought that is equally impressive to the Soviet Montage and the French New Wave and that has the potential to bring about a new era in film history.
Author: Saad Dnewar
