The late, great Jean-Luc Godard re-invented the Cannes press conference during the 2108 Festival, by speaking with journalists via a smartphone using FaceTime.
This post offers some of the highlights.

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Godard’s Guernica
FaceTime with Godard

1. Thinking with Your Hands
2. Editing Comes First
3. An Editing Equation
4. Separating Image & Sound
5. Totalitarian Actors
6. The Violence of the Image
7. What’s Shown and Not Shown
8. The Courage to Imagine

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FaceTime Godard

This post looks back at highlights from the late, great Jean-Luc Godard’s memorable press conference during the 2018 Cannes International Film Festival.

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Godard’s Guernica
FaceTime with Godard
1. Thinking with Your Hands
2. Editing Comes First
3. An Editing Equation
4. Separating Image & Sound
5. Totalitarian Actors
6. The Violence of the Image
7. What’s Shown and Not Shown
8. The Courage to Imagine

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Godard’s Guernica

At Cannes, the 87-year old filmmaker presented
The Image Book in the Official Competition. The film is an 84-minute cinematic essay about cinema and civilization, intertwining clips from movies, archives, news and YouTube footage, with pessimistic, thought-provoking statements by the filmmaker about the dire state of the planet, war, revolution and the Arab world.

The Image Book may well be Godard’s Guernica, a cubist mirror of a world torn by violence. The form of the film can be said to be cubist, a mosaic of image shards accompanied by audio fragments in a multi-layered mix dominated by Godard’s voice. Many of the video images are freely modified, with increased contrast, and painterly dashes and post-modern image samples by a very cultured veejay.

Many film critics were taken by the latest work of cinema’s elder statesman, and the 2018 Cannes jury led by Cate Blanchett awarded a Special Palme d’Or to Godard, a first for the Festival. In the future, it is said that Godard’s atypical film may be also be presented as an art installation.

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FaceTime with Godard

One of the Festival’s most surreal moments was Godard’s re-invention of the Cannes press conference using FaceTime on a handheld iPhone. Journalists stood in line to speak into the phone to the director, who answered via Apple’s video chat software from his home in Rolle, Switzerland. And this crowding around the tiny iPhone screen occurred in front a giant frame taken from Godard’s film, Pierrot Le Fou, the icon for the 2018 Festival.

In the past, I have argued that some of Godard’s press conferences were better than some of his films. Even when the film screened was weak, the ensuing press conference was the occasion for Godard to dazzle us with his brilliance, humor and originality.

The medium alters the message, and the smartphone transformed the Cannes press conference into a series of one-on-one conversations between Godard and 15 journalists. These brief dialogues added an intimate tone missing from most press meetings. A Japanese journalist told the director that they shared birthdays, a Portuguese journalist said he learned French in order to understand his films. Many described their virtual meeting as an “honor.”

What follows are my freely edited translations of eight quotes from Godard’s press conference, with my notes in italics

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1. Thinking with Your Hands

Jean-Luc Godard: “What makes man unique is thinking with his hands.”

Godard repeatedly cites this expression by Denis de Rougemont. The hand is a key motif in Image Book, and, whether by design or not, the signature image of the press conference is also the hand holding up a smartphone with Godard’s face.

Throughout his career Godard has made many brilliant films that make you think. The cinematic master has continually explored innovative cinematic approaches, spanning from the Nouvelle Vague in the 1960s to Goodbye to Language, his previous 3D film which won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2014.

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2. Editing Comes First

JLG: “I quickly had the intuition that what is most important is not what’s called shooting, but what’s called editing. And editing comes in the beginning, and, therefore, if you will, shooting is a form of post-production.”

Godard’s current cinematic form is the essay, which primarily involves editing existing footage. But Godard’s remark may also imply that the filmmaker must construct the film’s ideas before starting production.

JLG: “And, yes, this allows you to be much freer and to think a lot, because, even with digital, editing is done with your hands.”

Godard got a laugh by comparing his job as a filmmaker to that of the artistic director of the Cannes festival:

JLG: “In order to edit, I saw more films in four years than Thierry Frémeaux did for his festival. And I sought to find out in all these films, if certain images, certain sounds could tell a story. Because in addition to doing, you still have to tell a story.”

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3. An Editing Equation

JLG: “A film is: X + 3 = 1. A school boy understands that means X= -2. And when you start with an image from the past, present or future, to find a third image, a real image or a real sound, you have to take two images out.”

This cryptic formula reminds me of what another Zen master, video artist Nam June Paik, once told me: «editing is like having five children and killing three of them»

JLG: “X + 3 = 1. This is the key to cinema. But when you say it’s the key, don’t forget about the lock!”

It’s not enough to edit, you have to have an idea and something to edit:)

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4. Separating Image & Sound

JLG: “The subtitle of Image Book is Image and Speech. The goal was to separate sound from image, so that the sound is not simply a companion to the image, whether it be dialogue or commentary.”

“That’s why I often look at silent TV, with the sound off. If I turnup the sound a little, the sound is a commentary which follows the image, and doesn’t add anything. That’s surprising. We live in a surprising world, we have to get used to it, but we can also do things differently.”

Godard’s cinematic goal here is radical, veering from traditional cinema with dialogues, defining a new form of cinematic essay that positions images willfully divorced from sound.

JLG: “For me, a perfect screening would be in a café, where we would see a silent film on the television, and the sound would come out from other speakers on the right and left, and the customer would suddenly notice that the two go together. It’s worth having this kind of hope.”

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5. Totalitarian Actors

JLG: “It’s a problem of fiction versus documentary; for me it’s thesame thing, for actors it’s different.”

“Actors and especially actresses have helped me a lot. I don’t want to upset anyone, but actors are a little like politicians. And I think many actors today contribute to a totalitarianism of the filmed image, against the thoughtful image.”

In a world obsessed with celebrity, actors can become more important than the characters they play, and overcome the ideas in a film.

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6. The Violence of the Image

The penultimate section of The Image Book is about the images of the Arab world. Godard illustrates how Western movies, news and archival footage have stereotyped and demeaned Arab culture. In the movie, the filmmaker quotes Palestinian-American Edward Said:

“The act of representing (and therefore of reducing) almost always implies violence towards the represented subject. There is a real contrast between the violence of the act of representing and the interior calm of the representation itself, the image of the subject.”

JLG: “And I didn’t realize it, that all the films I’ve made, up until three or four years ago had this violence. There was such a violence in the representation, while the inside of the representation is very calm.”

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7. What’s Shown and Not Shown

JLG: “I’m interested in events: what happens and what doesn’t happen. And the two go together. We talk a lot about what does happen, and very little about what doesn’t. What’s happening is leading to a catastrophe, I can’t say much more… Alas, we have a lot of pity but little intelligence.”

“Cinema is no longer about showing what happens, because you can see that everyday on facebook, but about what doesn’t happen, which you never see. Very few films are made to show what’s not happening. And I hope that my film will help a little to show — or make you think about — what’s not happening. And for that, you have to think with your hands, and not just your head.”

Here Godard implies the importance of cinema in helping us imagine a different world than the one represented by contemporary media.

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8. The Courage to Imagine

Asked by a journalist about the courage it takes to continue making films, Godard responded about the importance of imagination.

JLG: “Allow me to say something to you about courage. Today and for some time most people have the courage to live their life, but they don’t often have the courage to imagine their life.”

“Me, I have difficulty living my life, but I have the courage to imagine it. And that allows me to continue.”

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IDA director Pawel Pawlikowski and cinematographer Lukasz Zal, PSC, watching the camera monitor

This post continues my in-depth look at scenes from the wonderful Polish film IDA. Once again I offer video and high-resolution images to present detailed examples of scene lighting.

This 2nd post is intended to be seen after you’ve read the 1st post:
3 Scenes from IDA.

Click on any image in this post to see a bigger version.

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IDA was directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, with cinematography by Lukasz Zal, PSC, and Ryszard Lynzewski, PSC. (Lukasz stepped in for Ryszard early on & shot most of the film.)

As I continued to discuss the lighting setups with Lukasz, he emphasized time and again that the images were the result of his collaboration with his director Pawel.

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video excerpt from IDA

The 3-minute video clip below occurs 58 minutes into the film. The sequence of six brief scenes conveys Ida questioning her decision to become a nun, upon returning to the convent after her travels with her worldly aunt Wanda.

Pawel Pawlikowski keeps his mise en scène here to a bare minimum, with no camera movement and few cuts. Each scene in this sequence also contains a brief poetic event that advances the story of Ida’s self-questioning: smelling a leaf, an open eye, a changing flame, a stifled laugh, a flickering candle, an upward look. IDA’s filmmaking masterfully combines economy and emotion.

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3 last scenes

Here we look at the last 3 scenes in the sequence. As mentioned in Part 1, Lukasz and Pawel sought to light IDA’s scenes simply, with single sources and natural lighting, and locked-down frames.

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dining room, night interior

The scene is made of 2 shots, with subtle, underplayed action:
- a 3-shot of Ida flanked by novice nuns on each side.
- a wide shot of the Mother Superior looking at Ida, with 4 other nuns to her left.

As in much of the film, the framing leaves a lot of vertical space above the characters. This sky room is part of IDA’s distinctive look, and evokes both isolation below and inspiration from above.

Ida looks around and stifles a laugh. She briefly sees humor in her silent meal surrounded by nuns, revealing her estrangement from the convent setting. This moment of levity separates Ida from her companions who register surprise, and some disapproval. Ida then looks up, and glances camera left, aware of those looking at her.

We cut to a wider shot of five nuns, including the Mother Superior on the left, who eyes Ida intently.

Click on the film-strip images to see a larger version

Lukasz keyed the dining room interior with 2 Octodomes above the tables, to convey flat, institutional top lighting, the kind that could be provided by ceiling fluorescents. These 2 soft top light sources bounce off the white table cloth, creating a simple and elegant fill on the faces from below.

Lukasz’ lighting scheme involves a total of 7 lighting units.

In the first camera position:
- In the background, a candle is on a cupboard covered by a white cloth. A Dedolight spot is aimed on the cloth, to simulate candlelight. This bright background accent gives depth to the frame.

In the second camera position:
- A 6K outside creates a bright vertical glimpse of the window above the Mother Superior. The window was frosty, creating a nice sheen that bleeds softly on to the wall.
- A door in the background is open, showing a bit of wall lit by a Kino Flo.
Lukasz comments that adding background detail is a lesson learned from his fellow cinematographer and former teacher Ryszard Lynzewski.”Ryszard taught me that: whenever possible, open the space, show the windows, open the doors.”
- A third Octodome adds soft light to the far left corner, outlining a lectern in the background.
- A dimmed-down Dedolight adds a little exposure to a dark statue against the wall on camera right.
The candle on the table is merely decorative, and adds a bright accent to the top-lit interior.

The challenge of lighting this scene is not to make it beautiful, but to present ordinary, institutional top lighting, and still add some depth and accents to avoid a completely flat image.

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dormitory – night interior

The dormitory scene is composed of 2 shots:
- A wide shot of the back of 3 novices praying in their dormitory in their nightgowns.
- A reverse close-up shot of Ida’s face lit by flickering candlelight.

We dimly hear the other novices praying, but Ida is silent, revealing her isolation. The flickering candlelight recalls the fire light in the kitchen, 2 scenes earlier in the sequence. But while the kitchen fire evoked sensuality and desire, the varying candle in the dormitory evokes Ida’s thoughtful uncertainty about becoming a nun.

Lukasz’s lighting required lowering sources to keep the 3 candles on the altar bright.

The candle’s key light is simulated by a Dedolight placed on the ground in front of the kneeling novices, and pointing upwards at the altar. This spot creates a shadow of the candles, which obviously cannot create their own shadows, but I feel that the lighting nevertheless succeeds in creating a feeling of strong candlelight. The decisive thing is the brightness of the area around the candles in the frame.

A 6K through a frame with 1/2 White gel outside the window provides a sidelight on the novices, defining them in the darkness. Lukasz notes that he had to pan the HMI fixture so as to get less light coming through the window, a technique he often uses to dim sources.

An Octodome above the camera provides general fill and defines the bed frames in the foreground from above.

For the close-up, Lukasz wanted natural candle light, so he put 6 candles on an apple box right below camera to light Ida’s face.

6 foot candles for Ida’s close-up (camera operator Tomasz Novak is on left)

For the close-up Lukasz also brought in a frame of 1/2 White on camera left to soften the window sidelight. In the background, the Octodome above dimly defines a bed.

To heighten the sense of mystery in Ida’s eyes, Pawel had the actress wear dark contact lenses in the film. The effect of these dark, soulful eyes is really evident in this close-up.

This scene is a great example of using real candle light, and subtly balancing all the other sources to complement the candles.

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garden statue – night exterior

The exterior scene is composed of 2 shots:

- A close shot of Ida pacing back and forth in the dark, then finally looking up.

- A wide shot that reveals that Ida is in the convent garden next to a statue of Christ that was seen at the very beginning of the movie.

Ida then speaks her only line of dialogue in the sequence of 6 scenes:
“I’m not ready. Forgive me.”

This is the culmination of the sequence, first Ida moves back and forth to show her agitated and indecisive state.

Then, alone in the darkness, Ida tells her God that she is not ready to become a nun.

Lukasz sought to light the night exterior as naturally as possible, and he says that this was one of the most difficult scenes in the movie, because he chose to shoot it as dusk for night.

Lukasz set up for the wide shot first, bouncing 2 6Ks and 1 4K into big frames on the Western side of the garden, to add a very soft direction to the light. He positioned these big fixtures far away from the action, about 40 meters, so as to not sense the sources in the frame. He relied on the sky to provide natural fill from the right. The camera was set up in the convent building as a high shot with a long lens.

The difficult part was balancing the bounced sources to rapidly darkening skylight. Speaking via walkie-talkies to electricians near the fixtures, Lukasz had them tilt the units downwards as the sky got darker, ending up with almost no bounce at all in the final take.

The crew then rushed the camera to the statue for the close-up of Ida. A 4×4 1/2 White frame was brought in behind the actress to provide backlight from the distant bounces, and a poly was used for fill. Lukasz laughs as he recalls how dark the close-up was. “I couldn’t see anything with my eye, I only saw it in the viewfinder”.

This scene is a very compelling and convincing night exterior. The choice of dusk for night implied shooting quickly and adapting to the natural light. I especially like that you can’t sense the sources in the wide shot because they’re so far away.

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another scene

To give another taste of IDA, I wanted to describe one more scene, when Ida dresses up to go to a club to listen to her musician friend play jazz. Although I don’t have an excerpt of the scene to show, you can see glimpses of it towards the end of the trailer:

watch on YouTube

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night club – night interior

The club scene is composed of 3 shots:
- a wide shot from behind the audience watching the musicians play Coltrane’s love ballad Naima.
- a wide shot that reveals Ida in the audience wearing a dress
- a close-up of her, entranced by the music

Music plays an important role in IDA. There is an eclectic mix of 1960s pop songs, jazz and classical.

Mozart‘s Jupiter Symphony accompanies a key dramatic moment, and the film ends on a Bach cantata.

Here Ida is clearly taken by Coltrane’s ballad, which serves as a gateway to romantic love: in the next scene, she dances with the saxophone player.

The musicians were simply lit with 2 fresnel spots. The spot on camera left is a kind of soft key, shining through a frame of 1/2 White, the spot on camera right serves as a backlight for the band; a little smoke softens the image.

Lukasz lit the shots on Ida with practicals and 5 sources:

- The soft key is provided by a Compact Kino Flo bounced off a poly and then diffused through a frame of 1/2 White. This combination of bounce and diffusion is often called a “book light“; it can also be done by diffusing first and bouncing second.
- An Octodome serves as fill on camera left.
- A 2K fresnel is shone into a Full White frame behind a bar with a shelf of bottles, creating rectangle of soft shapes on the left of frame.
- Another 2K fresnel creates another, dimmer rectangle on the right of frame.
- The background center is defined by 2 practicals and a Dedolight on a poster of Coltrane.

The strength of the lighting relies on the delicate and sophisticated balance of different tonal values, and Lukasz put all the units on a dimmer board so he could fine tune the look for each take.

The shots on Ida offer a rich background, with variegated dark and bright variations, and the book light on Ida is ravishing, especially when the book light is brought in close to her for the close-up.Lukasz sums up the goal of this complex lighting set-up simply: “we wanted to make Ida look beautiful.”

This scene is a good example of an image that offers a full range of gray tones from black to white, an important lesson for cinematography in color as well as black and white.

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links

New York Times: An Innocent Awakened – Ida review by A O Scott

Hollywood Reporter: Ida review by Todd McCarthy

Music Box Films: Ida press page

Pawel Pawlikowski’s website

Lukasz Zal’s Vimeo channel

Lukasz Zal’s website

Arri Alexa 4:3

Dedolight: Octodome

YouTube: John Coltrane’s Naima

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My thanks to Lukasz Zal and Pawel Pawlikowski.
Thanks also to Brian Andreotti and Laura Kim.
Video and stills courtesy of Music Box Films & Lukasz Zal.

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Part 1:
3 Scenes from IDA

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You may also be interested in

thefilmbook: Eric Kress Lighting Workshop 1

thefilmbook: DPs & Gaffers: Who Does What?

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Part 1 of my video interview with legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch, whose credits include: The Conversation, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient and Cold Mountain.

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LINK:
http://bit.ly/Murch1-thefilmbook

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Part 2 of my video interview with legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch, whose credits include: The Conversation, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient and Cold Mountain.

In this video Walter explains why he always chooses to edit in real time, by hitting the edit point on the fly.

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LINK:
http://bit.ly/WalterMurch2-thefilmbook

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The video is an edit of Peter’s presentation shot by Pauline Maillet during the AFC’s HDR Day in Paris.

link: bit.ly/PeterDoyleHDR2thefilmbook

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Hoyte van Hoytema in conversation

The cinematographer and his gaffer discuss a few lighting set-ups from Spectre
on thefilmbook blog on the ASC web site.

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Link: http://bit.ly/LightingSpectreHoytema

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I posted a closer look at Klute, a lesser-known masterpiece by Alan Pakula with pioneering cinematography by the late, great Godron Willis, ASC, with comments by fellow cinematographers Ed Lachman, Matthew Libatique & Vilmos Zsigmond, as well as my friend & colleague Stephen Pizzello, who recently completed a book about Gordon.

This post is based on a tribute to Gordon Willis that I organized with Stephen at Camerimage 2014.

My post on thefilmbook blog on the ASC web site

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