At the inaugural American Society of Cinematographers awards almost four decades ago, about 100 attendees saw host Gregory Peck give a single award, acknowledging the artistry of Jordan Cronenweth on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Today, the ASC Awards is an annual event with global reach where 10 major awards are presented, this year including recognition of music video cinematography.
On March 3 at the Beverly Hilton, the 105-year-old organization will honor Spike Lee with its Board of Governors Award, in recognition of his career contributions to the art of visual storytelling. Don Burgess, whose credits as a cinematographer include “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away,” “Contact,” “The Polar Express” and more than 60 other credits, will receive the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement honor, and Steven Fierberg, behind the camera on “Emily in Paris,” “The Affair,” “Entourage” and “Kingpin,” will be acknowledged with the Career Achievement in Television Award. Amy Vincent will be honored with the Presidents Award in recognition of her dedicated service to the ASC, and her pioneering work in the areas of diversity and inclusion in the film industry. Vincent’s credits as a cinematographer include evocative films like “Hustle and Flow,” “Black Snake Moan” and “Eve’s Bayou.”
The five Oscar nominees for cinematography — Edward Lachman (“El Conde”), Matthew Libatique (“Maestro”), Rodrigo Prieto (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Robbie Ryan (“Poor Things”) and Hoyte van Hoytema (“Oppenheimer”) — are all up for similar ASC feature film honors while lensers for shows including “Lessons in Chemistry,” “The Diplomat” and “The Bear” have been nominated for TV trophies.
The ASC Awards were originally conceived as a way of educating the industry and the wider public about what makes for quality cinematography, thereby gaining respect and appreciation for the craft and for its practitioners. The endeavor has been a success. Today, with a motion picture camera in every pocket, the artform itself is much more widely understood and appreciated. Compared to 1989, motion picture photography for television today is particularly astonishing in its power and subtlety. Cinematography is regularly remarked on in the most mainstream venues.
Lachman, previously Oscar-nominated for his camera work on “Far From Heaven” and “Carol,” was tapped this year for his breathtaking imagery in “El Conde.” Pablo Larrain’s blend of history and horror casts Augusto Pinochet as a literal vampire. Lachman blended up-to-the-minute camera technology with hand-polished Baltar lenses made in the 1930s and ’40s, and the results already captured a Silver Frog at the influential Camerimage Festival in Poland.
“There’s something that happens to glass with age that affects how it sees and refracts light,” says Lachman. “These lenses were not made in the scientific way that lenses are made today, and it changes the way they interpret light.”
Meanwhile, the monochromatic sensor developed by ARRI for Lachman offered greater exposure sensitivity, allowing him to work with less light while capturing unique texture. “The black and white creates a kind of parallel, abstracted reality, and that helped us create a certain distance, as in a fable,” say Lachman.
Digital cameras continued to render major changes to lensing in high-end cinematography, shifting the emphasis to optics for creating the right feeling, and to mitigate the direct and literal nature of the digital image. The relatively new ARRI Alexa 35 camera, with a sensor roughly the same size as a standard film frame, brought older 35mm-format lenses back into relevance, after several years in which large-format sensors seemed to gain ascendence. Cinematographers were happy with expanded choice in the deep inventories of lens makers and rental houses.
Most cinematographers work with reverence for visual storytelling as invented by their predecessors. A good example is M. David Mullen, who earned his fourth ASC nomination for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” He took the category last year, adding to an Emmy along with four other Emmy nominations for the show. Mullen is acutely aware of the history of his craft. On the nominated show, smaller, lighter cameras facilitate movement, and greater depth of field places the characters more solidly in their distinctive surroundings.
“We emphasize moving medium shots to allow the performances and comedic timing to play off each other within the frame,” he says. “That style goes back to classic studio cinema. It maintains a sense of environment. You’re not shooting a lot of closeups with out-of-focus backgrounds, where you don’t feel where you are anymore. You hold back on close-ups, and when you do use one, it has more dramatic weight.”
The ASC has always recognized cinema as a universal art form. Some of the organization’s founders and earliest leaders were immigrants with skills in the visual medium that proved useful and innovative in Hollywood — helping it succeed around the globe. American Cinematographer Magazine, the society’s mouthpiece, was founded in 1921 and was spreading the word to more than 40 countries by the 1950s. Today, that attitude finds expression in the ASC spotlight award, given for feature and documentary work that is normally seen at festivals, in limited theatrical release or outside the U.S. A number of cinematographers have had their careers kickstarted with the recognition, bringing fresh sensibilities to the game.
Among this year’s nominees in the spotlight category is Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton, who grew up in remote Alice Springs. Thornton already took home the Golden Frog at Camerimage for “The New Boy,” which he shot and directed.
“What I love about the craft of cinematography is that although the technology evolves, it’s like a chisel and a piece of wood,” he says. “Everything correlates. We talk sensors rather than film frames, but the essential lessons still work. I’ve always been scared of technology. But once I forgot about technology and started believing in craft, I relaxed. It became a much more beautiful place to be. I’m still learning every day. In in a way, I feel like I’m just starting to bloom as a cinematographer.
“I’m completely blown away by the recognition from the ASC,” he says. “I’ve read a lot of scripts in my life, but essentially only one book — the American Cinematographer manual. I had a very old version because I couldn’t afford the new edition, but the wisdom applies. Because I was so remote, the ASC and their beautiful tradition of giving made me a fanboy. It’s going to be incredibly surreal to be in the room with them.”