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I had a chat with Richard Crudo, ASC at NAB one year about that — he said every cinematographer is different in terms of how many layers of the onion they want to peel back. There’s a vague point where, of course, it crosses the line from practical knowledge to merely satisfying intellectual curiosity. We need to know enough to identify and solve problems, or at least, know who to ask. We need to know enough to get the results we desire, or at least, hire people to help us get those results. There are plenty of technical experts in this industry to get answers from, so to some degree, it depends on how reliant you want to be on other people. Ultimately the one thing that we have to supply is the artistic idea, our visual taste, and our storytelling skills, and then we have to know enough to achieve our ideas, even if that means consulting with experts when necessary.
Certainly one has to know the fundamentals of photography and lighting.
I wonder what ‘the fundamentals of photography and lighting’ actually are? The more I do the less I seem to understand. I don’t mean technically, for that I can read a book or ask someone far more proficient than myself, but what really are ‘the fundamentals’?
Roger, I remember in one of the podcast episodes you and James expressed surprise that a lot of the film students you talk to now don’t seem to know much about exposure. Surely something as essential to cinematography as knowing how to get the exposure you want is a ‘fundamental’.
Most certainly! Exposure is obviously important, just as is knowing how depth of field works or the inverse square law, but is it really ‘fundamental’. When you ‘know’ all these techniques what is left? What makes an image resonate? What makes an image reveal more than a word on a page?
This conversation reminds me of one of Albert Einstein’s quotes: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
As a former film school student, I found the rules or ‘fundamentals,’ a great help because they set boundaries and restrictions that helped me progress with my learning. But as I improved and grew stronger as a filmmaker, I required them much less to guide me because I found something else. I developed my personal taste and character, and still am developing it.
What I mean by fundamentals is that you aren’t relying on someone else to expose the shot for you. There are basic aspects to photography like f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, frame rate for example that I think any cinematographer has to understand the principles of or else they are lost. But does a cinematographer have to know the data rate of ProRes 444HQ at 3.2K, 24 fps? Do they have to know the chemicals in ECN2 color negative processing? Do they have to identify all the elements in a Cooke prime lens? Probably not.
I think Gordon Willis said to the effect that if you don’t how to achieve an idea, then you’re in trouble — but if you don’t have any ideas, you’re really in trouble.
Intuition is the greatest ‘fundamental’ that I have, but it took decades for me to understand that and even longer to fully trust it.
As to camera knowledge, I think knowing how to best expose it is critical.
What I would submit is that filmmaking is a technical medium and being able to answers these questions by definition implies a base of practical knowledge and skill. Somebody like Pier Pasolini would have very strong opinions about what makes an image resonate, but on his first film his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, claimed that he still had to explain to Pasolini what a ‘lens’ even was. If Pasolini had remained ignorant of something as basic as focal lengths ‘Accattone’ would not have the same expressive power.
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