By
The Playlist Staff
|
The Playlist
November 17, 2015 at 12:42PM
Todd Haynes’ celebrated new film “Carol” begins rolling out in theaters this week, and as such inexorably towards the Oscars. The director’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price Of Salt,” regarding the love affair between young shopgirl Therese (Rooney Mara) and the wealthy, older title character (Cate Blanchett) is, per our Cannes review, probably one of the best films of the year and certainly one of the best acted. But even if you turn out to be one of the few that disagrees on those points, you’ll likely come away thinking that it’s one of the best looking movies of the year.
Credit is due (or at least should be shared with costume designer Sandy Powell and production designer Judy Becker) to cinematographer Ed Lachman, who’s captured 1950s New York in utterly gorgeous, incredibly rich Super 16 of reds and greens —his work in the film at once organic and perfectly composed. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it should: though he’s not recognized by filmgoers in the way that, say, Roger Deakins is, Lachman’s long been one of the best working cinematographers.
The 69 year old New Yorker’s CV is certainly one of the most adventurous: with early credits on efforts by Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, he’s worked on everything from big studio movies to microbudget indies, racking up jobs not just with Haynes (this is their fourth project together), but also Paul Schrader, Sofia Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Altman and Todd Solondz. So with “Carol” in theaters, and having examined Haynes’ work in full last week, we thought it seemed like an opportune time to highlight the work of a master who deserves to be a lot better known. Take a look at the best of Ed Lachman below, and let us know your favorites of his work in the comments.
“Lightning Over Water” (1980)
Though he’s American, Lachman got much of his training with European DoPs like Sven Nykvist and Vittorio Storraro, before shooting Werner Herzog’s documentary “La Soufrière.” But he first turned heads when he teamed up with Wim Wenders (having worked as an assistant cameraman on his film “The American Friend”) for the fascinating documentary/narrative hybrid “Lightning Over Water,” a collaboration between (and portrait of) both the German director and his friend, influence and mentor Nicholas Ray. By the time the movie was made, the legendary director of “Rebel Without A Cause” had been virtually exiled from Hollywood due to his problems with drugs and alcohol, and Wenders, who’d cast him in a small role in “The American Friend” and was having a difficult time on his Hollywood debut “Hammett,” planned to team with Ray for another project. But it soon becomes clear that Ray’s health is on the wane, and the film turns out to be more a portrait of his final days and a meditation on mortality. Yet it’s not a documentary either: the film uses semi-improvisational acting, showy techniques and Brechtian highlighting of the process to make a movie that honors Ray’s experimental spirit without lionizing him. Lachman shares credit for shooting the film with Martin Schäfer, but it seems clear where his touches lie: it’s strikingly beautiful, inventively composed and expressionistically lit for a hastily put together experimental film. Jean-Luc Godard, for one, was impressed: he hired Lachman to shoot a project called “Anatomy Of A Shot,” a film essay that saw the pair filming on the set of Coppola’s “One From The Heart,” which proved to be a sort of workshop for the director’s 1982 film “Passion.”
“Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985)
On the surface, it might seem a enormous leap between the kind of experimental European movies that Lachman was working on in Europe —films with Herzog, Wenders, Godard and others— and a bright, breezy comedy vehicle for the world’s biggest pop star, Madonna. But "Desperately Seeking Susan" makes rather more sense once you dig into it a little bit. Director Susan Seidelman was an avowed devotee of François Truffaut, Godard and Agnes Varda, and brings a punkish New Wave energy to the film, which stars Rosanna Arquette as a New Jersey housewife who becomes fascinated with the titular Susan (Madonna) after seeing a series of messages to her in the personal ad section in a newspaper. It’s a raucous, featherlight picture, frantically plotted to a fault but with a immensely likable tone that brings the vibe (and much of the cast) of early 1980s American independent film to the studio world, with Madonna delivering her best-ever screen performance and an incandescent turn from Arquette. It looks glorious too, thanks to Lachman. Shot in the same year as his collaboration with Wenders on the Ozu documentary “Tokyo-Ga,” about as different a movie from this as you could imagine, he brings enormous life to his capturing of the big city, which is a reflection of his own relationship with New York. “I wanted to show the New York City I knew,” he would later say. “What was happening out on the street, and how it felt to be here. The city was enticing and foreboding all at once. There’s probably a version of that film that could have been made, just doing the Hollywood gloss on the idea of New York. But I was living in New York, so I decided to show the grit.” The result is a bright, vibrant picture, soaked with gels and neon nodding to German Expressionists like Otto Dix, but which doesn’t eschew the shadows either.
“Light Sleeper” (1992)
Perhaps the most Paul Schrader-ish film in Schrader’s career (dark underbelly of the city? Check. Bressonian neo-noir? Check. Semi-religious guilt and redemption? Check), “Light Sleeper” was the first and by some distance the most impressive of the two collaborations between the director and Lachman (though “Touch,” which followed five years later, isn’t so bad either). Willem Dafoe, perhaps the ultimate Schrader protagonist, stars as John LeTour, a mid-level drug dealer working for Ann (Susan Sarandon), whose clients mostly come from the Wall Street milieu. Lost and sleepless, his life is upturned when he meets his ex Marianne (Dana Delany), who’s still addicted and soon dies, seemingly at the hand of banker Tis (Victor Garber). The film tackles themes that Schrader’s been fascinated with throughout his career, but it reaches a sort of perfected form here: thanks in part to a titanic performance by Dafoe, there’s a huge vein of humanity and compassion coursing through the film, with few characters, bar perhaps Garber’s villainous financier type, painted as black and white. But if anyone deserves credit for the film’s evocative mood, encompassing the kind of spiritual crisis and deep, sad regret that hits you at 6am as you realize that you should have gone home hours ago, it’s Lachman. This is the film that confirmed him as one of the great New York City photographers, pulling off the trick of capturing the same kind of street life as he did in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” but in an entirely different way: swapping the brightness for muted, mellow colors and not shying away from warmth, but keeping it perpetually out of reach.
“The Limey” (1999)
To date, Lachman is the last cinematographer that Steven Soderbergh has worked with other than himself (or more accurately, his pseudonym Peter Andrews). One could perhaps take that as an insult, but given the influence that the two movies they made together have had on the director’s subsequent career, we reckon it should probably be taken as a compliment. A confluence of the experimental approach of “Schizopolis” and the styliized crime film of “Out Of Sight,” Soderbergh’s two previous pictures, “The Limey” sees Terence Stamp as a British ex-con who travels to L.A. to avenge the death of his daughter (Melissa George), seemingly at the hands of a record producer (Peter Fonda) with ties to the drug trade. It may seem to be an ordinary revenge tale on paper, but Soderbergh’s formal brilliance reaches new heights here, with a fractured, time-hopping narrative that remixes a potentially familiar story into something entirely fascinating. But as terrific and important as Sarah Flack’s editing and Cliff Martinez’s score are for the film, Lachman’s photography is just as crucial. Being shot almost entirely on handheld gives the camera here a mobility that converts to a kind of intimacy. When we see Stamp smoking in a hotel room, it’s like we’re there with him, looking him in the eye. When we’re pushing through a crowded party, it’s like we’re a guest. Yet there’s no shaky-cam to be found: Lachman’s frames are still somehow clear and precise, not least in the famous shot where Stamp runs back inside a warehouse to kill some thugs, only to come out and say “Tell him I’m fucking coming.” Lachman even finds an inventive way to film flashback sequences: throwing the shutter out of sync to cause a semi-abstracted, dreamlike distortion of the light.