NAB
Satire was probably the only way to
face up to a dictator like Augusto Pinochet.
article here
The Chilean general who took power in
a U.S-backed coup in 1973 died in 2006, still with the blood of thousands on
his hands. In new film ‟El Conde,” Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns the
story into a stomach-turning tragicomic melodrama-horror movie.
“The chain of thought involved the fact that
Pinochet died in complete freedom — and with the most vile and absurd
impunity,” Larraín told The Hollywood Reporter’s Patrick Brzeski.
And that impunity made him eternal in a way — we still feel broken by his
figure, because he’s not really dead in our culture.
Veteran Chilean actor Jaime Vadell
stars as Pinochet, who is reimagined here as a 250-year-old vampire who faked
his own death and absconded to a dilapidated estate in the Patagonian
countryside.
Argentina suffered a similar fate
when a military junta took power, but civil society was able to bring justice
to bear on some of its members in a story filmed by director Santiago Mitre as
“Argentina, 1985” last year.
“We never had that in Chile, so his
figure remained very vivid and alive,” Larraín says. “So, that idea took us to
the figure of the vampire, and that satire was the only way to approach him.”
Larraín describes his film’s Pinochet
as “an absurd superhero of evil” and says he knew early on that he wanted the
film to be shot in black-and-white.
A precedent for using dark humor and black and
white was set for Larrain by Stanely Kubrick’s 1964 classic ‟Dr.
Strangelove” as he explained to THR: “One of the smartest things Kubrick does
in that film is how the satire and farce can help you face those characters
without creating empathy.
“When you have a protagonist who is
played by such a sensitive, interesting human being like Jaime, the big danger
is that you could end up feeling empathy for him. It would be completely
immoral and dangerous to do something like that. So, the satire, absurdism and
filming in black and white allowed us to have the right distance from these
people.”
He expounds on the decision to shoot black and white in conversation with Bilge Ebiri at Vulture: “Black and white is not only beautiful and poetic and artistic, but also creates a parallel reality. It’s a fable that you could observe from afar, and that allows you to be dark, be funny, talk about this difficult and painful subject in a way where if you are able to smile a little bit, maybe there’s a strange and awkward form of healing.
In conceiving the look of the film,
Larraín turned to cinematographer Ed Lachman ASC, who has been Oscar nominated
twice on two period films with Todd Haynes, “Far From Heaven” and “Carol.”
They talked about landmark silent horror films like
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932
“Vamypr,” as well as work by photographers from different eras including Sergio
Larraín, Fan Ho and Maura Sullivan.
Larraín fought not only for the movie to be in black and white but to actually shoot it in black and white, a rarity in the digital age in which studios insist on color cinematography that can later be desaturated in post-production.
“The reason producers do it that way is because
then they can always fall back on the color if they have markets that they
can’t show it in black and white,” explained Lachman to IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt. “The contrast and
the saturation, the subtlety of mid-range in the blacks and whites, aren’t the
same [and] that’s why I think [‘El Conde’] really has a different look than a
number of black and white films over the last few years.
“When you can actually shoot in
monochromatic, you can reach back to black and white filters to modify the
contrast and the mid-tones.”
A Time-Sensitive Custom Sensor
Knowing that Larraín also wanted to
have the mobility of a light camera that could be used on a technocrane (to
facilitate the film’s flying scenes), Lachman needed ARRI to develop a black
and white sensor for its smaller (but still large format) camera, the ALEXA
Mini LF.
ARRI’s large format Alexa 65 has such
a monochrome sensor but the camera body would be too large to use while the
Alexa XT also with new b/w sensors didn’t meet Netflix’s 4K mandate. Lachman
could have chosen to shoot with a RED camera and its black and white Helium
sensor (used to shoot Netflix Oscar winner “Mank” in 2020), but it seems that
Lachman preferred to push ARRI to develop a new version of its cameras.
Per IndieWire, the problem was less
ARRI’s willingness to build a new camera — in theory, its color scientists were
confident it could work — and more that Lachman’s request came two months
before the start of production, which is less time than it had taken to develop
previous prototypes.
Luckily, according to ARRI’s Marko
Massigner and Manfred Jahn, creating the new chip came together quicker than
anticipated, and they were able to deliver three working cameras in time for
“El Conde.”
Building on his vision, Lachman used
lenses retrofitted with vintage glass from the 1930s and modified to work on
the ARRI camera. This unique combination of equipment was then used with
Lachman’s own patented EL Zone System, which employs concepts utilized by
photographer Ansel Adams to control different exposure values throughout an
image.
Cined has more details on the development
of the new Alexa which also notes that the re-housed Baltar lenses were the
same glass that was used to shoot classics “Citizen
Kane” and “Touch of Evil.”
Lachman and Larraín have known each
other for several years, but this is the first feature they‘ve worked on
together.
“Ed can create a very particular visual poetry, but
he never loses the focus on the narrative,” Larraín told Mark Olsen at Variety. “That is very important because
sometimes you see beautifully photographed films that don’t have a strong and
powerful narrative. It was often very moving to see the images he was
creating.”
Unusually, the director himself
operated the camera for the entire shoot.
“It helps me to be closer to the
actors,” says Larraín. “I’m too anxious to be seated at a monitor. Even when
I’m not operating, I’m standing and working and walking. I can’t just see the
world created in front of me. I have to be right there. You’re part of the
process.”
Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri, judged the film “an unrepentantly gore-filled horror flick… a piece of agitprop provocation [that] might be the most perverse project Netflix has ever signed off on.”
Nick Vivarelli for Variety says, “The film is somehow sparse
and flamboyant at the same time; viewers may feel conflicting impulses of being
charmed and repulsed.”
“El Conde” is streaming on Netflix
now.
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