British Cinematographer
For
his outstanding body of work, serial camera inventions and unrelenting fight
for better recognition and fair remuneration of cinematographers everywhere,
Jost Vacano ASC/BVK is a deserved recipient of CameraImage’s Lifetime
Achievement Award.
https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/take-a-sneak-peek-inside-the-november-2021-issue-of-british-cinematographer/
Best
known for his Oscar nominated Das Boot, the German DP also enjoyed a two-decade
collaboration with Paul Verhoeven, which included creating a futuristic
colony on Mars in Total Recall, dystopian Detroit (shot in Dallas)
for RoboCop, as well as Starship Troopers, Hollow Man and Showgirls.
Born
in 1934 in Osnabrück, the son of a choreographer and
a conductor, Vacano describes himself as a “visually oriented person”
whose hobbies included stills photography he began making films with an 8mm
camera as a school boy.
“I
felt that stills were static and that, for me, the image should be moving,” he
says. It’s a kineticism that defined his later work.
Practical
film school
Intent
on a career behind the camera, Vacano settled in Munich after leaving school.
The city was the centre of filmmaking in Germany in the 1950s but lacked a film
school. There were schools in Poland, Paris and Moscow but all depended on a
student speaking the local language. Vacano knew he’d have to learn the trade
by getting involved at grassroots.
“I
was very naïve and was an active moviegoer and knew the names of several
cinematographers working in Germany. I thought I’d try and talk to them and ask
to join their crew.”
He
made phone calls but was told time and again that in order to gain a job, even
work experience, he would need a showreel. Catch-22 but Vacano’s persistence
was undimmed. Since he could neither study cinematography somewhere, nor
had a chance to learn and work in a professional camera team, he had to start
as a complete autodidact.
“I thought I’d go to high school and study something
similar to cinematography – like electrical engineering. At the same I knew I
wanted to be a cinematographer not an engineer so I also enlisted in an acting
school. This was not to become an actor, but to learn the basics of acting so
that later on I’d know how to work with actors.”
He
wasn’t the only one with that idea. Also at the Munich school was Peter
Schamoni, an aspiring director who, like Vacano, had struggled to break into
the industry. The two were to form a lifelong friendship.
Together,
they gained permits to cross the Iron Curtain from West Germany into Moscow in
1957 and make a documentary about the World Youth Festival. They spent a week
there during which, with a rented 16mm Bolex, Vacano captured the crowds and
celebrations of the official communist party display alongside shots of poor
Muscovites in the suburbs. Jazz im Kreml and Moskau
ruft! (both released 1959) were his first as cinematographer.
More
documentaries, commercials and TV films followed as Vacano learned on the job
before making his cinema debut with Schonzeit für Füchse, (No
Shooting Time for Foxes), again with Schamoni, which won the Silver Bear in
Berlin in 1966. His career took off in the mid-1970s, when he shot The
Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von
Trotta and later Lieb Vaterland Magst Ruhig Sein with Roland
Klick. Vacano was honoured for both films with the Federal Film Prize.
Mobilising
the camera
All
the time, Vacano was marrying artistry with engineering skills. While Garrett Brown
was experimenting with what was to become Steadicam in the US, Vacano was
making his own explorations of gyro-stabilised camera systems.
“To
me, film is always about movement. I have to involve the audience in what is happening, becoming part
of the scene, not just show them. Moviegoers don’t necessarily want to sit on a
tripod or glide on a dolly. Sometimes the camera has to be like a living person
in the scene.”
He
first worked with a Naval device for keeping binoculars steady on ship and deployed
it for crime drama Supermarket (1974) directed by Roland
Klick. “I got hold of this stabiliser and connected it to a Arriflex 2C 35mm
which reduced shake and created a feeling of the camera - and by this, the audience –
become part of the action.”
He
refined it to ground-breaking effect to put the viewer inside the
claustrophobic submarine of Das Boot (1981). Director
Wolfgang Petersen wanted to tell the story – adapted from Lothar-Günther
Buchheim’s bestseller – with as much authenticity as possible and
had 1:1 interior replicas of a U-boat constructed for the shoot.
“We
couldn’t use a Steadicam because it was too big to fit through the connecting doors,”
Vacano says. His instrument had two gyroscopes to provide stability for the Arriflex,
a different and smaller scale solution than Steadicam, and on which 90 percent
of Das Boot was shot. It became known as ‘Joosticam’.
“The
story is told through the eyes of a young war correspondent so we wanted to put
the audience in his point of view. The producers were under pressure to make
the film for the worldwide market and to show that German filmmaking was as
good as Hollywood.”
Several directors including John Sturges and stars
like Robert Redford and Paul Newman had been lined up long before to
film a version of Buchheim’s book in Hollywood long before. Sets were even
built but script problems scuppered production.
Making
Das Boot
“We
had no experience shooting a submarine film. That type of film had all been
done before in Hollywood (such as The Enemy Below, 1957). My idea
was to shoot it like a documentary, handheld and without film lighting, to get
across the experience of what it was like being in that tight and dangerous
space in wartime.”
With no external light available, Vacano fitted the
sub’s interior with marine lights which accentuated the pale skins of men
confined for weeks below decks. The mocked-up sub was on a hydraulic platform
at Bavaria Studios but Vacano needed a solution for keeping his camera steady
even while the floor rocked in all directions.
“People couldn’t see the horizon in the
submarine and had no orientation at all, therefore I needed to
stabilise the handheld camera on the horizontal line so I used a spirit level
at the beginning of each take to orientate the three axis of the stabiliser.”
With barely room for a camera-op let alone focus
puller, Vacano also devised a remote focus control using bowden-cables, a
pulley system and a ring around the lens for the focus puller to adjust just
behind or underneath him. It’s a piece of electronic kit today’s DPs take for
granted.
The film’s producers took some convincing but they
had the courage to back the project with a budget of $18.5m, making it among
the most expensive in German cinema. It repaid spectacularly when it reaped
$84.9 million worldwide (equivalent to $220 million in 2020) and six
Academy Award nominations including for its cinematography.
“My instinct, whenever I have a problem is
‘can I build it myself?’. Now these tools are easy to use. In 1980 it was like
having a Black & Decker on set.”
The success of Das Boot and Vacano’s
new standing as the first German to be Oscar nominated for cinematography set
in train a struggle for professional recognition that is still unwinding.
Campaigning
for copyright
“The
prevailing view was that cameras were technical devices and the cinematographer
just a technician who pressed a button when the director called action,” he
says. “Technicians are paid a flat rate and that’s the end of the matter. I
believed that the cinematographer is not just an author of the image but a key
decision maker in the film as artform. I also believed I’d proved this
with Das Boot. I decided to campaign to ensure that we are perceived
as image creators and that this is also reflected in copyright law. It became
my second profession.”
It
has taken 40 years and a series of law suits (challenging production company
Bavaria Film, public broadcaster WDR which serialized Das Boot and
distributor Eurovideo) but, in Germany at least, the work of a cinematographer
is recognized by law as one of the co-authors of a film and able to claim a
percentage of its turnover.
Having
sunk his own saving into the legal challenge, Vacano was finally recompensed in
2019. “It was a professional-political campaign. The fact that not only
cameramen, but also editors and costume designers - everyone involved in a film
- should be entitled to share in its financial success, was the goal.
Total
Recall
Since
1986 he worked primarily in US collaborating with Verhoeven, with whom he
previously made World War II-resistance drama Soldier of Orange,
followed by the controversial coming-of-age film Spetters.
Filming
sci-fi blockbuster Total Recall at Mexico City’s Churubusco
Studio, Vacano struggled to find the right colour red for Mars.
“Every
DP, every gaffer, has these nice little swatch books and you go through them
and say, 'This is a wonderful colour.' You do a film test and it looks great. It
was two weeks before shooting and I just figured we would order what we needed
— two hundred or three hundred rolls — it was a huge amount. Then we found out
the colour we chose wasn't in production anymore. I tried to substitute with
another colour from another company, but the film tests didn't work. Finally,
Rosco agreed to manufacture it for us and they started production of this
special colour again. Just barely in time we got what we needed.”
Filming
Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, Vacano was challenged to execute the
lighting of invisibility. “For a director of photography, that presents an
interesting challenge, because cinematographers are normally hired to shoot
things we are supposed to be able to see. In CGI-effects films, you usually
shoot something that is not yet there, like the bugs in Starship
Troopers; but in Hollow Man, we shot something already there
that was supposed to not be there.”
Of
Verhoeven he says, “The way you want to create images and tell your story is
about personality and you need a director working the same way you are working.
Paul and I were like that.”
That
wasn’t quite the case on Katharina Blum. “There is some great
acting and its themes matched the political situation at that time but the
director and I did not fit together well. We were both professionals and
certainly did the best we could but it was not an altogether happy experience.”
Art,
engineering and authorship
Das
Boot excepted, Supermarket perhaps best showcases
Vacano’s style. He enjoyed a “wonderful relationship” with Klick to stage
scenes collaboratively on location around Hamburg and the director was also
open to more technical ingenuity from his DP.
“We
had a very low budget and shot 100ASA film but with a lot of night exteriors.
There were no high-speed lenses available and we didn’t have the money to spend
on HMIs and giant film lights so I thought I’d have to build
a faster lens.”
He
took an Olympus 1.4 speed lens to shoot with available light and rehoused it to
fit on a 52mm Arri mount. “The lens was much bigger than the camera mount so I
took all the glass elements out and built a new housing with no iris diaphragm,
just wide open with no stops, so we could shoot all the night work. It was a
mix of art and engineering.”
And here is Vacano’s creed, his fierce defence of the role of the
DP.
“Cinematography
in general is about lighting, composition, and movement of each shot,” he says.
“That doesn’t change with postproduction of VFX or with virtual production shooting
against video screens. The DP is still 'directing' the photography,
setting the creative photographic standards. I'm not denying anyone else’s
artistic influence, or the high degree of responsibility for the scenes they
have created. But I think, the photographic creation of an entire film, in its
totality, is a unique piece of art. This cannot be divided, it has only one
author: the Director of Photography.”
ends
