Sept. AC Arrives with Impossible Cover, Focus on International Production

Issue features Rob Hardy, BSC’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout; Florian Ballhaus, ASC’s The Captain; the 2018 International Cinematography Summit and much more.

Print and digital editions of the September issue of American Cinematographer will be delivered soon, offering a variety of stories highlighting international production and collaboration.

In his opening note in this issue, publisher/editor-in-chief Stephen Pizzzello writes:

This past June, the ASC hosted the latest International Cinematography Summit (ICS), a major event on the calendars of fellow societies around the globe. The four-day event, organized by the ASC International Committee and its chairman, Suki Medencevic, ASC — with the dedicated assistance of ASC events consultant Delphine Figueras, operations/events manager Alex Lopez and sponsorship and events director Patty Armacost — drew more than 60 cinematographers from 30 different countries. It was a truly impressive gathering of the profession’s practitioners, who enjoyed the rare chance to prioritize their art form’s agenda in an industry where technological flux has become the new normal.

In a recap written by AC web manager and associate publisher David E. Williams [found online here], Medencevic notes that his Committee’s programming for the Summit was “very ambitious,” but adds he was gratified to see the ASC’s extraordinary effort rewarded with rave reviews from very enthusiastic participants. “What was most important,” he concludes, “was the aspect of networking and interaction and getting to know each other and becoming one big, global community, which is really what we’re trying to build here.”

This issue of AC further underscores cinematography’s international reach with detailed reports on productions shot all over the world. Michael Goldman’s cover story on Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which made stops in France, England, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates, makes an especially persuasive case for keeping one’s passport in order. Director of photography Rob Hardy, BSC [seen at top of this page] found the epic undertaking logistically daunting but creatively stimulating. “This movie was spread out across the globe, and there was so much happening,” he reflects. “It was difficult, but it was an incredible experience.” [AC recently covered his work in the harrowing sci-fi drama Annihilation.]

I first heard about The Captain last October while enjoying a lively group lunch in New York with Arri executives and ASC member Florian Ballhaus, who told me he was excited to be working on “a period black-and-white World War II drama shot in Germany and Poland,” based on historical events and “told from the perspective of a rank-and-file Nazi soldier who impersonates an officer.” In a piece by Rachael Bosley, Ballhaus explains that director Robert Schwentke felt shooting such a “dark and troubling film” in black-and-white would help tone down the more graphic images and “immediately establish the period and emphasize the starkness of it all.”

Principal photography on Juliet, Naked — shot by Remi Adefarasin, BSC — took place primarily in his local zone of London, England, and on the coast of Kent. But as Adefarasin remembers in his discussion with Phil Rhodes, he spent his early years as a BBC cameraman working “on documentaries going all over the world.”

This month’s other spotlighted locations include Brokenhead, Canada, where Peter Flinckenberg, FSC shot the Netflix action-adventure drama How It Ends, and northern Chile, where the skies above the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert served as a stunning backdrop for the documentary Cielo, written, directed and produced by Alison McAlpine and shot by Benjamín Echazarreta (Filmmakers’ Forum, online here). This doc’s imagery is so impressive that it earned our American Cinematographer Award for Best Cinematography at the 2018 Salem Film Fest in Massachusetts.

You’ll find all this and much more in the July issue of AC, which subscribers should receive shortly.

To receive our print magazine or digital edition — and never miss an issue —  click through here.