April 1999
Sundance Wrap-up

While slightly less frenzied on the business front, this year's festival still offered a slew of fascinating Films.

by Stephen Pizzello, Andrew 0. Thompson, Patricia Thomson and Holly Willis

Overhearing the intercom at Salt Lake City's airport squawk: "Will Julie Delpy please come to the information desk" is a pretty sure sign that you've arrived at the Sundance Film Festival. If that's not enough of a wake-up call, try an hour-long shuttle ride to Park City seated next to a beleaguered Hollywood agent barking into a cell phone...

Throughout the 10-day festival, AC's merry band of moviegoers managed to take in close to 50 motion pictures. After careful consideration, our Sundance team opted to profile the following films, all of which offered intriguing visual styles.

Andrew 0. Thompson

Treasure Island (U.S.)
Director/Cinematographer:
Scott King

In making his stunning black-and-white feature film debut with Treasure Island, writer/director/cinematographer Scott King turned toward the past both in his script, which ponders the slippery boundaries dividing narrative and history, and in his choice of equipment and production methods. Set in San Francisco during World War II, Treasure Island shadows two American naval intelligence agents as they fashion a fictitious persona for a dead body that's going to be left off the Japanese coast prior to a military incursion. The process of creating this fake history entails the writing of well-crafted correspondence to the "man" from his loved ones. While penning these letters, however, both protagonists indulge in some soul-searching that sparks a resurgence of their own repressed psyches. Memories soon lead to madness as the officers slowly scrutinize their own inner lives, as well as the macabre circumstances of this self-examination.

To re-create life during wartime, King, whose previous filmmaking experience includes stints as an executive producer on the indie flicks Star Maps, Shotgun Freeway and Olympia, taught himself how to reconstruct a 1940s pictorial aesthetic from a top-notch source. "I purchased all of the American Cinematographer magazines from 1933 to 1945," he says. King also perused back issues of International Photographer, as well as John Alton's black-and-white lighting primer Painting With Light. Using these publications as guides, King was able to glean pertinent information about the period's lenses, lighting styles, and processing methods.

King's choice of camera was certainly esoteric; he employed a vintage Mitchell BNCR, a 175-pound camera owned by Paramount and now utilized mainly for television. "It's a fine camera," King says. "It was built in 1932 and then refitted in the 1950s by Karl Freund (ASC) when he was shooting I Love Lucy. I initially wanted to use the Mitchell because I thought I could get the old Cooke lenses, which are uncoated and make a softer image. The Cooke lenses are also not very contrasty, and since we were trying to re-create a Forties look, that was important:' King could not get his hands on any Cooke lenses, however, and wound up opting for Zeiss primes instead.

While the camera's enormous weight might have discouraged many filmmakers, King turned into an advantage. "I knew that we wouldn't be moving the camera very much, and we didn't; there are 222 shots in the film, and I think we moved the camera six times. In modern movies, people move the camera a lot, and I don't know if it's always a good idea. The nice thing about the Mitchell is that if you're going to move the camera, you have to know why.'

In addition to keeping the camera still, King hewed to a few other rules with what he describes as "fascistic" intransigence. "We shot the entire film at an aperture of T2, without exception," he says. "We only adjusted the light. I wanted the look to be as soft as possible, not only in terms of the contrast, but also in terms of the depth of field. When you look at old movies, it's surprising how little depth of field there is, and how much attention the filmmakers are paying to focus."

King's use of extremely short depth of field allowed him to fully explore the creative possibilities of focus. "One of the neat things about the film is that you're not always sure what the hell is going on," he explains. "There's always a part of the story itself that's out of focus, a part that you just can't make out. To my mind, it was really fun to have the ability to focus on people where I wanted:'

In his aim to approximate the past, King photographed Treasure Island on Kodak's 5222 black-and-white stock. "In the old days, they were shooting at 8 ASA, and had these giant arc lights everywhere," he notes. The director/cameraman tried to simulate that lighting approach with plenty of hardened ambiance.

To maintain a full tonal range in his palette, King banished shades of black and white from his sets. "The images are all grayish," he details. "Back then, cinematographers felt that if you were shooting black-and-white, it had to match the colors tonally. They were thinking in terms of pure color, so as a result, their version of black-and-white is much different than what we see today."

King also deployed colored filters and fixtures to accentuate the tonalities of his monochrome emulsion. "If you put someone in green light [when shooting in black-and-white], the person looks really old and tired," he explains. "But if you put a person in pink light, all of the tones even out the skin becomes lighter than everything else [in the frame], and you can do some amazing things. While this technique is still practiced in still photography, I think that really being aware of what color can do is a lost art." In terms of filters, King employed a coral 2 indoors and a red 1 outdoors; he also endowed his imagery with a slight tint and texture by shooting through a nude silk stocking, which he special-ordered from Paris.

The result of King's adherence to classic methods is quite impressive. Treasure Island sparks an uncanny connection with another era and aesthetic, reminding us why indie moviemaking is crucial to cinema history. In discussing the film's gamut of inspirations, King states, There are always going to be [mainstream] movies starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks...you can't compete with that, and you should not try to. But I think the role of independent film is to make something so different that people really want to see it. Why bother making it unless it's different?"