Robert Edge

This morning, a US programme called Breakfast with the Arts aired a lengthy interview with Woody Allen about his new film Match Point. Allen said that he intended to make the film in New York and that the script was written accordingly. Why the change? He said that there are several US production companies that want to work with him, but he doesn't want to work with them. He said that US producers are not content to be financiers, but rather fancy themselves, erroneously, as filmmakers, and that they insist on interfering with the script, casting, etc. Allen said that European financing is put together in a way that gives a director much more independence, and that this led him to shoot the film in London. Given Allen's history, this doesn't make any sense unless US production companies have indeed become more controlling, to the point where Allen won't put up with it, or Allen has become less tolerant of interference. I was just struck by the fact that he was so blunt, essentially saying that he made the film in London because he couldn't get sufficient creative control to make it worth his while to make the film in his home town. Has anyone seen Match Point?

The largest is probably www.photo.net. There is also www.apug.org, which focuses on analog black and white. I noticed the large format camera in one of your photos. You might also want to have a look at www.largeformatphotography.info.

I recently watched an interview in which Hitchcock talked, among other things, about his penchant for meticulous planning and storyboarding. From time to time, I've read suggestions that Hitchcock used 99 per cent of what he shot. I assume that this refers to shots and is not a suggestion that he shot everything in one take. In any event, is it essentially true or something of an embellishment? I wish I could remember who did the interview. He had some great things to say about creating suspense and about his use of the mcguffin.

Subject to any response from Mr. Prieto, who sometimes posts here, the Fall issue of Filmmaker, which contains an interview with the director, and the January issue of American Cinematographer, both say that the stocks were Kodak EXR 50D 5245, Vision 250D 5246, Vision 500T 5279 and Vision 2 500T 5218. The lenses were apparently Cooke S4. To address your specific questions: According to American Cinematographer, Prieto used 50D for daylight exterior scenes on the mountain - "I wanted those images to feel a little crisper and cleaner - I wanted the air to feel a little more transparent". According to the magazine, he used 250D for dusk and dawn scenes on the mountain for more speed. The article also says that 50D is the stock "when things are good" and that Prieto went to 250D "when things get a little ugly". There are three paragraphs in the article that are specific to stock and discussion at various points in the article about filters. For what it is worth, I think that there is something to be said for reading Annie Proulx's short story, originally published in the New Yorker, in conjunction with seeing the translation of her story into film. Hope that helps.

Mitch, I'm not surprised at your reaction to some of what has been said in this thread and, as you point out, in related threads. There is something called provocation, and it is real.

I have a question. Are there standards of civility on cinematography.com and, if so, what are they? How is it that there can be an entire thread about the experience and personality of an individual participant in this forum? Why, in the last couple of weeks, have there been threads about something called Ultra 16, whatever it may be, and about whether a particular video camera does or does not do 24p, in which almost all of the participants have conducted themselves in a way that is, to an non-participant observer, embarrassing? Why is it that someone who expresses his or her view on a political or aesthetic, or even techical question, in good faith, can wind up being subjected to condesension, ridicule or worse, sometimes in what develops into a pack mentality?

Mike, thanks for the link to Zeiss. Just had a chance to look at it in more detail. I didn't know that Zeiss has just come out with a new 35mm rangefinder. Looking at B&H and Robert White in the UK, the body seems to be about half the price of a Leica M. There are some comments about the camera here, including some from Roger Hicks who apparently will be doing a review for Shutterbug and the UK magazine Black and White: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-..._id=00Eq0z&tag= The super 16 camera that I have will take a Nikon mount, so I'm kind of curious about what Zeiss is going to announce on Wednesday.

I gather that this is directed at me... I was living in Paris when my local train (RER) station was bombed during the evening rush hour in the last of a long series of terrorist attacks. I will never forget getting off the bus, which I took instead of the train that day, to hear nothing but sirens, and to walk into the nearest brasserie to ask what had happened, to be told "une bombe". For the next three months, taking public transportation in Paris was extremely stressful. All train and RER stations, and key metro stations, were patrolled by several teams of three, invariably a 30 yr old and a couple of 18 yr old boys, armed with machine guns. Every trash can in the city was sealed. Most importantly, people eyed one another on the train or the metro with suspicion on racial grounds. It was a hard time to be Algerian. You can read about it here: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9612/03/subway.explosion/ On the date about which you are speaking, and asking whether I am ignorant, the person with whom I lived in Paris was living in New York. During that day, I played communications central because none of his family could get through to him, or he to them, except through me, because for some reason my cell phone and his were able to communicate throughout the day. He was fine, which is better than I can say for friends in Battery Park. As I write this, I am looking at a poster, signed by Sir Ian McKellan and Helen Mirren, which I bought a few weeks after what happened in New York at the end of a performance of Strindberg's Dance of Death that they gave to a largely empty Broadhurst Theatre. I bought the poster in order to make a contribution to New York actors who had been affected by what happened, and I will never forget McKellan and Mirren and the rest of the cast coming out on stage, at the end of the performance, and thanking the audience for coming to support the theatre in difficult times.

The significance of this is that one of the two main players in film cameras is throwing in the towel. It's hard to resist the conclusion that Canon won't be far behind, in which case one has got to wonder what Kodak and Fuji are going to do, not as a consequence, but because they must be experiencing the same free fall. When Nikon says that 95 per cent of its business is now digital, that says something. Nobody is going to buy Zeiss lenses for an FM10. It is a cheap, entry level camera. As I read the press release, continuation of the F6 is a matter of prestige, and temporary at that. I don't see why Zeiss would buy in, except on a temporary basis, to what Nikon has decided is a dead business.

That someone was Jonathan Swift, best known for Gulliver's Travels and an essay called A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that the problem of poverty in Ireland be solved by selling the children of the poor as food. The rules in New York are a little arbitrary. According to the rules, it is illegal to use a still camera on city streets without a permit. If one is using a still camera, such as a Hasselblad, one does not need insurance, but if one is using an A-Minima or any othe motion picture camera, one must be insured to the tune of one million dollars. The effect of this is that anyone using a still camera without a permit, or a consumer video camera without third party liability coverage, to make personal or vacation photos, is breaking the law. Then there are the local organisations that want more than the city requires. For example, if one calls the office of New York's Greenmarket organisation, which controls all of the city's open-air food markets, one will be told, as I have, that they require, for the use of a 35mm Nikon still camera, both a permit and one million dollars in liability insurance. When asked to explain, they say that the Food Network has this kind of coverage and they don't understand why anyone else wouldn't. Of course, this means that the vast majority of people who take photos at the Union Square Market, and all of the rest of the greenmarkets, are acting, in the opinion of the greenmarket managing authority, illegally. On top of this, there is the problem that photographers have been affected by increased security. In some cases, the position of security guards and the police has been hysterical, not just in New York but elsewhere. About a year ago, the New York city council planned to enact a by-law that would have made it an offence to take any photograph on the New York subway system. After agitation and demonstrations, the city relented. For some reason, the photographers who were active on this issue and who are active generally on the issue of balancing security and freedom of expression are almost invariably still photographers. With few exceptions, cinematographers are nowhere to be seen. In saying this, I want to make it clear that I am not just talking about New York, or even just about the US. My personal approach in New York and elsewhere is to act discretely. I have not had a problem with the authorities. That said, there is something fundamentally wrong when a set of rules that leave people who are acting in an innocent manner completely at the mercy of the discretion of a security guard or police officer. The problem isn't getting a summons, the problem is being prevented from engaging in innocent activity and, potentially, getting arrested in the process.

So if you were buying a matte box for a super 16 camera today, new and without regard to backward compatibility, what would you buy?

Today, Nikon announced that it is essentially getting out of the film camera business: http://www.nikon.co.uk/press_room/releases/show.aspx?rid=201 With a few exceptions, the company is ceasing production of 35mm film cameras, manual lenses, large format lenses and enlarging lenses. The press release says that current stock should run out sometime this summer. Not surprising.

Has anyone seen the 2004 film Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano (I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth)? It is a documentary by a Brazillian named Vicente Ferraz about the people who made I am Cuba, how they made it and why the film had a very short run before being shelved for 30 years. Doesn't appear to be available on DVD, although presumably it will be packaged at some point with I Am Cuba.

What is a sensible rule of thumb regarding age when buying stock that has been refrigerated but not frozen if you don't have a chance to test it first? As I understand it, Kodak says that refrigerated film is fine for 6 months. Does experience bear that out? If not, is it one year, two years...?

Linos Photonics, the company that owns Rodenstock, has a free software programme on its site called PreDesigner. The programme allows one to play with lens variables and see their impact. I've just played with it a little, but it seems to be quite a cool little programme, available in German or English, PC only: http://www.winlens.de/en/predes_intro.html There is an on-line manual that explains in detail what the programme does and how it works.

I like the Jean-Luc Godard statement quoted earlier in this thread. It is an insightful remark, especially coming from a man whose raw material was often banal, formulaic pulp fiction. It is one thing to say that commercial film producers demand the kinds of structures and methods espoused by people like Field and McKee. It is another to say that what Field and McKee teach results in good, let alone interesting, work. If it did, there wouldn't be such a hugh gap in artistic quality and artistic interest between serious narrative writing, whether one is talking about the short story, the novel or the play, and the films that are coming off the commercial assembly line. I don't think that the fact that there are a lot of chefs stirring the pot explains the problem with film. There are a lot of chefs when a play gets produced, yet artistically challenging plays do make their way to the stage. I think that the problem is that most of the people who are producing and packaging films lack both nerve and vision, and that people like Field and McKee are their handmaidens.

Does anyone have a comment on Spike Jonze's Adaptation? Apart from being about the topic of this thread, it includes a cameo appearance by the ultimate guru on the subject of winning the Hollywood writing lottery.

The most revelatory theatrical production that I have ever seen was Peter Hall's 42nd anniversary production of Waiting for Godot with Alan Howard and Ben Kingsley. Those who think that Beckett is hard should see this play live. It is very, very funny. More importantly, in the context of the current discussion, it does not run three acts. It runs, at two hours, two acts, and it is unquestionably a work of genius. People who want to decide for themselves whether there are magic formulae for writing might consider reading a book by the American writer John Gardner called The Art of Fiction. They might also consider reading an essay by John Updike, published some years ago in the New York Review of Books, in which he argued that modern literature owes a huge debt to Sterne's Tristram Shandy (a novel recently turned into a film by Michael Winterbottom and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind) and Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. Mordechai Richler once said that when he wrote a novel, he didn't have any idea, when he was finished with the first sentence, where the book was going. In other words, the first sentence helped him find the second sentence. If one writes from the language, and from character, this makes perfect sense. I believe that it is how many, although not all, great works of literature have been written.

I think that the new Tascam is very interesting if two channels are sufficient and you want time code and have a way, independently of the recorder, to generate code. The problem is that the Tascam is so new that very few people have used one. Hands-on information is almost non-existent. That should change in the next few weeks, but at the moment the only user reports that I am aware of are on the r.a.m.p.s. and rec.audio.pro newsgroups. Those reports are positive, but also very preliminary. If the recorder is as good in reality as it is on paper, it is very attractively priced.

You may find that the most efficient way to understand the issues and make decisions about how you want to proceed is to read a book or two. There is a good overview of sound recording and editing in Steven Ascher's The Fimmaker's Handbook, and of course there are books that are dedicated to the subject. The Transom public radio site (www.transom.org) contains good information, but obviously Transom doesn't address issues specific to sound and film. Recently, someone drew my attention to the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.production.sound, which I've found useful. I am about to acquire a recorder myself and I'm looking only at machines that record either to hard drive or PCMIA or flash card. Given where the technology is going and current pricing, I don't see the point of buying a machine that records to tape, whether a Nagra or a digital audio tape machine. Over the last 18 months, I have made several voice recordings, unrelated to film, using a laptop computer, simple sound recording/editing software, a small M-Audio pre-amp connected to the computer and a microphone connected to the pre-amp. Because I already owned the laptop, and the recordings were being made for content rather than sophisticated sound quality, this was cost-effective. If you are on a very tight budget, this could be used on a film proect. However, it is not terribly compact and, in the intervening months, some attractively-priced stand-alone digital recorders have come on the market. I'm planning to make a couple of short documentaries myself with a film camera. I'm doing it because I think that I'll have good control over the amount of film that I'll use and because I think that the subjects lend themselves to film. Were it not for that, I would shoot on video, which is how almost all documentaries are being made these days.

Well it's the end of the first period and Canada leads Russia 2-0. Here's my suggestion. Replace these banner headline threads entitled SIGN YOUR POSTS with lower case threads entitled civility.

The last time that this issue came up I wrote a fairly lengthy post about why I do not think that people should be required to give their full name. This time, I'm going to keep it brief. The only thing that I care about is that I be civil to other participants and that they be civil to me. The last time that I said this, Tim Tyler explained that participation was increasingly dramatically, that this seemed to be resulting in more trouble and that much of the trouble seemed to be coming from people who weren't using their full names. Tim probably has a better handle than I do about what goes on on this site. That said, I do not myself see any difference, when it comes to the question of civility, between the behaviour of those who are using their full names and those who are not. Given that the Gold Medal game of the World Junior Hockey Championships has just started to a packed arena in Vancouver, and it appear from the first three minutes that this is going to be an incredibly fast, hard hitting and classic match, I'll leave it there. Cheers

Stephen, I was joking. During the last marathon thread on this issue, Max also weighed in without signing, and found himself having to go back to fix it. You do see the humour in this?

And here I thought that audiris was a Latin conjugation. What's your first name, Mr. Audiris? :)

Thanks, good news, and suggestions that we can manage. That time of year, I don't think that keeping film at body temperature or below will be a problem. The camel expert in this exercise tells me that the camels won't be keen on carrying a cooler, but she says that we may be able to rig something that won't annoy them, especially if we bribe them with fruit leather.