Above: Ed Lachman, ASC First Steps
Ed lachman: I started out editing my own film, it was like my graduate project, with the Maysles Brothers, it was a film about a therapeutic community for drugs addiction. I met Al and David, and I became a sound man for Al, because he liked that, it gave him all the space to shoot. I cared more about the camera than the sound. Then I started work with them as a second cameraman on "Christo's Valley Curtain" and "Grey Gardens". I ran their office, I did everything there. That was my first film job, working for the Maysles Brothers.

They always felt -- and Albert still does -- that stories, whatever you could find in fiction, you could find in reality. In a certain sense you could say that about imagery. Whatever you can create in the cinema, in a narrative form, you probably could find visually in reality. And it just takes the eye to see it. Than it is a question of how you recreate that. It is best to be a good observer to understand the nature of light. Why an image is created the way it is. Why it looks the way it does.

Even when I studied paining I was always interested in kind of the found object. The photographers that I was primarily interested in growing up, was Robert Frank and Larry Clark, they depicted the world that they lived from a POV, but the POV was from a reality that they where experiencing. They had a subjective viewpoint about what they where seeing. And could express that.

Cinematography
It is what we don't do. For me it is like translate stories into images, with the Director, the Art-director, the Actor, but more important we can also interpret, set the emotional context of the stories by creating the visual language. Trough framing, movement, non-movement, lighting, and depicting a realism or abstraction. The wonderful thing about imagery and cinematography is that it is like music. Images are non-verbal. And that's what makes them so evocative and emotional. I feel like images have a rhythm and a tempo. That's where I respond to, even when it is hard for me... I like to operate on smaller budget films. But on bigger budget films I have to have an operator. The way you move the camera has so much to do with the visual rhythm and how you tell the story. I am very sensitive to feeling how the camera moves to the performance. In a certain way I think almost, the cameraman gives another kind of performance in the film, for the director.

Images are metaphors for the storytelling. That's the most important thing for me. And we always have to find what is unique about the story and its characters, what do the images represent? It is to find the visual languages to tell the stories. That's what is so important. And every story is different, we have to find a different language for each story.

We learn to translate images from what was before. That helps us to move on to create other language. There is an evolution to the imagery. People become more and more sophisticated about what an image represents. What you don't have to show to explain or to convey visual ideas.

Young people are so indicated with imagery today. Everyone can pick up their digital camera and create their own films. Or experience their life trough images. They are bombarded by advertising, what ever, that is giving us a shorthand in telling our stories. But the most important thing is to have the stories to tell. That we are not creating manufactured cliché's and -- you know -- vacuous kind of imagery. That our images don't become cliched, sentimental or hackneyed. The most important thing is to find stories that somehow make people think about their own existence, their own life. And not create images that are just amusement rides. That's one form, like a video-game. That Hollywood is very good at. I have always been more interested in European storytelling, that is character driven. And that the camera is more of an interpretive tool towards entering the world of the characters. In writing it is much easier to go into the interior world of the character. But it is much harder to explain location or place. Or what we do in a wide-shot in a film. Where in film it is much harder to enter the interior world of the character.

How you interpret , how you make the audience feel how that character thinks or feels, or expresses himself. That's what I am always searching for with the camera, how you find the interior world. And find the language to translate that interior world

Steven Soderberg: The Limey
I think what he tried to do in The Limey was -- trough editing -- it was kind of an experimentation, running the voice of the dialogue over the reaction shot, of someone not speaking, and than also shooting dialogues over different scenes, but they where the same dialogue, cross-cutting them. So this was all an attempt of deconstructing the dialogue to the
image, but somehow you are able to enter... that you thought like it was a thought process. Rather than let's say a voice over. Because it was actual dialogues in the scene. But because he deconstructed the images to the dialogue, you had the feeling that you where entering his thoughts. And the dialogue was what he was thinking about as well as speaking. I never thought about it that way, but that's what I think that's what happens. At the end of a scene he would say: you remember the scene that we shot yesterday, could you just run that dialogue? But it was a totally different scene, but they ran the dialogue. And then in the editing room he experimented with running that dialogue over that scene, over the reacting shots of the character. And it had this effect of you where entering this world. It was shot that way, but it was more part of the editing process, that created that illusion



Above: Director of photography Ed Lachman, ASC (photo: Bart van Broekhoven)

Fragment from interview with Ed Lachman for the upcoming NSC book on contemporary imagery and cinematography, co-interviewer: Richard van Oosterhout