Cinematography Style: Charlotte Bruus Christensen

INTRODUCTION

The visual language of cinema is to a large extent determined by the context of the story. Some moments need to be slow and creeping, some moments need to feel hot and pressured, while at other times it should feel organic and natural. Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s work can be characterised by an overall classically Hollywood, cinematic, filmic, widescreen look, mixed with naturalism, which then uses the context of the story as the basis for applying the correct psychological perspective.

In this video I’ll take a closer look at the Danish cinematographer’s work, by unpacking some of her philosophical thoughts on the medium and then go over some of the gear that she uses to physically bring stories to the big screen.  

PHILOSOPHY

“It’s interesting how you hit those different genres. It adds to the way that you think about, you know, lighting a scene or moving the camera. I think it just gives you, a sort of, another way in technically and also style wise to how you approach a story. It gives you sort of a framework and then you think there are those rules but then you break them.”

From horror films like A Quiet Place to period dramas like The Banker and psychological mystery films like Girl On The Train, her photography has covered a range of different genres.When coming up with a look for a film she’ll use the visual associations with each genre as a kind of general jumping off point, but will then narrow down the look and sometimes go against expectations as things progress. 

 The process for preparing for each film shifts. For example when working on Fences, originally written as a play, with director Denzel Washington, a lot of the early focus went to working with the actors, and nailing down the feeling of how each scene would be performed using rehearsals. Whereas when working with a different director slash actor John Krasinski they would go over older films as references in the build up and then be much more flexible and reactive with how each scene was filmed once they arrived on set.

“For A Quiet Place, John Krasinski, the director and actor, both of us were like there’s something about Jaws. I know it’s not a sort of direct, like you may not spot that in there, but the ways they were sort of lining up a three shot and this while thing of in Jaws you don’t see the shark until very late. There’s things that inspired us. I think also it’s a very educational process that we all sort of constantly do. When you make a movie you educate yourself further and further and further.”

She uses these films and shots as references in a way that takes into account their tone, feeling and type of storytelling - rather than directly borrowing from their look. For example, using a classically slow, steady, reactive, quietly moving camera to build a feeling of tension in scenes. And then letting the horror come from how the performances are captured and how the actors react to the off screen threat.

This feeds into another cinematic technique that she uses, where a psychological approach to story is taken through the imagery. She tends to shoot scenes grounded in a similar widescreen, classical, filmic base look but then tweaks things like framing, camera movement and lighting depending on the idea or effect she’s after.

For example, the buildings and places in The Banker were almost as important to the story as the characters were. So to better present the spaces she shot many scenes from a lower angle with a steady frame that more fully displayed the height of the architecture in the background.

While a film like The Hunt, pulled more subtly from the Dogme 95 stylistic guidelines by shooting naturalistically on location and using a lot of handheld camera movement to present intimate, personal close ups of authentic performances.      

So, although both these examples were bound by a similar warm, film-esque look with shallow depth, real locations and natural lighting - the subtle variations in her cinematic techniques differentiates how audiences may psychologically interpret these two films - while also maintaining her own perspective. She uses these little variations in different contexts to enhance the psychological feeling that she wants the audience to have.

“And then also a whole sort of psychological thing of how you make people nervous, you know. If they’re in court this thing of sort of shining light into their face and over expose them to make them feel so small and in the spotlight and sweaty and heat and all these sort of things you would do to make people break.” 

These effects come from discussions with the director, combined with her own point of view on how they want the images to feel. To get the most out of collaborations with the director and to serve their vision, usually means helping get the best performances out of actors.    

“The most important thing I think I really value and try very hard to create freedom for a director and the cast while also producing a cinematic image.”

This is a balance that most cinematographers have to tread between getting the best image that they can, while at the same time being flexible enough to compromise with the actors and people in front of the lens.

Sometimes this may mean changing a pre-planned lighting setup and adapting that on the fly when actors and directors come up with new ideas for blocking on the day. Or it may mean quickly having to re-frame to capture an actor that isn’t tied down to hitting a specific mark on the set. 

More often than not this process takes the form of an organic back and forth discussion with the creative heads of departments. This is why it’s so important to be able to collaborate and compromise on a film set to best tie the ideas that are brought to the party into the best iteration of the story that’s possible.   

GEAR

I mentioned earlier that most of Christensen’s cinematography has quite a consistent, warm, classical, filmic look to it. I’d pin this down to two gear selections which she regularly makes. 

The first is her use of anamorphic lenses. Although she has shot in the Super 35 format with vintage spherical lenses like the Cooke Speed Panchros, the majority of her feature film work has used anamorphic lenses. Particularly the C-Series set of anamorphics from Panavision, which is sometimes supplemented by other more modern Panavision anamorphics like the T or G-Series. 

These lenses create a native widescreen aspect ratio and render images with a natural smoothness and warmth to them that has long been seen as a trademark of traditional Hollywood cinematography. 

The second fairly consistent gear selection she makes is to shoot on film. Of course this isn’t always possible from a production standpoint or necessarily the right creative choice for all films, but she has shot a large portion of her work photochemically on all the variations of Kodak Vision 3 colour negative film.

When she does shoot digitally she tends towards the more filmic sensor in Arri cameras, like the old Alexa Plus or the Mini. The choice to shoot photochemically is in part an aesthetic one, but it’s also one that is determined by the style of working that she’s after.

“The way you light the film, the way you work with film. You know, you’re on set. You look towards the scene. You don’t disappear into a video village and try things out. You look, you light, you use your light metre and you shoot. I think that for us there was a nice feel to that. And then, you know, obviously the very soft, cinematic look where we could really use the anamorphic lenses, you know, with the emulsion.”

Depending on the needs of each project or scene she’ll select different speed stocks. For the interior scenes on Fences she used the more sensitive 500T which allowed her to expose the darker skin tones of the actors at T/5.6 in the dim spaces while still having enough latitude to preserve the brighter information outside the windows without it blowing out. Whereas this interior scene from The Banker was shot on the less sensitive 50D stock. This finer grain film stock, along with her lighting, evoked the 1950s, Hitchcockian period look that she was after.

To enhance this look, she lit the actor with a hard light - an 18K HMI. The light beam was positioned and cut so that it hit the forehead and created a rim light highlight ping on the skin, which is reminiscent of older films from the period which used hard light sources in a similar way.

I think Chirstensen’s overall approach to lighting was influenced early on by her work on films by Dogme 95 directors like Thomas Vinterberg. This filmmaking movement came with various rules that included limiting the excessive use of artificial lighting.

Her lighting tends towards a naturalistic look, where the sources of the light, even when they are artificial, are motivated by real sources of ambient light. Therefore, coming back to those interior scenes from Fences, she spots the quality of the sunlight that is coming through the windows and supplements its direction and quality by using daylight balanced HMI units. 

Then to balance out the look so that the actors do not appear too much in a shadowy silhouette she adds fill light using Arri Skypanels - which imitates and lifts the natural sunlight that comes from outside and bounces back, more softly, off the walls.

Most of her lighting uses this similar approach of supplementing the existing sources of light that are naturally present at the location, whether that’s in the form of sunlight, street lights at night, or artificial light from practical lamps inside a home.  Just as she subtly tweaks her lighting in different ways that play to story, time period or some kind of motivated idea, the way in which she moves the camera is also an important feature of her work. 

“If you’ve been busy with the camera, if it’s been handheld, or you’ve been running with the camera and you cut then to a still image then it’s like, ‘Oh my God. Something is going to happen.’ It was very minimalistic in a way. You move the camera a little bit or you cut from a running shot to still. These kind of very simple, minimalistic tools were very powerful.” 

How the camera moves is often talked about, but what is discussed less often by cinematographers is the kind of movement that is present in two different shots which are cut next to each other. Something Christensen likes to think about is how to contrast two forms of camera movement - like a rapid dolly move to a slow creeping push on a dolly - for a more abrasive emotional effect. This contrast is especially effective when it’s set against the rest of the movie that is shot with subtle, slow, barely noticeable camera moves.

She uses a lot of these slow, steady, traditionally cinematic moves in her work which is done with a dolly and a track. Sometimes to get to lower angles she’ll ‘break the neck of the dolly’ and shoot from low mode.

Another consistent feature in her work is the use of a handheld camera. This is especially present in her early work with Dogme 95 directors, as shooting with a handheld camera was another of their aesthetic rules, but she’s also continued to use this technique, particularly for more intimate close ups, throughout various other movies shot in the US.        

CONCLUSION

“I love going in and seeing the whole team and everything is going off. What you planned to do. And I come on set in the morning and go , ‘Really? Can I enter this and go in and say something?’ I always get excited about just the physics of the staff and the people and some mechanic that I love about this.”