Cinematography Style: Janusz Kamiński

INTRODUCTION

With a career in producing images that has spanned decades, it can be tricky to pin down exactly the work of Janusz Kaminski. However, it’s difficult to deny that a large part of his filmography is due to his extensive collaborations with iconic director Steven Spielberg.

This raises the question, how do you separate the creative input of the director and the cinematographer? Is it even possible to do so?

In this episode of Cinematography Style I’ll unpack Kaminski’s philosophy on filmmaking that uses visual metaphors to express stories, and give examples of the kinds of gear and technical tricks he’s used as a cinematographer to create images.   

BACKGROUND

During a period of political turbulence in the early 1980s, the Polish cinematographer moved to the United States where he attended university. He decided to take up cinematography and went to film school at the AFI.

He got his first professional job in the industry as a dolly grip on a commercial. The camera operator quickly told him this wasn’t for him. Next, he worked as a camera assistant, where he was again told he also wasn’t any good. He then started working in lighting which kicked off his career.

During this time he worked on lower budget productions with fellow up and coming cinematographers such as Phedon Papamichael and Wally Pfister. He also began working as a cinematographer too in his own right.

“I was here for 13 years and I shot 6, 7 movies. So I was experienced I just didn’t have that little push. I shot a little movie directed by Diane Keaton. Steven liked the work, called my agent, we met and he offered me to do a television movie for his company and after that he offered me Schindler’s List.”

This collaboration proved to be a lasting one. Over the years they have shot 19 other films together and counting. 

Other than Spielberg he’s also shot feature films in many different genres for other directors such as: Stephen Sommers, Cameron Crowe, Judd Apatow and David Dobkin.  

PHILOSOPHY

Coming back to the question of how you separate Kaminiski’s input from Spielberg’s:  in their vast collection of films together, a lot of the overarching visual decision making does come from the director’s side.

Prior to their work together, Spielberg was known for the creative way in which he positioned and moved the camera in order to tell stories. In that way, I think a great deal of the perspective of what the audience sees in the frame comes from him.

For some movies, such as West Side Story, Spielberg uses extensive storyboards to pre-plan the coverage in a very specific way. While other movies like Schindler’s List had surprisingly little planning and were more spontaneous without any shot lists or storyboards.

For this situation, Kaminski used a portable tape recorder to dictate notes about lighting, problems or gear he may need, to bring order to his thoughts and successfully execute the photography as they went.  

In terms of the overall look and lighting of Spielberg’s early films, they all followed a similar template that was grounded by a traditionally beautiful Hollywood aesthetic with haze that accentuated an ever present glowing backlight that gave the actors an angelic, rim light halo outline. 

The other cinematographers he worked with were intent on servicing this traditional aesthetic.

When Kaminski came on board to shoot Schindler’s List he deconstructed the Hollywood, family-friendly beauty that audience’s had come to expect from Speilberg’s work.

“I think the idea of de-glamorising the images, strangely, I’m always interested in that. I didn’t want that classical Hollywood light. I wanted more naturalistic looking. We all want to take chances, because it’s not this comfortable life we’ve chosen where we just make movies and we work with movie stars. We express ourselves artistically through our work and we want to take chances.”

Throughout their collaborations together, Kaminiski was able to find a middle ground that balanced Speilberg’s desire for a traditionally beautiful look with his own appreciation for de-glamorised images that could be considered beautiful in a different way. 

Another ever present idea in his work is his use of visual metaphors - where the camerawork represents a particular idea or leans into a visual perspective that represents the location or time period that is being captured in the story.

“I think each story has its own representation. You have to allow the audience to immediately identify where they are. So if you’re not using some very strong metaphors you will lose the audience. So the first explosion is very yellow, then we go to France and it’s more blue-ish, you go to Italy it’s very warm and fuzzy, France it’s very warm and fuzzy. So using those visual cliches that we as the people identify with specific countries.”

He doesn’t only create these visual metaphors with colour. On Munich he used zooms to capture the photographic vocabulary of the 1970s when those lenses were popular. 

Or in Saving Private Ryan he mimicked the kind of manic, handheld, on the ground style that the real combat cameramen of the time would have been forced to use.

Or in Catch Me If You Can, he differentiated the time periods by giving the 60s scenes a warm, romantic glow and the 1970s scenes a slightly bluer, flatter look.

These visual languages and cues subtly change depending on the movie. They back up each film by using the images to support the story in a way that hopefully goes unnoticed by the audience on the surface, but feeds into how they interpret the movie in an unconscious way.

GEAR

“I look at cameras as a sewing machine. When you talk to the wardrobe designer you don’t ask her what kind of sewing machine do you use, because it’s just a sewing machine. It doesn’t really matter. The equipment, all that stuff is not. What you do with it is essential.” 

Some cinematographers like to be consistent with their gear selection to carry their visual trademark across the respective projects that they work on. Kaminiski isn’t like that. 

Throughout his career he has got a variety of optical effects from his big bag of tricks. Sometimes this involves using filters, sometimes photochemical manipulation, other times unique grip rigs or playing with unconventional camera settings.

So, let’s go through a few examples of some gear he has used, starting with his camera package.

He flips between shooting with Panavision cameras and lenses in the US and using Arri cameras when working in Europe. He’s alternated between shooting Super 35 with spherical lenses and in the anamorphic format. 

Spherical lenses are more practical as they are faster, have better close focus and are smaller, which makes them better suited for shooting in compact spaces such as car interiors. Examples of some of these lenses that he has used include Cooke S4s, Panavision Primos and Zeiss Standard and Super Speeds.  

He usually shoots close ups at around a more romantic 50mm focal length or longer to flatter the face, but on Schindler’s List chose to shoot them with a wider 29mm field of view that lended itself to realism.  

He’s used anamorphic lenses for their classical Hollywood look, with beautiful flares that are impossible to otherwise recreate. Some examples are the C-Series and more modern T-Series from Panavision. 

He has used digital cinema cameras occasionally but almost exclusively shoots features on 35mm film - including his recent work. His choice of film stocks has been extremely varied. 

On Schindler’s List he mainly shot on Eastman Double-X 5222 black and white. For specific sequences that required parts of the frame to be colourised, such as the famous shot of the girl in the red dress, he pulled an interesting photochemical trick by recording on Eastman EXR 500T 5296 colour negative film stock and then printing the film onto a special panchromatic high-con stock which is sensitive to all colours and used primarily for titles. 

This gave them the look they wanted that best matched the rest of the black and white footage and didn’t contain the blue tint that came with removing the colour from the colour negative in the regular way.   

To get a flatter image for the 1970s scenes in Catch Me If You Can he used Kodak 320T stock in combination with low-con and fog filters to purposefully make the images a bit uglier, more neutral and drab. This coincided with the main characters' fall from grace as he came to terms with the real life consequences of his actions.

Or on Saving Private Ryan, he settled on Eastman’s 200T film stock, which he pushed by one stop and used a film development process called ENR which both desaturated the stock and sharpened up the look of textures, giving the details in the image a grittiness.

When it comes to lighting with his gaffer he acknowledges that some gaffers are more technical while others are more conceptual. Due to the large scope of the kind of sets he lights it’s more practical for him to describe the lighting he wants in more general terms. Such as no backlight, or this source needs to feel warm - rather than describing and placing loads of specific units around a set.

“The scope is way too large. You can’t demand every light be placed on set according to your desires, so you have a gaffer who is knowledgeable. On the shooting day or the day before you talk about the specifics of each scene or you adjust the lighting. Or you do the lighting with the gaffer on the given day right after the rehearsal. Surround yourself with the best people so you can work less and I want to work as little as possible.”

Spielberg likes to move the camera in a fluid, expansive way, with rigs such as a Technocrane, that reveals large portions of the location. This adds to his challenge of lighting as it’s far easier to light in a single direction with a 15 degree camera angle than it is to cover 270 degrees of the set.

Although for other films such as Saving Private Ryan a lot of handheld moves were done to introduce a feeling of realism that placed the viewer right down on the shoulder of the operator, in the middle of the action.

To inject even more intensity into an already shaky image he used Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker. This is a device which can be mounted onto the front bars of the camera and vibrates at a controlled level with vertical and horizontal vibration settings which could mimic the effect of the explosions happening around the soldiers. 

CONCLUSION

Kaminiski uses whatever technical trick he can think of to create visual metaphors that push the story forward, whether that’s done photochemically, with a filter or by physically shaking up the image.

In the end, the technical solution or piece of equipment itself is less important than the cinematic effect that it produces.

Spielberg and Kaminski’s filmmaking is an intertwined creative partnership which has combined Spielberg’s traditionally cinematic visual direction with Kaminski’s focus on visual metaphors. Sometimes this means perfect golden backlight, but other times a feeling of realism that is far more ugly and true to life is what is required.