Film review. An analysis of the cinematography of La vie d'Adèle, by Abdellatif Kechiche

La vie d'Adèle (also known as Blue is the Warmest Colour) is a film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche (Venus Noire, The Secret of the Grain, La Faute à Voltaire) that won The  Palm d'Or at this year Cannes Film Festival.

The plot. Adèle is a young girl whose life and sexuality change when she meets Emma. Love and happiness will rise making Adèle grow into a woman, but when their relationship falls apart she has to find back herself.

Cinematography: Sofian El Fani

Camera: Canon Eos C300

Lenses:  Angenieux Optimo 28-76mm T2.6

Aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Format: MPEG-2

Film Stock: -

After working in his previous works, Sofian El Fani (The secret of the Grain, Le Fil, Paris la Métisse) repeats as Kechiche's cinematographer for La Vie d'Adèle. The film, rather than being a story between two homosexuals like everyone expects, is a look at what happen when you fall in love, independently of you gender or sexual orientation. In this sense, La Vie d'Adèle is a kind of documentary about Adèle's emotions, from love and happiness to fear and suffer. The cinematography reflects and enhances this point perfectly.

The choice of the Eos C300 along with just one lens used (a zoom lens but still one lens) is justified for the way of shooting: camera is hand held and follows the characters almost as in a documentary. So the Canon camera and the Angenieux Zoom  offered lightness and practicability for this purpose. Actually, the C-log of the Eos worked really well, given the pleasant image offered, not hard at all as digital cinema normally is.

The Angenieux Lens is generally used at its longest focal length and at a quite wide aperture: the depth of field is very shallow, the characters are isolated from the background and are often out of focus when they move, giving the focus puller a hard job (which he did great, by the way).

There's a clear preference for close up shots: the reason is not only getting the audience closer to the characters; the main reason is that the film is about emotions and emotions are better expressed by face, and the great work of the two actresses made it easy to fill the frame with their face and looks.

Light has a natural feeling, of course, according to the story and way of filming. Windows, doors and on set lights are used as light sources, reinforced and softened. There's a preference, especially in the first half of the film, for back lighting: the key light is placed behind the character who never falls into silhouette anyway because the exposure is balanced with frontal fill lights.

La Vie d'Adèle is translated in English as Blue is the Warmest Colour for a reason: the use of this colour throughout the film, an use which is, in a cinematographic point of view, very interesting. Normally blue is associated with coldness and distance not with warmth, while the colour representing love is red. The director and the cinematographer changed this relationship because they wanted to go further: in fact, blue is also the colour of freedom and the future. It is freedom what Adèle looks for when she first sees Emma, freedom for expressing her true feelings. This is what Emma's hair colour represents. She is the future for Adèle. That is why, in the gay bar, the first thing we see of Emma is the blue hair popping out from the darkness, that is why the first time Adèle and Emma makes love the linen of the bed are blue.

And it is also interesting to see how blue starts to fade along with the falling apart of their relationship: as soon as problems and doubts arise, Emma has blonde hair for example, or the colour of the sea where Adèle is swimming has a washed blue colour. This happens for small but important details too: at the beginning of the film we can see a picture of New york taken in the blue hour, which means that it has a blue cast; at the Adèle and Emma's rendez-vous, towards the end of the film, we can see some pictures of New York in the bar where they meet: they are in black and white.

Also in one of the final scene Adèle wears a blue dress (loaded with symbolism) when attending Emma's exhibition, perhaps in her last attempt to reconquer her; when she leaves her blue dress will be the only coloured object in a grey and desaturated surrounding.

La Vie d'Adèle is a marvellous film in which Kechiche managed to portrait like no one before what we go trough when we love someone; its cinematography is simple but powerful, enhancing the story through tiny important details.

Film review. An analysis of the cinematography of Barry Lyndon, by Stanley Kubrick

Barry Lyndon didn't receive a big commercial success when it was released back in 1975. But now it is considered one of Kubrick's finest film. It is a film on a grand scale which abounds in meticulous technical  craftsmanship and it owes its success to Kubrick, of course, but also to cinematographer John Alcott and electronic engineer Ed DiGiulio.

The Plot. Barry Lyndon is a slightly thick, hungrily ambitious young Irishman who longs tu pull himself up by his low-born origin into the superficial and illusory world of the nobility, and he almost succeeds in doing it.

Cinematography: John Alcott

Camera: Arriflex 35BL, Mitchell BNC

Lenses: Canon K35, Zeiss  ƒ 0.7, Angenieux 25-250

Aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Format: 35mm

Film Stock: Kodak Eastman 5254 100T

John Alcott already worked with Kubrick as cinematographer in his previous works (2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange), he was actually promoted by Kubrick during the shooting of 2001; but saying that Barry Lyndon's cinematography is Alcott's job would not be right. It is instead a close collaboration between Alcott and Kubrick, who was a fine photographer himself. The result is a delicious feast for the eye, where each composition is like a painting by one of the old Master.

They actually studied and searched for lots of references in the paintings of the Dutch Masters but they seemed to them to be a bit flat so they decided to light the scenes a bit more from the side. Anyway, they went after a pictorial style with a soft and subtle rendition of light and shadows.

John Alcott used to define himself as a natural light cameraman: he managed to master light to naturally light the scene in all of the features he DP'd and, of course, Barry Lyndon is no exception; in fact it was the first historical film to be lit in a natural way: lighting in a more theatrical way was the trend at that time for that kind of features. Throughout Barry Lyndon, there's a constant feeling of natural light coming through the windows of the locations simulated by Mini-Bruts always placed outside the houses where they shot. Anyway, there are some scenes, like the one with Barry and Captain Potzodof, lit with light placed on top of their head which is no really justified nor natural.

They had to gel windows and use different ND to stop down the light and, despite the "rules", they never used a 85 filter to colour correct the light to give an overall consistent balance throughout the film and because of the low light conditions of exterior light they had to deal with sometimes: in this way they managed to keep the extra 2/3 of a stop the filter would have taken down.

Shooting exteriors was a problem because the brightness of the day changed a lot so they had to change the aperture constantly to match the brilliance (not always achieving it thou), finding themselves to shoot with full aperture: the Canon K35 T1.2 come quite helpful in several shots.

Instead of using diffusion filters, quite trendy at that time, Alcott and Kubrick decided to use Low Contrast Filter which is not really consistent throughout the entire picture but doesn't affect the overall cinematography. In the wedding sequence we notice the use of the filter combined with a brown net which gave Alcott a more control over the highlights. Another filter Alcott used unconventionally is the Graduated Neutral Density filters, making use of them for interior shots (Was he probably the first one to do so?).

Another interesting technique used by Alcott is the use of mixed coloured light during the film. In the scene of Barry's room after he has had his leg amputated, for example, a warm effect is achieved by placing 1/2 sepia gel over the light coming through the window. While, when Barry's boy is dying, the natural blue day-light comes trough the window without colour correction.

Camera movements are used in certain sequences but without making an excessive use of them, like travellings and handheld camera for the scenes of the battle. But the use of the Angenieux zoom is always preferred, zooming in to close ups from very wide shots in a voyeuristic manner, and the other way round, opening from a close up to reveal the whole scene. The zoom was used along with travelling too, like the scene of the battle, where a very long travelling is used and the zoom starts at 250mm with a close up.

But, the most interesting and probably most technically difficult scenes to shoot were definitely the candle lights scenes. The naturalism in the way of lighting reaches its extreme because no natural light was used whatsoever: the scenes are lit exclusively by candles, which was something technically impossible given the available means  of those years. But Kubrick's stubbornness and Ed DiGiulio's expertise made history. Kubrick discovered some Zeiss lenses which were designed for the Hasselblad NASA took to the expedition to the Moon and which had a maximum aperture of ƒ 0.7. DiGiulio made the necessary adjustments to fit the Mitchell camera. 

They placed candles all around the scene and used a 70 candles chandelier  with metal reflectors attached to the ceiling bouncing light down. The had lots of trouble with focus because of the very shallow depth of field and the impossibility of checking on a viewfinder due to loss of luminance, but the result is superb.

Barry Lyndon is a marvellous film, the composition of every scene is perfect and precise, one of the great and emblematic Kubrick's characteristic, and its cinematography is beautiful and innovative, and, even if more than 35 years have passed, today it keeps on being a reference for every photographer or cinematographer.