Katarzyna Taras
Alchemy. About the Art of Cinematography
Coincidence has to be earned - the phenomenon of Vadim Yusov
"Coincidence has to be earned" - this is what Vadim Yusov teaches in the Gerasimov Insitute of Cinematography, where he has been giving lectures since 1971, and where he has been in charge of the faculty of the art of cinematography since 1982. I start my article on Yusov with what he was like as a teacher - each person I talked to about him pointed this out. Supposedly, some students wait for a couple of years in order to be able to attend his course. As you can see, not only has Vadim Yusov mastered the craftsmanship of cinematography, but also is a master par excellence.

Vadim Yusov, courtesy of Vadim Yusov archives
Yusov teaches his younger colleagues not only about what and how to light things up, or how to compose a film frame, he also inculcates in them the respect for equipment and sensitizes them to thinking about the security of a whole crew. He also teaches them the disdain for sloppiness. And often suggests to look for inspiration in great painters' works of art. He indicates the meaning of a film portrait, of which he is a master, both when it comes to a beautiful woman - The Black Monk by Ivan Dykhovichnyy (Golden Osella at the Venice Film Festival in 1988), and to a child - The Steamroller and the Violin by Andrei Tarkovsky (their first film together, for which they immediately received New York Film Festival award), or Ivan's Childhood also by Tarkovsky (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962). Among all films made by Yusov and Tarkovsky, I like the last mentioned one best. Maybe due to the fact that there is so much of Ivan Karamazov's cogitation about children's suffering? Maybe because from the very first shot the boy-scout is presented as a martyr, whom neither small nor big sacrifice will prove purposeful. Maybe because Tarkovsky and Yusov showed the times of the reign of death in a way it was shot only once in the Polish cinema - by Has and Jahoda in The Codes. I do have a problem with Andrei Rublev (1966), though. On the one hand, I am terrified with cruelty, so often present on the screen, although it is difficult to tell about the history of a nation without touching upon the issue of violence; on the other hand, I am defenseless against the Bruegel-inspired sequence “Crucifixion".

Still from "Solaris"
I do not know whether we can talk about Vadim Yusov's school of cinematography? Nevertheless, this cooperator of directors of such diverse sensitivities and temperaments as Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Bondarchuk, already has taught some recognized and titled students - among many others we can name Sergei Machilsky, Yuri Nevsky, Vladislav Opelyants (the cinematographer of Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus), Ilya Diomin (the co-creator of 1612 and 72 metres) and Roman Vasyanov (the cinematographer of nostalgic Hipsters). Another student of Vadim Yusov was Hanna Polak, a Polish documentary filmmaker, nominated together with Andrzej Celinski to the Academy Award in 2005 for The Children of Lenigradsky.

Vadim Yusov was born on the 20th of April, 1929, in the village of Klavdino in Leningrad Oblast. His family moved to Moscow in 1941. The father of the future co-creator of Solaris took part in the Continuation War, and then in the Great Patriotic War. He was an expert on forestry and enjoyed taking photos. Yusov Senior bestows special meaning upon the photography in which several-year-old Vadim Ivanovych is holding a part of his father's camera - a focusing screen. He passed the exams to the Gerasimov Insitute of Cinematography after his third attempt. He decided to become a cinematographer after having met in the Technical Institute of Aviation (where he studied) with Roman Karmen, a distinguished Soviet documentary filmmaker, who shot, among others, the Spanish Civil War. Allegedly, Eduard Tisse, the legendary co-worker of equally legendary Einstein, defined Yusov's first works as “refined photography".

Still from "Ivan's Childhood"
What distinguishes Vadim Yusov's cinematography? I have already written about the attention he pays to a portrait, which is related to the focus put on a character.

Thus, what has remained? Nobody can manipulate with stains on images the way he does, which talent we can admire in The Black Monk. In this film the character's mental dysfunction (or only hypersensitivity) was suggested with light reflections on the water surface or in the mirrors. And in Walking the Streets of Moscow (1963) by Georgiy Daneliya, where even the wet asphalt expresses vitality filling the main character played by Nikita Mikhalkov. The asphalt photographed by Yusov in a way completely different from what we know from the film noir genre.

He was able to extract so many nuances and meanings from black, white and grey like no other cinematographer before him (and so far nobody after him either). It is Yusov's cinematography which renders Daneliya's comedy a story about joie de vivre (in Moscow in the 60s). Whomever does not believe, may try to recall “the rain sequence" matching in sensuality Anita Ekberg's bath in the fountain di Trevi - and this is only a girl's stroll in the rain. And not Fellini but Daneliya. Yusov cannot be named “a painter" of a city, though - why it is him who created “the birch dance" sequence in Ivan's Childhood, the scene which went down in the history of the cinema and constitutes a landmark of this masterpiece.

Still from "Andrei Rublev"
If I were to describe Yusov's cinematography in the shortest possible way, I would say they are painting-like. That is, whenever I am “haunted" by them, at first I seem to recall a work of some great painter. Then it turns out I was thinking about a film with Vadim Yusov's cinematography.