Katarzyna Taras
Alchemy. About the Art of Cinematography
This what remains
There is no need to convince anybody that cinematographer's profession involves broadly understood responsibility. Responsibility for everything to be properly visible. Biological responsibility for a viewer - as far as filming in 3D is concerned, since wall-eye or migraine attack are definitely unpleasant. One more type of responsibility has to be taken into account in a documentary - the one for a hero. For it is the cinematographer, or to be more precise - a cameraman, who first sees the character's reactions, and moreover, one has to remember that most often there is a true story and a real person behind a documentary. Therefore, it is a cameraman who comes the closest to one's tragedy or great happiness. And it is his mediation through which the director enters one's private space. (It is not surprising that the direct cinema, whose creators desired to be as close to their characters as possible, were called - as was mentioned before - the cinematographers' cinema.) When we deal with the staging of what has already passed or with setting the reality “in motion", the cameraman is the first person who can notice falsity, emptiness and trashy glamour. The master in protecting his characters was Krzysztof Kieślowski, mastery in respecting them was also achieved by his cinematographers, above all by Jacek Petrycki, the author of images to “First Love" (1974), in which the standards of telling about the most important things were marked out.

I remember one of the conversations with my students during the festival of documentaries in Cracow, somebody then made a point that it is getting more and more difficult to differentiate between a documentary and a television coverage, because both more and more often raise equally extreme topics. It seems to me that the factor which distinguishes a film from a coverage is, of course among other things, the care for visual quality. Maybe it's like with a newspaper's note and a short story based on it? It is difficult to speak of a note's style, yet to speak of the poetics of a short story - it is most certainly appropriate.

Krzysztof Kieślowski
And this what most probably remains in us after watching a documentary, is precisely the memory of the image. Thus, how is it possible not to appreciate images in a documentary, how to ignore the cinematographer in the process of its creation? And it should not be surprising that during the festival of the art of cinematography Plus Camerimage two documentaries competitions take place, and I have to admit I met such doubts.

When I think about documentaries, certain images “pop" in my head. When I think about “Kieślowski", I see - mentioned two articles before - the shot of Jadźka who had just given birth to a daughter; and the composition of the image is disturbed by ... a microphone, because the executers didn't care about the beauty of the picture - capturing the first glance at the child was more important. I also see a hammer cracking during an operation - like in “Hospital" (1977, cinematography - J. Petrycki), the story about surgeons, who are the modern heroes - as the director planned it. Or the faces of characters from “Talking Heads" (1980, cinematography - J. Petrycki), although in this case I also recollect their uttered dreams, such as the wish to become a car called “Syrenka".

If uttered, then we deal with sound. The authors of documentaries like to clash vision with sound. In order to counterpoint the first one with the second, both - the vision and the sound have to be perfect. As it is, for example, in Wojciech Wiszniewski's “The Carpenter" (1977, cinematography - R. Jaworski). The film ceased to be an ordinary story of a Warsaw craftsman the moment we recognized Jan Himilsbach's voice. Or in Andrzej Czarnecki's “The Rat-Catcher" (1986, cinematography - P. Sobociński, M. Isajewicz, M. Herba), in which the combination of the voice-over monologue with the images of rat eradication results in creating the story about totalitarianism.

Still from "Fotoamator"
But let's return to what remains after watching a documentary, to post-images. If I were to make a rating of my post-images, and most certainly I have a right to do it, because I don't write a note to encyclopaedia, it would be composed of shots from various realizations, all having in common the fact that their authors succeeded in creating a perfect metaphor of their times, and in saying something more than the title had foreshadowed. And, of course, it is difficult to forget these films. Like, for example, “Day after Day" directed by Irena Kamieńska (1988, cinematography - K. Pakulski), in which the tired faces of busy female characters reveal more about a woman's status in the previous system than the thickest sociological theses. Or “Fotoamator" by Dariusz Jabłoński (1998, cinematography - T. Michałowski and M. Jeziorowski) with “bloodstained" and at the same time vivid pictures from a ghetto in Łódź. It is sometimes said that “stones talk", in this case these were Walter Genewein's slides which talked. And maybe “Birth Place" by Paweł Łoziński (1992), the recording of extraordinary archeology - searching the truth about father's death. While watching “Venice" by Kolski I had the same impression of participating in excavating the world that had passed, and then it turned out that the author of images for both films is Artur Reinhart. Finally, a film mentioned by me so many times not only in this column - “Declaration of Immortality" by Marcin Koszałka (2010, cinematography - M. Koszałka, B. Dziworski and T. Augustynek). The production which restored vision in a documentary, and which is not only a film portrait of charismatic Piotr Korczak “the Crazy", but a story about this magical moment when craft, and even the simplest technical activities, like arranging climbing routes, preparing the walls or ... setting the light, become art. And about not reconciling with people's fragility and mortality.

Still from "Declaration of Immortality"
“Pina" by Wim Wenders (2011, cinematography - Helen Louvart) is also a documentary.