The blockbuster movie “Saving Private Ryan” from 1998 featuring Tom Hanks uses a puposely broken film camera for a reason.
The background
In order to prepare to shoot the D-day sequence in Saving Private Ryan (1998), the director Steven Spielberg and cameraman Janusz Kamiński set out to research one of the greatest accidents in photographic history.
They researched the look of newsreel footage from the era.
The look seemed grainy, bleached, high-contrasty and they extensively looked at the last 8 remaining frames from the photographer Robert Capa.
Robert Capa was a Hungarian born photojournalist, a pretty good one.
His photographs still capture the fascination and the severity of the “moment”.
He was the one to document the heroic acts and the historic invasion on D-Day in the Normandy. He was well known for his war photography.
Robert Capa landed on Omaha Beach with the first wave of assault troops at 0630 on the morning of June 6, 1944 (D-Day), on freelance assignment from LIFE magazine.
But an excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives had used on too much heat causing the film emulsion to melt before his eyes, running down the hanging strips before he could do anything. Out of the one hundred and six images Capa had taken only eight survived.
The faulty drying too had somehow added a special quality to the photographs, one that lifts them out of that specific time and place, making them universal images of war.
Some say this all is a myth, soe say his hands were shaking and others thik it was the saltwater or the exposuter of the image overlapping the sprocket holes in his Contax II camera and the used Kodak 35mm film cassettes.
In Saving Private Ryan light leaks were used to simulate the “running” emulsion from the negatives of Robert Capa.
In an article from the American Cinematographers Magazine (August 1998) Kaminski explains:
“I also used another technique that Doug Milsome [BSC] [btw: he was an operator on the movie Barry Lyndon] utilized on Full Metal Jacket [see AC Sept.1987] where you throw the camera’s shutter out of sync to create a streaking effect from the top to the bottom of the frame. It’s a very interesting effect, but it’s also scary because there’s no way back [once you shoot with it]. It looked great when there were highlights on the soldier’s helmets or epaulets because they streaked just a little bit. The amount of streaking depended on the lighting contrast. If it was really sunny, for instance, the streaking became too much. However, if it was overcast with some little highlights, it looked really beautiful. The streaking also looks fantastic with fire, and that’s what Milsome primarily used it for in Full Metal Jacket.“
Kaminski employed Panavision Platinum and Panastar cameras throughout the Private Ryan shoot, and had Samuelson Film Services in London prepare one unit with a purposely mistimed shutter in order to create the described streaking effect.
Kamiński also had the protective coating stripped from the camera lenses, making them closer to those used in the 1940s. The cinematographer completed the overall effect by putting the negative through bleach bypass in the Film Lab, a process that reduces brightness and color saturation. Kaminski shot Private Ryan in the 1.85:1 format entirely with Eastman Kodak EXR 5293 stock, which he pushed one stop to a 400 ASA rating. He also utilized a ½ Coral filter in place of normal 85 correction to lend a slight bluish tint to the imagery.
“Additionally, I again used a Panaflasher in conjunction with the ENR process, as I had on Amistad. Because of the contrast that you get with the ENR, I was flashing at about 15 percent so that I didn’t get totally sharp blacks. I was looking for a slightly flatter look. The Panaflasher also contributed greatly to the color being more desaturated. You gain the contrast back with the ENR, but you’ve desaturated the color already with the Panatlasher.“, he explains further.
ENR is a silver retention process. Silver retention is also called bleach bypass process is a chemical effect which fully or partially skips of the bleaching bath during the process of developing a color film. By skipping the bleach, silver is retained and most of the color dyes also are retained within the film.
One of the most popular of the silver-retention processes is ENR, which was named for its inventor, Ernesto Novelli Rimo, a former control department operator at Technicolor Rome who designed the technique for Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC to use on Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds. ENR is a proprietary color-positive developing technique which utilizes an additional black-and-white developing bath inserted at an appropriate stage of a print’s processing in order to retain silver. After the film has been bleached, but prior to the silver being fixed out of the film, this extra bath allows for a controlled amount of silver to be redeveloped, adding density in the areas with the most exposure — primarily the blacks. By retaining silver density in the image, the contrast is increased by making the blacks blacker, and, because of increased contrast in the shadows, more detail is visible. The images appear slightly sharper because of the increased contrast and, because there is physically silver in the film, a certain edge-effect around the image exists.And because there is silver in the print, slightly deaaturated colors are the result, depending upon the level of ENR used.
More to come.