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Gordon Willis moves in; Tattoo is skin deep
BY GERALD PEARY
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A Brattle tribute this past spring brought the news that Gordon Willis, the most influential cinematographer during Hollywood’s adventurous 1970s, had moved to Cape Cod. Last month, the Woods Hole Film Festival celebrated Willis’s new Cape residence with a 35mm screening of Manhattan (1979), at which he talked about his friendly collaboration with Woody Allen, for whom he shot eight comedies, including Annie Hall, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose. The Woods Hole Fest managed a coup this year, as Willis also spent a day leading a six-hour seminar. He showed clips from films for which he was the director of photography — from the three Godfathers to 1997’s The Devil’s Own — and he gave pointers about filmmaking and free-associated about his career. His earliest DP work for various emerging directors includes future cult items: End of the Road (1970), Loving (1970), The Landlord (1970), Bad Company (1972). It’s Willis’s visual stamp that gives The Godfather movies their luster: the golden glow of the Italian scenes, the underlit underworld of Don Corleone. Nobody has illuminated better the paranoia of the American city than his striking trilogy for Alan J. Pakula, Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976). Willis has been called "the prince of darkness" by fellow cinematographer the late Conrad Hall for his underexposed expressionism: the shadows hiding Brando’s eyes in The Godfather, the blackness enveloping Allen and Diane Keaton when they meet at Manhattan’s planetarium. Credit him also with the gloriously gloomy ambiance of Pennies from Heaven (1981). From his seminar: "I’m a minimalist. I see things in simple ways. But people take a simple idea and tie it into knots, thinking, ‘It’s not complicated enough.’ It’s human nature to define complexity as better. Well, it’s not." "It’s hard to believe, but a lot of directors have no visual sense. They only have a storytelling sense. If a director is smart, he’ll give me the elbow room to paint. It’s okay for directors to change their mind. The cinematographer can’t. You have to keep the balance. It’s the judgment they’re paying for." "I never allow editors on the set. Never. What they see is what they get. If the material doesn’t work, 50 cuts won’t help." "I don’t really like directing. I’ve had a good relationship with actors, but I can do what I do and back off. I don’t want that much romancing. I don’t want them to call me up at two in the morning saying, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ " I go to the Woods Hole Fest each year because of its mandate from director Judy Laster to showcase Boston-area and Cape independent filmmakers. Among the local works I caught: Doug Cabot’s The Men Who Would Be Viking, an invigorating, bemused documentary showing an amateur crew re-creating Leif Eriksson’s Greenland-to-America boat run; C. Phred Churchill’s Iceballs, a very funny but thinly stretched work-in-progress (go shorter, not longer!) about a true-life, sci-fi phenomenon across the globe, chunks of ice catapulting from space; John Stimpson’s The Winter People, a gorgeously shot Cape-set ghost story; and Shandor Garrison’s Freebox, a poignant dramatic short about the friendship between an unlucky blue-collar guy and a Hispanic youth plagued by the AIDS virus. It’s hard to imagine having a better time than chortling through Fran Solomita’s dandy, nostalgic When Stand-Up Stood Out, an ode to Boston comedy’s legendary late 1970s, when walking hilarities like Lenny Clarke, Bobcat Goldthwait, Barry Crimmins, and Steven Wright prowled the mini-stage at Inman Square’s Ding Ho Comedy Club/Chinese Restaurant. The Best Actor Award at Woods Hole? I give it to Petra Wright, the star of ex-Bostonian Chip Hourihan’s Glissando, in which she plays a broken-dreams, lost-highways, vulnerable young woman. Finally, my Woods Hole discovery: Matthew I. Rasmussen’s Marboxian, a mini-masterpiece of animation done via Photoshop on a Macintosh by its Brookline filmmaker. A creature from the far planet of Marbox lands in the wrong universe and, E.T. fashion, struggles to go home. The graphics are amazingly inventive, and Hollywood should come courting: Rasmussen could be the best designer of title sequences since Saul Bass. ROBERT SCHWENTKE’S TATTOO, at the Brattle this weekend, August 15 through 17, is a German cop serial-killer thriller annoyingly derivative of the recent American neo-noir David Fincher school. As Gordon Willis complained, "Now people are always in the dark." The only unusual element is the tattoos that are for sale, skin attached, via the Web.
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