“When I was growing up in Venice, Italy, I was mesmerized by a television series I saw about Leonardo da Vinci. Without realizing it then, I was inspired by his balance between curiosity about the technical, rational world, and his quest for higher artistic meaning. Cinematographers often have a certain sense of introspective appreciation about things that is brought out through technical means. It’s not just about where to place the light, but how it feels and why. Dramatic storytelling comes with a discipline. The art of storytelling doesn’t change when you jump to a new platform. At times, it seems like the technology is telling us the way to express ourselves as opposed to us expressing ourselves through the technology. With film, there is a light, a lens and a chemical reaction. There is something holistic about film. It creates a sense of possibility.”

Norayr Kasper, CSC studied architecture, videography and photography. He emigrated to Montreal in 1987 and studied filmmaking at Concordia University. His first narrative film was Calendar. His credits include the television projects The Last Debate, Trudeau, The Death and Life of Nancy Eaton, Last Exit, St. Urbain’s Horseman, and Race to Mars, and feature films Walk All Over Me, Two Thousand and None, The Life Before This, and Time of the Wolf. His work has earned him both CSC and Gemini Awards nominations.

A CONVERSATION WITH NORAYR KASPER, CSC

QUESTION: Tell us about your background. How did you first become interested in cinematography?
KASPER: I was raised in Venice, Italy. I’m of Armenian heritage. I studied architecture, and took up courses in photography, and videography at a time when there were Ampex one-inch videotape machines, and U-Matic was novelty. I came to Montreal 20 years ago when I was 22 years old. At first, I did lots of odd jobs, including lab work and printing, and work at a post house as an editor. My interest in video and photography slowly led to cinematography. I studied filmmaking and film production at Concordia University, and eventually I earned a BFA.

QUESTION: What important lessons did you learn at Concordia?
KASPER: At the time, the programs were very much directed towards producing and directing. What I learned more than anything was film aesthetics, film language and film history, which was exciting.

QUESTION: How did you make the transition to professional cinematographer?
KASPER: After graduation, I shot some short films and did other camera work. One day I got a call to shoot a road movie called Calendar. The director, Atom Egoyan, needed someone who understood architecture and cinematography, and luckily for me, someone who spoke Armenian. I was familiar with one of his movies that we had studied at Concordia. We went to Armenia on a very strict budget, and shot in very intimate environments during a very turbulent period in Armenia’s history. At times it felt surreal, with very little food, and no electricity to charge our batteries. We were told at one point that ours was the only camera rolling in Armenia. It was a rough, exciting time and so incredibly cathartic in every sense.

QUESTION: What was Calendar about?
KASPER: It was an experimental story. We had no script, just an idea about exploring identity and belonging based on an experience Atom had observed during a previous trip to Armenia. We had two actors, and we would go to very remote areas and film in monuments and churches. We worked our way through the story day by day, and we built it from there. We used 16mm film for the photographer’s camera point of view, and video to capture his emotional voyage. That project was very important for me. It embodied all the thoughts, all the parallel roads I had built for myself throughout my formative years – art, history, architecture, photography. It all came together and made sense. Building the story with Atom from one day to the next, under extraordinary circumstances, definitely gave me a higher understanding of story construction and made me aware of my creative response to the process. In a sense, that experience nailed it for me – cinematography was the right pursuit.

QUESTION: FHow do you devise a look for a project?
KASPER: For me, each film has been very conceptualized. I like to start from a clear slate, and let myself be taken by the script and the director’s views. At the same time, I reflect on my own interpretation and start building new ideas. I was cutting my reel together and I realized that none of my films intercut together, which is stylistically a statement on its own. There are geniuses out there – take Vittorio Storaro for example – who have been mentors, in a sense, for a lot of cinematographers like me. You can take frames or scenes from their movies, and you can cut them together without realizing that you have gone from one movie to another. With mine, I find them so different one from another. I think that’s because I try to start with a clear slate. It starts with the imagination, with the new challenge, and you let it happen. I really get excited when I feel an image projects the sense of the story, and manages to steal a word or two from the dialogue.

QUESTION: How do you decide which format is right for a particular project?
KASPER: The art of storytelling is still there and is not affected by the platform, as I like to call it. On the technical side there are challenges. You have to appreciate the technology, collaborate and understand how to manipulate it. But I don’t think that changes the artistic side in any way. The spiritual, imaginative element, how you compose, and the lighting, really stays the same. It comes from within, and which tool you use shouldn’t represent a block. At the same time, it’s very important to make the point that video doesn’t liberate anything. It’s another platform altogether. It gives you the option to keep shooting, and gives you the option to have small cameras. But those options don’t make better cinema. Dramatic storytelling comes with a discipline. There is a discipline to how you tell the story, what you do, and who represents what and which job. An architect can build a small house, but he cannot build a high-rise himself. You need your foreman, you need contractors, all the way to the bricklayer and the plumber. The filmmaker is the same. Once you are liberated, then the question is, what? Liberating is really a misconception from my point of view. Quite the opposite. You have to realize that I am certified in video engineering since 1983. So, for me that learning curve towards digital and video really happened in the 1980s. It’s nothing new. That’s why for me it doesn’t represent any kind of jump. As a cinematographer, the important thing is how you use it to express yourself. I’ve never bought into putting grain in video to make it look like film. Video is video. Why are we trying to make it look like film? There is something holistic about the use of film. There is a lens, light, a chemical reaction, and something quite holistic about this process, because the alternative is layers and layers of electronic boards, engineered and manufactured. There is something so ironic in talking about liberation when there is such a dependence on technology. At times it seems like the technology is telling us how to express ourselves as opposed to us expressing ourselves through that technology. That’s happening more and more. There has been a lot of prophetic nonsense about video versus film since the 1980s. I find it sad that so many choose to act as salesmen instead of acting as artists.

QUESTION: TIs there a project that illustrates your approach to cinematography?
KASPER: I’ve shot a few projects that have been very helpful to me, allowing me to be expressive and free, and to bring my own contribution. Race to Mars was an interesting example. It happens in 2030, with astronauts spending two years in a spaceship. To me, the spaceship was like an aquarium. The electronic screens are their sun, and their way of knowing that they are alive and whether they will make it. They are dependent on this aquarium, so I decided to light almost the entire project using only LED lights. It was difficult because these lights aren’t production-friendly, and I had to mix RGB color values for every shot. It took a lot of work to make them consistent from one shot to another. But it was an interesting challenge to experiment with a concept and stick with it.

QUESTION:Where do you find inspiration?
KASPER: As early as I can remember, my parents took us traveling. We must have seen half the world. My father wanted us to see different things, and there was always a still or Super 8 camera along. The fascination with capturing faces and environments has been my constant companion since I was a child. I don’t think it was done consciously. Sometimes it just seemed fun. One of the closest friends of my family was named Benig. He took black-and-white portraits and colored them by hand with watercolors. I spent hours with him, and he taught me about a lot of things. I heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time in his studio. He was instrumental in giving me a basic understanding of image manipulation. Of course art history and architecture gave me, and continue to give, a lot of worldly knowledge and sensibilities. For example, in the TV movie The Death and Life of Nancy Eaton, I studied some paintings done by psychopaths and mentally handicapped patients to find inspiration for color and composition.

QUESTION: Has growing up in Venice had an impact on your work?
KASPER: I refer to Venice as my first wife, my muse, and my sanctuary. The city and its architecture inspire me enormously. I still spend some time there every year. When I was a child growing up in Venice, I was mesmerized by a television series I saw about Leonardo da Vinci. Without realizing it then, I was inspired by his balance between curiosity about the technical, rational world, and his quest for higher artistic meaning. It was such an inspiration. I think he must have been my first unofficial idol. In Leonardo’s works, there is stuff that you have to be rational about. There is imaginative rationality, just as much as there is craftsmanship. There is also the quest for expressiveness. I think it’s a combination of two things: the technical world, and the imaginative and spiritual world, which comes from within. Cinematographers are not in the limelight. They are not acting, producing or directing, but cinematographers often have a certain sense of introspective appreciation about things that is brought out through technical means. It’s not just about where to place the light, but how it feels and why. We share a sense of being impressed by the environment, and this sense of introspection, and the need to somehow bring that out and express it through technical means, using the sort of rationality that cinematography demands. This is why I love cinematography, it allows me build a bridge between content and form.

QUESTION:Have improvements in technology like digital post, faster films, smaller cameras, and better lenses changed your approach?
KASPER: They have, but it can go both ways. The tools have brought new freedom, but that freedom is sometimes translated into less time. Sometimes I am asked to shoot a feature in 18 days. There is something so cruel about asking cinematographers to do things like that, especially when directors and producers are expecting a $50 million look. You see the constraints and try to make that speed and roughness fit into a visual concept. But improved technology must come along with an improvement in our understanding of how to use it. If you gave me a 1,000-speed film tomorrow, it would take me a while to understand it, like a painter with a new brush. Ideally, the technology creates a certain sense of freedom for me to experiment, and then to use it or push it for my concept. For one project, I pushed a 500-speed film two stops with a full bleach bypass on the negative because that’s the effect I wanted. It’s amazing what you can do, but first you have to experiment. I’ve spent over 25 years learning composition and lighting, and yet little of this knowledge is used when I hear on the set, ‘Don’t worry, keep shooting and we’ll fix it in post.’ And even then, you realize that they often speed through the post without consulting the cinematographer. Somehow, I find cinematographers lost as to what to make of those improvements. Imagine millions of people downloading highly compressed features that may never make it to theater screens. What’s worse is that they will watch it on their portable gadgets on the subway to work.

QUESTION: How has the artistic aspect changed?
KASPER: The impoverishment of the art of cinematography is a sad reality. Some call it a change, but when you see young cinematographers who do not understand the concept of composition, it is like a painter who splashes color on canvas and can’t draw a hand if called for. Institutions have to work harder to form and preserve the art of cinematography, not only through technical expertise, but also by enriching future artists with worldly knowledge and artistic culture.

QUESTION: Is there another example from your body of work?
KASPER: I remember shooting a film for CTV called Last Exit. It was about two mothers in traffic who have road rage. One of them ends up killing the other one. That was the basic drama, but there was also an incredible statement about hectic and modern urban life. One is a single mother barely making ends meet. One is a mother of two from a middle class family. Every day they are fighting through traffic, hours of tension and stress, just trying to make it, and it affects their lives and their health. Some of that was written in the story. For me that was the clue for where to take the visuals. That brought me to a detached visual language that I used, including 45-degree shutter angles, and high-speed films pushed one stop. I was pushing 16 mm to 1,000 ASA sometimes. In a story there is always more than just two people talking to each other. I cringe when people say, ‘It’s only TV, or a TV drama about two people talking.’ To me, they are throwing out entire layers of meaning that could hold people’s attention. We are trying to say something more — more than just two faces talking to each other about the same old story. Cinematography illuminates the thought behind the word, and elevates the meaning into form. I think a good film should have a sensible balance between both content and form. Otherwise, it’s either too much photography, or too much radio.

   
NORAYR KASPER, CSC