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Shooting For The Stars: Women Cinematographers
Women Cinematographers
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| I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) |
In the male-dominated world of filmmaking, women have traditionally been excluded from leadership positions. But today more and more women are forging a path in the uncharted territory of the technical side of moviemaking: namely, cinematography. It isn't uncommon now for a woman's name to be listed after the Director of Photography credit, particularly in independent films and documentaries, and there are signs that even Hollywood is opening its doors to women cinematographers. The pioneers, who broke into the film world in the 1970s and '80s, have opened the doors for young women today not only in terms of opportunity, but as role models and mentors.
"You have to be daring," says Christine Choy, Chair of the Graduate Film and Television Department at New York University. Born in the People's Republic of China, Choy came to the United States by herself at the age of 14. Trained in architecture, she entered the world of filmmaking at 22, cleaning and cataloging film for a radical organization called Newsreel. When the riots broke out at Attica prison in New York State, according to Choy, the all-white male staff felt uncomfortable going there to shoot. With just a day's training on the use of the camera, they gave her a few rolls of film and sent her and a girlfriend upstate to cover the rebellion.
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| I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) |
"He was so upset that his footage was never broadcast," says Choy, "that he gave me his film." Combining it with her own interviews and animation, Choy made her first film, Teach Our Children, which won First Prize at the 1974 International Black Film Festival. Since then she has made over 40 documentaries about social and political injustice. In 1989 she was nominated for an Oscar and won several other awards for Who Killed Vincent Chin , and this year she was awarded Best Cinematographer at Sundance for My America.
A self-taught cinematographer who learned to shoot by "making mistakes," Ellen Kuras emphasizes that women DPs have to trust their instincts, find the confidence to overcome any challenges that arise, and try not to be intimidated by men. Armed with a background in anthropology and still photographyand a Fulbright Scholarshipin 1983 Kuras set her sights on the Lodz School of Film in Poland. When she couldn't get a visa, she decided to get involved in documentary film.
"I worked as a production assistant and an associate producer. I tried to get as much experience as I could." In 1985 she decided to make her own documentary, which is still in progress, about a Laotian refugee whose father once worked for the CIA.
"I was more of a director at that point," Kuras explains. "I'd gotten someone to shoot for the first five days, and when I saw the dailies I realized that they didn't have what I was looking for. So I decided to shoot it myself."
A couple of years later, when a friend's cameraman couldn't go to Cambodia to shoot her thesis film, Kuras convinced the friend to let her shoot it. At the time, she was "very scared. I didn't know how to meter correctly, and I didn't know how to do a lot of things. But I knew that I had to trust my eye and my feeling about the situation and how to depict it." The film, Samsara, was shown at festivals around the world, and won Best Documentary Cinematography at the FOCUS Awards in 1990.
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| Swoon (1992) |
"I really had to ask myself some key questions: What is this scene about? What does Tom want to say? And how can I best show that with the camera, lighting and movement?" Besides having no experience, Kuras faced the challenge of shooting Swoon on "no money." She explains, "We had a doorway dolly, shot on regular 16mm and had only enough film for one or two takes." But again she followed her instincts, and it paid off. Kuras won the Best Feature Cinematography Award at Sundance in 1992 for Swoon. In 1995 she won the award again for Angela.
"You have to be thick-skinned, have strength and stamina," says Nancy Schreiber, only the fourth woman to be admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers. "It'll be a rough road. You have to be willing to sacrifice your personal life at the beginning and to take any job to get experience." Schreiber, who had no technical background at all when she began, says, "The last thing my mother ever thought I would become was a technician. It just wasn't a woman's thing."
While majoring in psychology, Schreiber ran a movie theater at the University of Michigan that showed foreign and underground films. That's when, she says, "I got the bug." After college she moved to New York and took a six-week crash course in filmmaking. On her first film as a production assistant, she did everything from getting props and costumes to assisting the gaffer.
"It was haphazard that I got into the electrical department. During production I was the best boy electric because there was just nobody else. I had no idea about anything. I just did it and found I had an aptitude for it."
Lured by the magic of lighting, Schreiber became a gaffer. Ten years later, she hit a brick wall when trying to get paid shooting work. "It was very hard for women in those days. The only women shooting were in news and documentaries." But Schreiber was tenacious. She made her own documentary, Possum Living, which gained critical acclaim on the festival circuit and in The New York Times. "All of a sudden," she says, "everyone thought I was a documentarian."
After shooting documentaries for three years, Schreiber realized, "People wanted to put me in a little box. I was worried that people would not hire me in other arenas if they thought I was just doing documentaries." Determined not to let anyone box her in, Schreiber began shooting music videos and student films, while doing "classier" documentaries like the Amnesty International World Tour, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Sting and other celebrities. After shooting two feature films, Schreiber got an agent and her career took off. Chain of Desire, which she shot in 1991, was nominated for an IFP Spirit Award for Best Cinematography, and she won a Primetime Emmy for Celluloid Closet in 1996. Schreiber continues to shoot features, documentaries and music videos. "I'm not a snob about just being in features," she says. "I love spending hours lighting a set, but I also like shooting from the hip. There's an excitement and energy and spontaneity that you don't get in other kinds of filmmaking." Being the DP for Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1993), was not only a great honor, says Schreiber, but also enabled her to explore the high-definition medium.
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| Cinematographer Claudia Raschke |
A romantic driven by her passion for the arts, Claudia Raschke came to New York from Germany in 1983 to become a dancer after receiving a degree in Fine Arts. The course of her life changed when a friend asked her to help him shoot a student film. "When the director said, `Action!' the entire crew, like magic, became invisible and only the actors were performing," she recalls. "That was the spark." In cinematography she had finally found a medium into which to channel all of her passions: "I have choreography with the camera movements and the actors. I have painting with the lights, and I have sculpting by creating three-dimensions on a two-dimensional plane."
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