Haskell
Wexler, ASC, Focuses on Ask most people about Matewan, and they'll say it's a period film about labor strife in a West Virginia coal mining town. The period is 1920. Ask Haskell Wexler, ASC, and he says Matewan is a story about people in difficult times trying to live their lives with some semblance of dignity. Wexler spent eight weeks in Mt. Hope, Virginia shooting Matewan, a John Sayles production, made by Red Dog Films. The film was made on a lean $4 million budget. Wexler's sensitive imagery transports the audience to the town of Matewan, where three different constituencies of miners are set against each other by a worried management determined to break a strike. You experience the blackness -- the almost total absence of light -- in a coal mine. You are there when the desperate miners meet in secret in a hidden room lit solely by flickering kerosene lamps. You are in the middle of the scuffle when a fight breaks out in the quickening darkness of a exterior threatened by a fast-rising storm. Wexler's peers have nominated him for his work on Matewan for the 1987 ASC Outstanding Achievement Award for a feature length motion picture, for an Oscar, and for the Independent Spirit Award given by the Feature Film Project West. If there is a triple crown in cinematography, this is it. Part of the Matewan look comes from Wexler's visual memory. There was a time when he worked as a coal miner. However, most of his life, Wexler has been a filmmaker. He came out of the merchant marines as an officer at the end of the second world war, and set up a Chicago-based film production company. He shot commercials, industrial films and documentaries. His early features during the 1950s included Hoodlum Priest, Angel Baby, America, America and Face in the Rain. He won an Oscar in 1966 for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and another in 1976 for Bound for Glory. There was also an Oscar nomination for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Other notable features include Coming Home and In the Heat of the Night. Wexler has always had a soft spot in his heart for independent features. In 1968, he directed and shot Medium Cool, a reality film set against the background of the riotous Democratic party convention in Chicago. Several years ago, he produced and directed Latino. On the Matewan look: Usually, you think of period films as having a soft, pastel look. They are almost black and white with lots of diffusion. "That's because our visual memory of periods comes from old photographs," Wexler said. "We designed a clean, crisp look with realistic depth-of-field." Colors saturation was toned down. It was a dirty and dingy mining town. Buildings were painted neutral and dark tones, and they looked shabby and aging. There were only splashes of brighter colors mainly in the wardrobe and props in the Italian immigrant-miners' homes. Wexler shot some 90 percent of Matewan on Eastman color high-speed daylight film 5297, including interiors and exteriors, day and night. That was only shortly after the film was introduced. A handful of cinematographers had used it in specific daylight or mixed light situations. Wexler was the first to use the daylight film as his principal emulsion. Kodak recommends use of this emulsion at an exposure index of 250. After testing, Wexler decided to base his exposures on an E.I. of 200 in real and artificial daylight, and in mixed light. This gave him a couple of stops latitude which gave him crisp depth and saved time and money in various low-key situations. For example, there's an exterior involving a crowd of 20 to 30 people. A fight breaks out. Wexler was losing his daylight as dark storm clouds moved in. Sayles wanted the camera in the middle of the crowed, with everyone and everything is sharp focus. There were people three to four feet away from the camera. Others were 20 feet away. However, Wexler was able to pull a deep focus at stop T-11. In general, the design called for a soft look. "I looked for softlight, avoided front light, and shot in side or backlight whenever and wherever I could," he said. But mainly, he innovated. For example, a railroad track that ran through the center of town was used for long dolly shoots. Wexler had the grips improvise a dolly which ran on the railroad tracks. Why Matewan? "A movie can make an indelible impression on the
people who see it," he said. "I thought Matewan was
a story worth telling." |
