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The
Story of Bank Ban: You know that ancient homily, “You can’t go home again.” Don’t believe it. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC proved that when he filmed Bánk Bán. It was the first film he has shot in his native Hungary since leaving the country as a political refugee in 1956. Zsigmond explains that Bánk Bán captures the essence of the national spirit. The film faithfully replicates an opera composed by Ferenc Erkel some 150 years ago when Hungary was under the heels of the Hapsburg empire. Erkel couldn’t challenge the autocratic rulers, so he composed an operatic allegory that takes place in 1213. The title translates to Bánk, the king’s viceroy. The story is staged in Visegrad, a medieval city where the Hungarian royalty lives. King Andrew II is away fighting a war. His wife is Gertrude, queen of Meran, which is kind of a medieval metaphor for the Hapsburg empire. Some Hungarians in the court are planning a rebellion. The story takes a dramatic twist. While the viceroy is on a mission away from the castle, Gertrude helps her brother Otto seduce Melinda, Bánk Bán’s wife, by slipping a love potion into her drink. Bánk is urgently called back to the castle by the conspirators. When they tell him about the misery caused by the Meranians, he agrees to join the rebellion. Bánk sends his family to a fortress near the Tisza River where they will be safe. Then, he bursts into the queen’s quarters and confronts her. Gertrude attacks him with the sharp end of a cross, but Bánk kills her during the struggle. The king returns from the war and discovers that Gertrude has been killed. When Bánk Bán confesses, Andrew draws his sword intent on revenge. Before he can strike, coffins containing Bánk Bán’s wife and child are carried into the castle. The distraught Melinda had drowned herself and the child. The opera concludes with a solemn requiem. “Csaba Káel (the director) had dreamed about making this opera into a film for years” Zsigmond says. “Csaba graduated from the national film school in Budapest like I did. He is one of Hungary’s most successful commercial directors, and has also directed operas on stages and several films. He was my A.D. when I directed The Long Shadow in Hungary. I was very happy when he asked me to work with him on Bánk Bán.” It wasn’t the first time Zsigmond has been asked to shoot a film in his native land. He was slated to shoot a ballet film in 1978, but that discussion ended after the Russian, Hungarian and other Eastern European delegations stalked out the Berlin Film Festival when The Deer Hunter was shown because they thought it was anti-communist. Káel told Zsigmond about his plans for Bánk Bán about five months before they began shooting, but the project didn’t become a reality until the Hungarian government decided to provide funding as part of a national millennium celebration. They watched a number of opera films together, including Othello and La Traviata. Zsigmond says that an important part of their inspiration came from watching those films. They agreed that Bánk Bán should be filmed mainly at practical locations, including medieval cathedrals and chapels. After funding was secured, Zsigmond had about a week to scout locations and discuss visual strategy with Káel before he had to return to the United States to satisfy another commitment. When Zsigmond flew back to Hungary approximately a month later, he and Káel had just four additional days in preproduction before they began a grueling six-week shooting schedule. That was sparse time for the ambitious schedule that offered very little flexibility. Production was planned and revolved around the schedules of the cast, which consisted of professional opera singers. There wasn’t time for formal rehearsals. “Everything was storyboarded,” he says. “Csaba is very good at pre-visualizing and had a picture in his mind of every set, and exactly when, where and how each performer should be moving. We spoke about what we were going to do based on the drawings. We didn't give the singers much freedom. They had to hit their marks, but they are all stage performers, so it came naturally to them. There was one older singer who complained, until I told him that if he didn’t hit those marks, he would be in darkness, and no one would see him. After that, I noticed that he learned to look for his lighting.” Most of Bánk Bán was filmed at practical locations some 100 to 200 miles east and west of Budapest. The rest was filmed in and around Budapest. The only set was the queen’s bedroom, which was built on a stage in a Budapest warehouse. “We were supposed to shoot those scenes at a museum in Budapest, but it was booked for a wedding on the day the singers were available,” Zsigmond says. “We had a wonderful production designer (Attila Cslkos), who designs sets for the opera in Hungary as well as for movies,” he adds. “The costume designer (Rita Velich) also did an incredible job. Our research mainly consisted of looking at paintings at museums. We used muted colors on sets and in costumes, including earth tones, browns, beiges and rusts, and a little orange and blue for the oppressors who could afford richer clothing.” Zsigmond notes that the film version of Bánk Bán is far more subjective than stage performances of the opera, because the camera can draw the audience deeper into the story in more visceral ways with movement, angles, framing and choice of lenses. “Csaba is very collaborative,” he says. “He asked for my opinion about everything having to do with the visuals and accepted most of my advice.” They came to a quick and obvious decision to frame Bánk Bán in Academy aperture 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Zsigmond explains that the cathedrals and other settings are predominantly vertical, and he and Káel anticipated much more up and down than horizontal camera movement. Zsigmond framed the images in 16:9 format anticipating that many people will see Bánk Bán on television screens and in DVD format. Zsigmond and Káel also agreed that camera movement should be fluidly choreographed with the music. The music was prerecorded because the production couldn’t afford to carry an orchestra for six weeks. That provided a challenge for the performers who had to match their actions to the music and sing to their own voices in playback. One location was an 800-year-old cathedral in Ják about 10 miles from the Austrian border near Vienna. The third act of the opera was staged at this site. It was a relatively dark place, where light only came through windows, from candles and torches. They paid attention to the subtle differences in all of those sources. “Candles don’t flicker as much as torches,” Zsigmond says. “We used flicker generators, and sometimes we did it the old-fashioned way by passing our hands or a stick in front of the light.” The crew wasn’t permitted to rig lights on the ceilings or walls of the medieval buildings. Usually they hid lights behind pillars and in other niches. Occasionally, they were in places, and shooting from angles, where it was possible to put a wooden beam between two pillars, and hang lamps on those for cross and backlight. Zsigmond estimates that he was shooting with two cameras on dollies some 95 percent of the time. Often, they were side-by-side with one camera covering a master shot and the other one in tighter. There are many hidden zooms, which enabled him to adjust the sizes of images as the cameras moved through scenes. Occasionally, Zsigmond had a camera on a Giraffe crane, which climbed up to 21 feet in the air, providing a high angle, graphic perspective of cathedral interiors. Zsigmond assigns a generous share of credit to his gaffer, Bela “Richy” Romwalter. He met Romwalter when they collaborated on Stalin, and subsequently became partners in Sparks, a Budapest-based camera and lighting rental company. “Richy assembled a brilliant lighting and grip crew and he helped me find operators, assistants and a loader,” Zsigmond says. “I couldn’t have done it without him.” Zsigmond notes that Bánk Bán is a very dark story with a matching environment. Most of the action takes place at night or in dimly lit places, with illumination provided by torches, candles, campfires and the moon. He made significant use of available light, which was augmented in nuanced ways to create an un-lit look. Zsigmond mainly used the 500-speed Kodak Vision Expression film (5284) for night and also for some dimmer daylight scenes because he felt the somewhat less contrasty images it rendered were appropriate. He says this relatively new negative also requires less fill light for revealing details in shadowy areas, which are ample in this film. Most of the few exterior scenes were recorded on Kodak Vision 5246 film, which is balanced for an exposure index of 250 in daylight. Zsigmond notes that enabled him to shoot with one film from dawn to dusk with no color correction filters on the lenses. The negative was processed at Hungarian Film Laboratories. The lab provided film dailies of one take from every master shot. Most of the gear he needed was available in Budapest. Sparks provided electrical and grip equipment, and CAM-35 delivered the camera package, including ARRI 535B and ARRI 435 ES bodies with ARRI variable focus zooms and a complete range of wide to long prime lenses. Zsigmond also occasionally used an ARRI III camera for second unit. Zsigmond used a subtle slow-motion shot to depict a flashback memory of a happy time for Bánk and Melinda. They are riding horses and her hair is flowing in the wind. Káel wanted a dream-like quality for that sequence. When we asked Zsigmond about the frame rate for stretching time in that shot, he said there is no textbook answer. “I think it was 60 frames per second, but it might have been 48,” he says. “It’s something you feel and learn from experience. If it was a shot for a commercial and we really wanted to exaggerate. It might have been 120 frames a second.” Zsigmond also describes a seminal scene filmed with the actress playing Melinda as she walks along the edge of the river singing a melancholy song. Three 12K HMIs high on a construction crane provided the illusion of moonlight. Zsigmond also had four or five smaller HMIs on stands in the river bouncing shimmering light from the surface of the river to Melinda. “It looked like reflections of moonlight,” he says, “I got that idea at the last possible moment, and asked Richy if we could do it.” Machine-made wind and flashes of lightning, created with a Lightning Strikes device, imply a menacing storm. Lightning seems to hit a dead tree that catches fire and falls into the river. The foreboding images speak as loudly as the most eloquent words. Zsigmond and Káel mainly relied on production design, costumes and the story to create a medieval aura. Zsigmond added a small painterly touch by using Tiffen number one, and occasionally number two fog filters on camera lenses to create a slight halo effect. He explains that look is associated with older lenses, which aren’t quite as sharp or clean as today’s glass. It’s another subtle way of talking to the audience. Zsigmond believes that filmgoers know how to read and interpret those visual clues if only on a subliminal level. When we ask him to describe the look crafted for Bánk Bán, he replies with the passion of a gourmet cook talking about a favorite recipe. “The audience knows it’s an opera and the idea that singers are telling a story is a bit abstract,” he says. “We complimented that feeling by mixing warmer and cooler light. The candlelight and the firelight are a little warmer than reality. We used warm gels to bring the color temperature of the lamps down to 2700 or 2800 degrees Kelvin. The moonlight is a little colder and bluer. We also took some liberties with colors that are a little more saturated. It’s a slightly theatrical or romantic form of exaggerated reality.” One of the problems with giving your heart and soul to a film like Bánk Bán is that chances are only a relatively small audience will see it on a big screen. Zsigmond speculates that only two to three percent of the population is opera fans, and this one is sung in Hungarian. How many people in the world speak Hungarian? He believes that shouldn’t matter because the music is beautiful and the story is universal. Zsigmond points out that the DVD will carry the story of Bánk Bán around the world, and people everywhere will discover it for many years into the future. There is a moral to this story. Zsigmond recalls that when he was a student at the Academy for Theatre and Film Art in Budapest, the faculty taught him and other students a great truth: “They taught us that a movie is only art if it has something important to say. It should be more than entertainment. It should have social value.” Bánk Bán is both entertaining and relevant. The musical message crafted by Ferenc Erkel some 150 years ago has stood the test of time. |
