GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHY
Capturing explosive cinematography
CINEMATOGRAPHY WINNER
CHERNOBYL SKY ATLANTIC/HBO Sister Pictures, The Mighty Mint, Word Games
Cinematographer Jakob Ihre eschewed a contrived ‘stylised’ look for Chernobyl, instead focussing on the ‘hard light’ of the Soviet Union while using the sun to play the part of the radioactivity
“When I first read the Chernobyl script, I felt that it held strong parallels with this photography book that my father owned called The Family of Man, that I grew up with. The book came out of one of the most visited photography exhibitions of all time that premiered at the MOMA in New York in the fifties. The exhibition’s theme was that we are all the same, all living on the same planet with the impending conflict between the two blocs and the imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust: the imminent threat of disaster. The Family of Man was a cry for help – an invocation to stop war. The book is almost Biblical and references the soul of mankind. And that Chernobyl was a photograph of mankind in exceptional circumstances and the script carried a more intimate story, a family story.
Finding the look “In terms of a visual look, I had been in the Ukraine in 1999 in Odessa, not far from Kiev, where I’d shot a feature length documentary. The first part of this film, Odessa… Odessa! had a pronounced, stylised blue / green look. When running camera tests in Lithuania, it didn’t look or feel right until I had that same tint. This was ‘reality’, but a fake reality. I looked at the Director’s mood board, it had the same colour schemes and tints.
“How do we recreate the Soviet Union? That ‘hardness’ of light? They had exposed filaments and metallic lampshades instead of frosted bulbs and cloth. They even had fluorescent tubes in living rooms, and they didn’t have much electricity. This forced us to use harder light and to think about Moscow as an underlit city. We based our lighting on fact.
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televisual.com Special Supplement Spring 2021
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