Film House Light and Shadow Masters (Dialogue with Contemporary Photographers)

Author: Dennis Schaefer
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-07-01
Features: Film is first a technology, not an art. To be able to create light and shadow from imagination in reality is what gives film its full freedom. Based on this idea, this book interviews 15 of the most influential cinematographers in the contemporary film industry, each of whom is a figure in this field. Among them are the realist master Almaviva, who shot the "Teach Me How to Love" series and "Annie Hall," Gordon Willis, who is praised by peers for his work, and Haskell Wexler, who won four Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, as well as Vermon Ziegler, who shot "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and is considered a late bloomer, and so on. The images created by cinematographers ultimately determine the visual appearance of a film, and their techniques, tastes, and styles are closely related to the quality of every film. This book records the life experiences, artistic philosophies, and unique techniques of these lighting masters through dialogues, allowing readers to revisit many classic films from the perspective of cinematography. Every time I shoot a film, I almost treat this book as a bedtime prayer book. The way I read it isn’t from the first page to the last, but by seeking out the figures and works I like, as this is what truly influences me. – Lin Liangzhong
Series Introduction: The "Film Gallery" series published by Taiwan's Yuan Liu Publishing House has always held a position in the hearts of Chinese film fans, but it has long been plagued by exorbitant prices and difficulty in obtaining. This series has always been a dream collection that Chinese film fans could only yearn for but never attain. Owning any one volume of "Film Gallery" is a matter of great pride, and it becomes an object of envy that friends eagerly pass around. "Film Gallery" is a series of film books that tell the personal experiences of world-class directors, holding a pivotal position in Taiwan's film education history and also commanding a status in the hearts of Chinese film fans. Its charm lies in its departure from conventional film lectures, offering a unique interpretation of everything related to film art. Here, you can find the names of almost all film masters, theories of the meticulous division of labor in filmmaking, analyses of films we are familiar with, such as "The Push Hand" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," and the meanings of all the film terminology you want to know. In this series, we can witness the unfamiliar film production processes of directors whose names we know, their struggles in daily life, the formation of their personal experiences, and even more clearly see how they grasp fleeting ideas, gradually enriching and developing them into the films we later encounter. In these books, the masters we have long only admired are into concrete individuals, people struggling in the process of filmmaking. Such books provide us with an undoubtedly calm and sincere form of communication. As we read, we revisit their films and imagine them in their own...