😍 2022-10-02 17:31:25 – Paris/France.
Since the final stages of its post-production process began to take shape, the road to the official premiere of Andrew Dominik's stunning 'Blonde' has been full of promise. Omens that placed the False Memories of Marilyn Monroe adaptation written by Joyce Carol Oates as one of the best and most controversial titles of the yearbuoyed by its NC-17 rating and a festival buzz as polarized as it is hopeful.
It was very difficult for Plan B Entertainment's production distributed by Netflix to end up not only disappointing, but also leaving people indifferent; and the reason is none other than a technical and creative team directed by Dominik himself—whose "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" remains one of the cinematic pinnacle of the XNUMXst century—and crowned by a Ana de Armas already consolidated as a great Hollywood star.
Finally, the equally adored and hated 'Blonde' ended up transcending its feature-length status to earn the 'experience' label; accompanying us for almost three hours through a stifling audiovisual nightmare which, projected through the prism of the cinematographer Chayse Irvinturns out to be the perfect antithesis of what is meant by "fairy tale".
experiment without fear
Rivers of ink could be written about the many virtues that have led "Blonde" to occupy much of the cinematic conversation in recent months. From its shameless tonal gamble that embraces the most uncomfortable and explicit sordid to its clever deconstruction of myth, to the lucid portrayal of the psychological duality of industry-manufactured celebritythe film shows an enviable discursive touch.
However, if there is anything that has elevated Andrew Dominik's reflexive will - which is far beyond mere morbidity - twisting it until it becomes a luminous feverish delirium crawling under the skin, that's Irvin's job in front of the cameras; an extremely experienced cinematographer who flirted with video clips, advertising and who signed feature films such as “Infiltrator en el KKKlan”.
If there is perhaps something truly defining in the visual treatment of 'Blonde', it is undoubtedly its experimental aspect. something driven by the perception of the novel that the cinematographer had after reading it several times during the project documentation. This is how he explained it to IndieWire media.
“I read the novel three times and had the interpretation that it was a representation of his whole life, but as if he were reliving it at the time of his death. It was like a hallucination happening in a sequence. So we took it to the point of hyperbole, because his feelings were the guide. It was less about recreating actual events and more about, "How can we twist this in a way that really reflects how he must have felt at the time?" » »
To achieve this goal, Dominik, Irvin and their team made the most of the possibilities of filming equipment and tons of documents - some 700 pages of photographs and graphic material of Monroe collected by the filmmaker over a decade -, playing with him freely .Y casting a collage nothing less than awesome.
In addition to transporting us back to the 1950s through the use of Panavision PVintage Lenses, designed in the 70s and which banishes any type of digital preview of the cameras used in terms of softness and color; director and DOP did not hesitate to make risky decisions such as the use of Petzval Glasses -which I told you about in reference to "L'Homme du Nord"- or even about infrared imagesto immerse themselves in the guns of the purest terror.
reality twist
If this kind of visual descent into hell manages to have an impact beyond pure artifice, it is thanks to a much closer relationship with reality than it seems at first sight, and that connects with the viewer through the popular imagination and a collection of snapshots etched in collective memory that fuse with fiction once embedded in the grotesque narrative of 'Blonde'.
Many scenes in the film are shot on actual locations where Monroe was or on sets reconstructed for the occasion, and Irvin used photographic references to find this reality and then bring it into his domain. to generate a sort of deja-vu nightmare.
“I used the same focal lengths. I didn't know what they were exactly, but I imagined what they could have been. And we shot in many real places where these images were taken. photo in front of me printed on a card, I looked at it, then I positioned the camera and tried to create the same geometry in the frame. »
But the factual aspect of 'Blonde' is not limited to simple geographical fidelity, but is a key element in developing one of the most surprising elements of its visual treatment. It is none other than constantly varying aspect ratios —there are passages at 1.00:1, 1.37:1, 1.85:1 and 2.39:1— and images shot in color and black and white. Andrew Dominik explained this unusual decision, which is in no way based on history or narrative, this way:
“Everything is based on existing images, and some are in color and some in black and white. So if we base a scene on a black and white photograph that is in a certain format, we shoot it in that format; if it is in color, we do it in color. If the scene doesn't have any sort of reference, we end up doing it widescreen. »
The optimal material
To get the best results for both scenes, those in monochrome and those shot in color, Irvin turned to digital cameras. The first of these was the Arri Alexa Monochromewhich captures images only and exclusively in black and white capturing only luminance data – and infrared through an optical low-pass filter – and whose use thus justified Netflix.
“The way you have to think about the black and white camera is that the Alexa Monochrome is the highest resolution black and white camera currently available because it only captures all red, green and blue information at the highest resolution. high who limps.
As for the color passages, the camera chosen was the increasingly popular camera Sony Venice equipped with a device known as Cinefade; a kind of, simplifying, variable ND filter motorized — which serves to prevent light from entering the sensor, as if it were “sunglasses” — which, in addition to allowing the DOP to expose the shots as if it were rotating in photochemical, allow transitions between inside and outside without using the diaphragm and even making smooth transitions between depths of field radically different in the same plane.
This, yes. Technicalities aside, if anything has made "Blonde" a caliber experience, it's your intuitive nature diametrically opposed to the structured approach with which one usually works in a feature film.
“I wasn't trying to use a specific structure. In fact, I was doing the opposite. I was trying to make it seem unstructured because Marilyn always had a need for stability and love in her life, but she could never find it. This has always been refused to him. She felt that if I created structure it would create that stability and I wanted to transgress that.
If awards season does his work justice, it's more than likely we will see Chayse Irvin nominated and, why not, become the winner of the fair, in the major events of the year. Whether he succeeds or not, his magnificent work on 'Blonde' will always be there to be appreciated and studied as it deserves.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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