Director Steve Lippman, a.k.a. FLIP, knows that images and music affect emotions in an abstract way. He's built a directorial philosophy around that relationship — one he's expounded upon in conceptual music shorts and documentaries with the likes of David Bowie, Kronos Quarter, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N'Dour, Bette Midler and Duncan Sheik. His most recent project, "Mariners & Musicians," is a companion piece to Rosanne Cash’s album Black Cadillac (Capitol) that blends Super 8 and 16mm footage. It combines conversation, recitation, animation and music to create a tone-poem portrait.
Lippman decided to shoot the majority of the film in Super 8. “My general aesthetic is to create something timeless and emotionally tactile,” he says. “I'm not debating one shooting format over the other, but Super 8 and 16mm have a grain structure and color and black density that serve the images I want to create. It's also the unique way the film reacts to light, or how it captures the happy accidents of film flashes, shutter fluctuations, flares, burn-outs, etcetera. To me, it feels alive and mysterious and spiritual.”
To get the look he's after, Lippman often works with cinematographer David Teague, who runs a Super 8 film festival in New York City when he’s not shooting. “Super 8 has ‘limiting’ attributes that I don’t really see as limitations, but as providing a certain palette to explore,” says Teague. “Because we mostly shot on reversal stock, contrast is very high and the grain is something to use to your advantage and not hide. The personal quality, the emphasis on memory, and the need for a warm organic emotional feel all pointed to a small-gauge stock. Steve wanted the film to have a very lyrical and poetic quality, with a strong sense of memory.
“We used the new Kodak Ektachrome [100D color reversal film 7285] stock, which provides greater color saturation than the old Ektachrome,” says Teague. “We wanted the look to connote the home-movie or personal-diary quality of Super 8 film. We also wanted to use composition and color to create an abstract landscape, homing in on the dreamlike, otherworldly quality of film stock.”
The small camera allowed the filmmakers to work quickly and spontaneously — often, the crew consisted only of director and cinematographer, relying almost exclusively on natural light. “In the shots we lit, we used a small Arri kit to accentuate details or to create an evocative, theatrical effect,” says Teague. “The Super 8 stock’s grain allows for a tactile quality that is the cinematic equivalent of larger brush strokes. Ektachrome needs a fair amount of light, but Steve and I both like darker, mysterious images, so even when we were shooting indoors, we’d often rely on minimal lighting or a strong backlight for a silhouette effect.”
In addition to Ektachrome, Teague used Eastman Plus-X black-and-white film. For scenes that required sync sound, the filmmakers used 16mm.
Only one scene was lit and staged. In it, Cash recites the words to “Mariners & Musicians.” “We actually shot a version of that early on and I wasn't happy with its naturalistic approach, so we re-shot it later,” says Lippman. “I realized that I wanted that section to be very direct and intimate, which required some specific stylization. I've always been moved by Ingmar Bergman's use of close-up. I showed David a frame from Persona and said, ‘I want that kind of simplicity — something that is both light and blunt at the same time.’ When it came time to shoot the sequence for Mariners, it wasn't to recreate the Bergman shot, but to absorb its impact and take inspiration from that. We shot against a white wall in an alcove of Rosanne's house. I love taking small spaces and making them feel like a universe unto themselves. Space, scale and time disappear.”
One important shot shows Cash at the top of a lighthouse. The light is visible and the sea is churning outside from a storm. “That shot is very indicative because it’s a still frame with a lot of emotion,” says Teague. “The grain is heightened to give the shot a tactile quality and movement while the lighthouse lamp slowly revolves in the left corner of the frame. The grain reduces the seas to a whirling abstract collision of surging darkness and light.”
The film was processed at Forde Labs in Seattle and at Pro8mm in Burbank. The telecine transfer was done at CinePost in Atlanta. All the formats were transferred to digital video and edited in Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
“Steve and I co-edited the piece and Jeremy Kotin was the assistant editor,” says Teague. “Steve and I have edited numerous projects together, so we have a very instinctive sense of how to work together that requires little explaining. We shoot and select compositions based on what we know we can do in post, knowing we can push the stock and grain with various color corrections and layering in the edit.”
Teague says improvements in the transfer of Super 8 footage are an important step forward. “I’ve shot two Super 8 features (The Sandman and Love Suicides),” he says. “Both are black-and-white films in the silent movie style with inter-titles and original scores. Both films were shot entirely on soundstages and were inspired by the Expressionist sets and lighting of early German cinema. What makes this possible is the advent of good telecine to DV or HD and the ability to edit digitally. As Super 8 doesn’t have edge codes, you can’t really edit a work print and then make a clean print. Before Avid and Final Cut, you either had to cut on the original itself, which was very limiting for more involved projects and difficult to screen unless someone had a Super 8 projector — not a common thing at festivals or theaters. Or you could transfer to Beta and edit tape to tape, which typically looked crummy. Now you can shoot on Super 8, get a beautiful digital telecine, edit without much resolution loss, color-correct, work with professional sound, and create an HD or DigiBeta master that looks great.”
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