12 minute read
COVER STORY Elen Lotman
Elen Lotman
A Professional Optimist
Elen Lotman is the fi rst female cinematographer shooting full-length feature fi lms in Estonian fi lm history. At the end of last year, she received a PhD in Film Studies, with a dissertation called Experiential Heuristics in Fiction Film Cinematography.
By Johannes Lõhmus Photos by Heikki Leis, Maris Kilmi and Viktor Koshkin
Elen has translated books on fi lm semiotics by her grandfather, the famous semiotician Yuri Lotman from Russian into Estonian, and is very passionate about everything to do with teaching. A few years ago, she was responsible for educating the new crop of Estonian fi lm students in Baltic Film and Media School.
Last September, she was elected the co-president of IMAGO, International Federation of Cinematographers. She is an unbelievably diverse fi lmmaker and fi lm thinker. Her recent work includes the psychological thriller The Sleeping Beast, that has just been theatrically released in Estonia.
Your parents are biologists, and in the beginning of your career you were labelled as a nature fi lm director, although you seem to have made only one fi lm that is related to nature – a short doc Jägermeister (2004) about hunters. What is the role of nature in your professional development as a cinematographer? From my parents, I have inherited an evidence-based worldview that is rooted in natural sciences. It helped me a lot at fi rst, because I am a verbal rather than visual person. Many cinematographers are very intuitive. They rarely speak but can set a camera up at a completely perfect angle. With me, it’s diff erent – I need to process things through words and at the start of my career had quite a hard time with understanding the image. I began looking for answers in neurosciences and knowing how visual processing happens in the brain still helps me a lot when I shoot.
You said that you are more verbal than most cinematographers, and that is very welcome, because you publish articles in the press and defended a dissertation, helping to analyse your profession. How do you verbalize and relay the proposed fi lm language, and does it diff er from the methods of the more visually intuitive DoPs? There is a chapter in my dissertation, where I try to understand what these working methods are, because most of a cinematographer’s preparation is quite ephemeral. I tried to describe, how every kind of crea-
tive thinking – not only related to cinematographers – tends to happen in two phases. First is the divergent chaotic phase where a maximum number of elements is introduced, experimented, and played with, before starting to make choices and narrowing down the options. The basis of any creative thinking is the divergent process, where new associations between different unconnected elements are formed, that could not occur without the widening phase. Otherwise, without the divergent phase, we tend to repeat something that has already been done. The reason why clichés work is that they feel right, because you recognize them. But the reason you recognize them is not because they are inherently good or original, but because someone has already used them before. The expansion phase allows us to break free of this cycle of first, trivial ideas.
I really like the film Robby Müller: Living the Light (2018), where director Claire Pijman uses the material filmed with Robby Müller’s own Hi8 camera, and an interesting document of a lifestyle emerges, where he constantly filmed everything, wherever he went. Watching this, you start to notice some elements that are familiar from his films, and it gives a chance to experience the subconscious creative process, where a cinematographer constantly records reality and finds random pieces of it that mirror one’s internal gist representation of the situation. It’s a place where creative associations start to form that are essential for developing the ability to solve problems. Every time our brain encounters an obstacle, a neurological reaction occurs, called constraint relaxation. Boundaries have to be expanded to let oneself free and allow the brain to dive into the chaotic process, that will create new associations between so far unconnected nodes.
A line from your article caught my eye: cinematographer’s work creates real feeling of contentment. Could you elaborate a little? Cinematographer can both create imagery that leads the audience to new meanings, and create the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. We know from neurosciences, that there are dopamine receptors in the visual system of the human brain, which means my work can actually create pleasure for someone. A book I just translated, Yuri Lotman’s and Yuri Tsivyan’s Dialogue with the Screen ends with a statement that human culture is a thinking device of humanity that records and processes information, and gives meaning to our existence. One very important thing that culture does, is creating new meanings and worlds that can only happen through art. And as cinema is life amplified, it’s potential and responsibility as a meaning-generator for humanity is enormous.
I see its untapped potential primarily in general education. What about you? Judging by my three kids who are 13, 10 and 5, I see how the importance of audio-visual language multiplies with every generation. It’s much easier for them to communicate through images and sounds than words. In order to avoid the situation where schools would become totally anachronistic places where everyone dies of boredom, we should integrate as much of the new language that the younger generation is actually using, into the curriculum, as possible. The teenage years are perhaps the most social period in a person’s life. It is a time when one senses the need to leave the safe wolfpack of a birth family and evolutionary need to find your own people. In school, the potential for social interaction is woefully underused: everyone sits, facing in the same direction, everyone relying to this one authoritative person for information. It seems to me that if schools would encourage students to look more at each other, and do things together, then educational subject matter would really turn into acquired and experienced knowledge. Why not make the next biology or history class assignment as a short documentary film or comic sketch?
Think about what cinema is – it’s really a game. It’s our way to simulate certain situations, without actually having to experience them and possibly suffer. That is why all kinds of narratives about change, overcoming obstacles, getting to know yourself, or growing up as a person, are so popular. Yuri Lotman has written a lot about game as a mental state that takes place in a space balancing between belief and disbelief. If kids play war, for example, they cannot believe it too much, or else they would end up fighting for real, believing too little, on the other hand, would ruin the game. So, the game can only be successful when we believe and don’t believe at the same time. In that sense, our ability to immerse ourselves in a film, and be aware that it’s not real at the same time, is quite a challenge cognitively. It develops the ability of balancing two contradictory concepts in our mind – a prerequisite for any intelligent person. Humour works the same way.
Going along with a game and participating in it could also show a person’s ability to achieve some sort of empathic arrangements? In the 19th Century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. It means that in order to enjoy a game, you have to give up on the notion that what I experience is not real voluntarily. In understanding that there is an active interpretation process during the film perception, a person’s ability to open up to the world will improve significantly, and we will not accept propaganda blindly at face value. Thus,
Elen Lotman (on the left) and her team on the set of The Sleeping Beast.
cinema is not just essential for cultural people to survive, but for human culture in general. Just by watching different films, you can experience a simulation of different worlds, and that makes you more open as a human being. For instance, David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning presumes that you will find something out, then try it out, analyse the result, and try again. So, when kids are watching a comic book movie, it is crucial for them to try and figuratively run their head into a wall a couple of times afterwards, to see that reality is different from cinema. Cinema has to simulate a conflict, or cycle of the rise and relief of tension, without making us really participate in it, and the more the audiences have experienced films, the better their ability to transfer the experience to their real life.
In my opinion the rise and relief of tension has been very well tuned in The Sleeping Beast. We worked hard on manipulating tension in that film. I have been lucky, because with The Sleeping Beast and Lauri Randla’s Goodbye Soviet Union before that, I had a chance to prepare the films with the directors
so that we could later handle those selected five Brown particles on the set.
Jaak is easy to work with, because he is a director who is constantly seeking something and never gets stuck in one place. He is inquisitive and searching but never aimlessly meandering. His search always has a direction and it’s a pleasure to accompany him on this journey, because every input is very welcome, but everything still goes through a director’s filter. It was a very agreeable space for working: you have a director that gives you enough freedom but also offers certainty, and doesn’t let any idea through that doesn’t fit his vision.
over a longer time, and I really love working with the script. When I started out as a cinematographer, I had a life-changing experience at the 2005 Berlinale Talent Campus. I met Christopher Doyle by chance and ended up as his apprentice on Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves (2006). On that shoot, something began that lasts until this day. I understood, by watching Chris work, that there is only one thing in the world one can be the best in: that is being myself. Everything else probably someone else can do better, but being me is something that only I can do. During this process, I understood that an analytic approach, which makes me work on a script extensively, is not a problem as it seemed to me once; but I am valued for precisely these abilities. There’s a saying: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”.
Directors have mostly embraced me with open arms and trusted me, but in the case of the last two films, the process has been exceptionally rewarding.
How was your cooperation with Jaak Kilmi, and what were his expectations of you? The Sleeping Beast was a big trip out of the comfort zone for me, because Jaak wanted a very natural, almost documentary-like hand-held image. I have used that in documentaries before, but not in features. I am very grateful to the scriptwriter Aidi Vallik, who was very open, and our cooperation was pleasantly flexible and trusting, enabling us to accommodate the script to casting and locations. It was a wonderful process where you could feel that every part influences another, so that the whole could be as good as possible. A remarkably long casting and rehearsal period with the kids fit very naturally into that environment and was extremely important. In addition to trying out scenes, it involved a lot of playing without any special purpose, and playing with relationships. I was constantly filming this, so that I could get to know the material as well as possible during the rehearsal, before the shooting begins. All in all, it was a very rewarding cooperation. The development and pre-production period were very well organized by the production team,
The Sleeping Beast, directed by Jaak Kilmi and captured by Elen Lotman, is a thriller for the whole family. How did you prepare the visual language of The Sleeping Beast? The visual language had to be as natural as possible. That is a very hard thing to achieve – you have to try the most to achieve the simple look. The dynamics developed in rehearsals were very beneficial here, and I would develop it further during the shooting period. I understood that I have to create an environment of controlled chaos. For example, adding some new unpredicted elements, like different B-camera operators. It was part of finding the gist of the story. The Sleeping Beast is the first film of mine where I had a B camera, and that allowed us to bring more chaos into the visual language. We were looking for ways to get close to the children and their world, and to be ready to react quickly, when necessary. In my work, I follow the socalled FFF principle of functionalist architecture – form follows function. So, in terms of the narrative, this is a story of how one person needs to find courage to stand against the group, thus I worked on the blocking and the mise-en-scene of the actors in a way that it would indicate the development of conflict and the group dynamics that emerge.
Together with the gaffer Andrus Ilp and production designer Getter Vahar, we concentrated on creating and lighting the space where the kids would have enough opportunities to act, and I had space to find the suitable frame. With a more static film language, I usually work on a frame like a painter, adding dots of accent to achieve depth or specific emotion. In a dynamic, constantly changing setting, you need to create an environment with the possibility of contrast to mark the fast shift in the situation. All of this needs to be done in a way that would allow the kids to maintain their level of agility, but also that the crew could stay professional and productive. Looking back, the making of this film was a very special experience for me. EF