9 minute read
ARSEN SARKISIANTS FSC•THE WOODCUTTER STORY
Finnish DP Arsen Sarkisiants’s idiosyncratic approach towards the cinematography on Mikko Myllylahti’s debut feature The Woodcutter Story, helped make for an existential dark comedy to die for.
CHOP CHOP
By Darek Kuźma
Somewhere in Finnish Lapland, amidst sublimely wintry landscapes and endless instances of nature’s chilling indifference towards mankind, lies a village populated by laconic folks trying their best to hide their inner agony under the guise of quiet dignity. Or alcohol. Or cards. Or Freud. Or visiting a well-endowed barber. Yet because we explore this world through the eyes of Pepe the woodcutter, a man notorious for seeing the glass half-full, it never gets tedious. Rather, the film frames their suffering through the beauty of the banal.
Sure, this prosaic ordinariness is heightened from time-to-time by adultery, murder, talking fish, a nihilistic psychic and a mysterious floating orb of light, yet life has to go on. It seems impossible to define what The Woodcutter Story exactly is – interpretations vary from it being a metaphor for purgatory, to a deadpan odyssey of a guy trying not to lose his grip on reality. But therein lies the beauty of a feature debut from a filmmaker so sure of his voice that he prefers to go off the beaten path. Still, Myllylahti would not be successful without the evocative visuals of Sarkisiants, his partner-in-crime.
“After I shot his short film, Tiikeri (2018), I knew this was a director I wanted to continue working with,” says Sarkisiants. “He sent me script for The Woodcutter Story, and I had never read anything like it. It was screenwriting poetry, yet it was so precise, every word was exactly where it should be. People were adamant that there was no way we could translate its unique atmosphere and metaphoric content to the screen, that it was un-filmable. But we knew it was possible, and it became one of our goals to prove them wrong!”
Due to the script’s completeness the prep was all about scouting and discussing how the film should be shot.
“All-in-all, we had 31 shooting days, but because we wanted to film on location as much as possible, we had to scout the year before,” he explains. “Principal photography started in November 2020 and was divided into two parts. First, we shot only interiors, then we had a break to wait for the right amount of snow and do the final scout to check if what we had picked the year before still suited us. Then we continued to shoot exteriors and the remaining interiors.” pawn-broker’s shop we found by accident on one of our trips. It was so dirty and ugly we instantly knew it was perfect! We had dozens of tiny rooms and houses up in the north that we could barely squeeze half of the crew in, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. You can’t replicate that kind of personality on a soundstage.”
And personality is this film’s essential factor. As the sawmill shuts down, leaving Pepe the ex-woodcutter and the rest of the folks in a state of limbo, looking in despair for any meaning in life, The Woodcutter’s Story needed enough visual stimuli to keep the viewers’ interested.
“Many people use Edward Hopper’s paintings as a reference for mood, but what I like about his work is the composition, how he only shows a part of a bigger scene so your imagination can run wild. In this film, I never show the edges of a scene, I cut cars, houses and people. It gives this world a curious feel. I was also inspired by photographer Gregory Crewdson and the use of high angles. There are only a couple of low angles in the entire film, the rest is done above the eye-line.”
Sarkisiants infused the images with a sort of mundane extraordinaire that makes the viewer marvel at the whole frame.
“I’m not interested in over-stylising, and want to come close to capturing reality as it is, like old American street photographers did,” he explains. “They never tried to find beautiful angles, they just took photos from
where they were standing because the subject was more important than beautifying it. That’s why we didn’t go Anamorphic, as that just looked too beautiful and brought something that wasn’t there to the actual reality of what was in front of us.
At the same time, however, Sarkisiants wanted the film to look unobtrusively cinematic.
“I believe in giving the audience something to watch. Looking at a character’s eyes or head is not enough,” he says. “You need to create a solid background, to have depth-of-field, to give people an opportunity to see the details of what lies behind.”
As a reminder lesson, he and Myllylahti took from three classics, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960, DP Otello Martelli), Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956, DP Léonce-Henri Burel) and Kitano’s Hana-bi (1997, DP Hideo Yamamoto)
“Kitano, for example, doesn’t care if the editing is smooth, he cares about what he shows,” says the DP. “We wanted our film to be kind of old-fashioned, with no modern visual tools to escalate whatever happens in a shot.”
To depict Pepe and his friends’ banal-yet-bizarre life situations to the fullest, Sarkisiants decided to shoot The Woodcutter Story in 2-perf on 35mm film using ARRI ARRICAM LT cameras, with ARRI Ultra Prime, Master Prime vintage Cooke zoom optics.
“We chose 2-perf and LTs with thousand-foot mags because we wanted to have visual flexibility as well as a smaller spherical area to use for sharper depth-of-field. This way we took the vignettes and distortions off the lenses and used only the centre of the lens. The idea was, again, to make the image a bit boring, not to beautify it beyond recognition and to accentuate whatever was in the shot.”
The plan to shoot the whole film on-location worked perfectly until it did not.
“In Lapland, the winters are so cold, with -30º Celsius and harsh winds, that you and the equipment can’t stay outside for long. I don’t do full lens sets anymore, and always pick individual lenses. I had two ARRI Ultra Primes, 16mm and 35mm, one Master Prime 25mm, and a vintage Cooke 25-250mm zoom lens, the one Janusz Kamiński ASC used on Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005). As the ARRI Rental technicians accurately predicted, Ultra Primes and Master Prime froze between -24ºC and -26ºC respectively. Fortunately, the Cooke zoom lens did not fail even once, giving us the necessary flexibility and variability!”
The freezing conditions did not make Sarkisiants change his attitude towards lighting. “I prefer Tungsten light, so we had a lot of old-fashioned Fresnel 2K lamps with a dimmer for days, and 2K Balloons pushed with sodium gel for nights. We also used ARRI M-series HMIs, like M8, M18, M40 lamps, to illuminate the night scenes with blue moonlight. Mostly they were used to draw backgrounds and shape the trees in the distance. They are light and powerful fixtures and it was easy to power them from small generators and just drop units farther away.”
The strategy was slightly different when it came to lighting interiors.
“Because the rooms were so tight, the idea was to bring light in through windows, and use a lot of fill for colour separation,” he recalls. “As a rule, I don’t light people. I create atmosphere, and bring form and shape to the image, so that I can shoot in every direction and give actors a space to explore. We pre-lit for an hour or two every morning, then just tweaked the lighting set-up bit as we went along, but no one had to wait more than 45-minutes for a re-take. I didn’t care about it looking perfect, it had to be functional.”
Sarkisiants supplemented his lighting kit with DIY LED solutions designed by a gaffer/engineer friend who supports his idiosyncratic approach to lighting film sets.
“One of his greatest gifts for this particular project was a number of very thin LED panels, A4-size, that barely weighed anything. I could tape twenty of them to ceilings and plug them all together in a single wire, and have a degree of control I wouldn’t have any other way,” he says. “You won’t find them in a rental house. We didn’t have to build anything and yet had a powerful source that suited our needs.” Another example of the gaffer’s ingenuity came with the aforementioned floating orb of light that harasses Pepe and a bunch of his colleagues in one of the film’s most surreal scenes. “This was shot on stage. We had KinoFlo tubes on the ceiling to give the room a soft top light, whilst the ball was made on a 3D printer from a very thin material with a few small Litra LEDs inside to simulate flickering light,” marvels Sarkisiants. “I had my grip operating it on a long boom whilst I had the ball paired with an iPhone. It was basically a practical effect, that’s why you see the actors properly interact with it and the ball’s light reflects in their eyes, hair and skin.”
Sarkisiants and Myllylahti were so adamant to retain the look they envisioned for their film that they spent 14 full days in the grading suite with colourist Edoardo Rebecchi at Denmark’s Beopost to finesse the final voice.
“I can be quite difficult when it comes down to these things, but the director and I had the same vision, and just needed to bring that to fruition. We flew backand-forth between Finland and Denmark and were exhausted, but we wanted the ensure the film had the right blend of naturalism and cinematic feel. There was no masking, no extensive CGI, only tweaking what was already shot in-camera.”
The end result is as personal as an existential dark comedy can be, both for Myllylahti and Sarkisiants.
“I try not to repeat myself, I’d rather explore new ways to express myself and the story through the means at my disposal,” Sarkisiants says. “I still value what Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC told me once, that there might hundreds of great cinematographers in France that he cannot compete with in terms of style, but there’s only a couple who can do real drama that is personal, often ugly, and not beautified for the sake of pretty images. He he prefers to be one of them, and I am the same. I know I’m not Vittorio Storaro AIC ASC, nor that I want to be. I have my own style and peculiar way of seeing things, and I look for projects that I can be proud of. Like this one.”
