High and Low

L'enfant d'en haut (aka: Sister, 2012, directed by Ursula Meier) is the first film that the great cinematographer, Agnes Godard, has shot with a digital camera. I wonder if this is a film that could have been shot digitally before this year or last, because the main drawback of digital has been the dynamic range of the image. This is a film that goes from a physical (and metaphorical) darkness to the blinding white of snowy ski slopes and back with regularity. I can imagine Godard pulling her hair out trying to get her camera to do what she wants. Part of her solution was a careful focus on the film's characters, shot mostly in intimate close-up whenever the landscape threatens to intrude. This is a film set in a spectacular landscape that resolutely ignores that landscape. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Godard tells how she wanted to avoid shooting postcards (and how difficult that is in this film's setting). They don't serve the story, she says. She's wrong about that, but she's such an intuitive artist that her approach manages to integrate the landscape with the story in a way a cinematographer more cowed by the visuals of her surroundings might not. In any event, this is an intimate film.

Read more below the fold >>