Project research: Janusz Kaminski

In today's post I would like to describe, in my opinion, one of the best cinematographers in history, Janusz Kaminski. His story is especially close to me because, like me, like me, he was born and raised in Poland before fleeing abroad in search of a better life. During his long career, Kaminski won two Academy Awards for his cinematography on "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." Most of his career he has been working with Steven Spielberg, for whom he shot 19 films (Champagne, 2003) In the rest of this post, I would like to focus on the analysis of his cinematography for the above-mentioned films and the reasons for their success.

Janusz Kaminski by Columbia College Chicago

'Schindler's List' was probably the most important film in Kaminski's career, it became his ticket to the Hollywood. With this film, he cemented his high position in film industry and began a long and successful collaboration with Steven Spielberg, which continues to this day. The film appears incredibly realistic because it is in black and white and is styled like a propaganda film from World War II. According to Pavlus (2003), Kaminski used bare technical codes because he wanted to achieve the effect of roughness and severity, thanks to which the viewers could go back in time and feel the terrifying atmosphere of war. The shots in the movie appear to have been taken from the ground or by hand because he attempted to give it a more realistic feel while he was filming it. Thanks to this, some of the scenes, such as the one with the girl in the red dress, go down in the annals of cinema history (Brockington, 2022) During the work of my project, I would like to use similar technical codes like hand-held camera movement or close-ups, to give my film more authenticity.

Schindler's List 1993 - The Little Girl in the Red Jacket

 

While in 'Schindler's List' Kamiński decided to only use shots imitating hand-held shooting, in the case of 'Saving Private Ryan' he went further and used this technique to add realism to the scenes. Watching the scene of the landing on Omaha Beach, you feel as if you were there. The camera shows everything up close, she is thrown from side to side, splashed with blood, goes under water, rolls on the sand. With the sounds of yelling and machine gun shots, we witness soldiers dying under the weight of their equipment, desperately asking for help or praying for quick dead (Walterscheid, 2022). To achieve such realistic effects, Kaminski used tracking shot and, as I mentioned earlier, a hand-held camera. When shooting my film Culture Shock, I won't need such strong shots as in 'Saving Private Ryan', but in the future I will definitely try to use similar techniques during other projects.

Saving Private Ryan: Winning the Omaha Beach Battle

To sum up, thanks to this research I learned what technical codes should be used to achieve realism in the film. I will try to use some of them, such as handheld shooting, in my current project and also in the future.
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References

Champagne, C. (2003) Kaminski Enters Space Program,  SHOOT, 44(19), p. 1. Available at: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=ca5acd89-d02f-32aa-9008-b9f23bfcbbfe (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Pavlus, J. (2003) Karma Chameleon, American Cinematographer, 84(1), pp. 62–73. Available at: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=7c82062e-ead7-3723-b863-7c015d5e4a6d (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Brockington, W.S., Jr. (2022) Schindler’s List (film), Salem Press Encyclopedia [Preprint]. Available at: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=7d3d4028-f66e-3f80-98b0-b794b6f3cbe1 (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Walterscheid, K.A. (2022) Saving Private Ryan (film), Salem Press Encyclopedia [Preprint]. Available at: https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=15849b79-3eca-3146-bf73-defa8f77d467 (Accessed: 12 November 2023).