Look Who it Was Random video

Michael Chapman - How technology changes art (90/94)

146 views · Published 11 July 2017 · 7:15 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Film & Animation

Watch on YouTube

To listen to more of Michael Chapman’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyKbX3v4q3w3U_-c2SOkXm9

Michael Chapman (1935-2020) was an innovative cinematographer. He worked with a number of acclaimed directors including Martin Scorsese with whom he created his two best-known films, 'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'. [Listener: Glen Ade Brown; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT: I think that the way that... If I were young and trying to start again, or start out to do it, what I would be interested in is in a kind of less realistic format, by which I mean... I'm going to go back to a kind of idiot's history of art for a second. Just to explain what I mean. In the Italian renaissance the laws of perspective were worked out so that art could... the art of painting could accurately represent what the eye saw. You know: I'm closer to you I'm larger; as things go away... there were vanishing points; and all that stuff which had not been used before. And because that had been worked out, there became, over the years, a kind of representational imperative in painting that you had, once you could do that, you had to do it, in Western art. And that was in many ways a wonderful thing. And it allowed enormous advances in... in telling people what the world looked like, and showing what it looked like. Not only just repertorily, but emotionally too. But it wasn't the only way. And because of this representational imperative, it seemed to me that, in a curious way, art began to bog down in the 19th Century, as witnessed, for instance... the French Academy and Bouguereau and people like that, they didn't... they were very slick and very beautiful and they showed life, but they... things began to... it began to be kind of a dead end.

But fortunately... and this is how... an example of how technology changes art: fortunately the invention of photography came along and took over this representational imperative, and it was a job that you could do much better than painting could, because there was no intervening human hand. It was just light, lens, and the object. And there was no way that the painter could intervene. He was unnecessary. He was gone, like a... like a wood engraver. And that freed art to go whooshing down the Impressionists, Fauvists, abstract... whatever road it wanted to. It does not mean that painting, that, you know, representational imagery could not be in painting. It still can and still is, and will always be. It just didn't have to be. It gave painting more freedom.

Well, I suggest that, because we are so surrounded by imagery of all sorts, with, you know, 500 channels on television and advertising, and everything all around us, that we are so saturated with representational imagery that we can now... the mass mind of the... at least the Western world, will begin to accept less rigidly representational imagery in visual storytelling. And that you can... now you can... you should be able to begin with... and certainly with video you can, to make the visual imagery that we use in storytelling more... freer, more... more able to represent overt emotions in... because of the colors, the framing, the how the image breaks up. You should... we should have far more freedom. Or we can begin to explore freedom in visual storytelling. And if I were young, and starting out, I would very much try to do that. I would... that's what I would passionately try to do. And, by God, I think that the... the human mind, in the sort of... the abstract of the, you know, middle class Western world – be it in America or Europe or whatever – would be begin to accept it. Because they're so saturated in imagery that they don't need this... this hammering of... of perspective and clarity. They don't anymore. And then I think they would begin to... and sometimes there is the beginnings of it; you see it every once in a while.

There's a curious movie called, I think, 'Greenvale' [sic] or something, by a rock and roller, or an ageing rock and roller... now my mind's just gone; wait a minute. Neil Young. Neil Young. Did you see it?

[GAB] It's called 'Greenwood'. 

'Greenwood'. 'Greenvale'. 'Greenwood'. I thought it was 'Greenvale'. Well he shot it on Super 8 handheld camera, and it looks like... it's kind of wonderful. And it doesn't, it's not, it's barely realistic. It's all Super 8 so when it's blown up it looks like Seurat. It looks like Pointillism, but it's moving Pointillism. And it's utterly convincing. Curious... I mean, I went to see it only because I wanted to see what Super 8 looked like. I didn't think I would last 10 minutes through it and, by God, I sat through it. And I was kind of fascinated. And it's all... what it really is... is an album of songs and the people in the movie lip-sync the songs. And it's quite curious, but it works. [...]

Visit [https://www.webofstories.com/play/michael.chapman/90] to read the remaining part of the transcript.

More from this channel