AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER - Post Focus

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By David Heuring

“In the final analysis, filmmaking has more to do with who is behind the camera than who is in front of it,” says Steve Sanguedolce, who blends the rhythms of editing, images and music to create unique experimental films.

With each project, the Toronto-based filmmaker experiments with the tools of film emulsion and chemical development. He has learned development techniques that today’s aspiring filmmakers will probably never know. He often shoots on film stocks manufactured for other purposes, like optical soundtrack stocks. He develops his own negative in 5-gallon buckets and sometimes dries it in a clothes dryer (on the “delicate” setting). He does his own contact printing on a modified Steenbeck, and he uses hand-tinting and hand-toning techniques.

The results are films that strain at the boundaries of such categories as “documentary,” “home movie” and “narrative.” In the early 1990s, his films Rhythms of the Heart, Mexico, Sweetblood, Away, and SMACK garnered a dozen international prizes. He is considered a member of the Escarpment School, Canada’s third generation of avant-garde filmmakers, but he thinks of himself as a documentarian. “Ultimately, I think I’m making films about people,” he says. “They’re called ‘experimental’ because formally they’re very different.”

His feature Blinding, which earned an honorable mention at last year’s Plus Camerimage Festival in Poland, is a meditation on losing one’s sight, but also an examination of blindness as a disease of modern civilization. Voices in the film include a writer, an ex-cop, and a former military pilot. Situations staged and filmed by Sanguedolce are mixed with archival materials and photographs. Some characters address the trauma and burden of having seen things they wish they hadn’t. The images are extensively treated, sometimes adding subtext by partially obscuring the vision of the viewer.

Sanguedolce’s process begins with a journal and collections of images and footage he has shot over the years with an old CP-16 camera and an Angenieux 12-120mm zoom lens. “I only begin to know exactly what the film is about when I’m halfway through,” he says.

Most of the exterior shots in Blinding were shot on 16mm on high-contrast 7378 Optical Sound Film. He says the negative has an ISO of 10 or 12 and gives him about 2 stops of latitude. “You pretty much need to detonate a grenade to get an exposure indoors!” he says. “If you’re off by a stop, everything can go completely black or completely white, so we tend toward high-contrast subjects, like trees against sky. If we shoot faces, we have to be very careful about it. The amount of moisture in the air, and which wavelengths of light are stronger, also seem to factor in.”

Sanguedolce hand-processes about 300’ of film at once and varies processing as negative or reversal depending on the effect he seeks. By controlling the concentration of developer, the temperature of the bath and the development time, he can make his images extremely high contrast, almost like a lithograph, or relatively panchromatic, like a harsher version of Eastman Plus-X or Double-X, with fuller mid tones and an array of tonality. He notes he can sometimes coax as many as 6 stops out of the film by controlling development.

“Then, I always use non-hardening fixer to lock in the image,” he says. “The hardener acts as a waxy coating that protects the film from scratches and abrasions. Without the hardener, the film is still absorbent, which makes it easier for toners to penetrate.”

The non-hardening fixer also results in more scratches and abrasions, which are part of Sanguedolce’s aesthetic. Toning adds pigment to the black-and-white image. With negative film, the highlights absorb toner first, and shadows stay clear and colorless longer. “You could use pomegranate juice or red wine,” he observes. “It’s very easy to put a piece of negative into a toning bath. The color you’re using is absorbed into the emulsion. You almost can’t overdo it. It’s only going to go to a certain density. The trick comes with split- or cross-toning, where you have multiple colors, which you see a lot in Blinding.”

After the first toning stage, the film is pulled out and washed. Next comes a toning bleach stage. “Berg Sepia toner comes with a toning bleach that coats the film, giving it a milky coating and protects it from taking on any more color. I often only bleach for a minute after toning it for four or five minutes. Then, I put it back in very diluted, weak, used developer. That removes some of the toner and parts of the bleach. Then, after washing it again, I put it in a second color, which is absorbed into different areas. Highlights might assume one color, and shadow or dark areas another.”

The process works more intensely on black-and-white negative treated as color negative, because black-and-white emulsion lacks the color couplers that help control hues on color reversal. The result can be almost psychedelic, super-saturated colors, a key part of Sanguedolce’s expressionistic style.

He currently shoots interiors on Eastman Double-X 7222 and uses highly concentrated developer for a contrasty negative. That way, he doesn’t have to “melt the subject to get an exposure.”

“If I wanted uniformity, I’d go to a lab,” he says with a laugh. “Some of the scratches I get are phenomenal. Sometimes the chemicals stick the film together, giving it sprocket lines running through. Occasionally I’ll flip the lights on for a half second while the film is in the developer, so the film is casting shadows on itself. This creates a kind of “solarized or sabbatier effect” where the tonalities invert in places going from negative to reversal and back to negative again.

He delights in the unexpected. “At times, with a really high-con image, you get this kind of reticulation around outlines, and it’s a beautiful, golden glow. It almost looks like someone did a rotoscope drawing of the image. There are probably ways to execute these effects to perfection, but I’m working with randomness. I am very careful about times and temperatures, but every batch of coloring is different, and if I don’t get something nice, I put that batch back in the developer, and it all goes back to black-and-white. It might be a little more scratched, but I could start over with the toning.”

A Steenbeck flatbed was not exempt from Sanguedolce’s passion for bending technology to his needs. “I have a small library of 16mm that I’ve collected since I began shooting in the early ‘70s,” he explains. “I might find a piece of color footage that I wanted to re-shoot, process and tone to make it totally different from the original color negative I shot. So I managed to modify my Steenbeck flatbed into a contact printer. It was quite simple: I removed the prism and built a little foam-core box. I ran the original film in the front “sound track” plates, ran the film to be copied to behind it in a bi-pack through the gate, and shined a 7-watt bulb [on it]. I can vary the speed depending on the density of the images to alter the result. I can also use neutral-density filters in there. It works!”

For Blinding, Sanguedolce transferred his images to Apple ProRes files, edited on Final Cut Pro, and finished with an HD-Cam copy. He tried importing the toned negative into the computer, thinking he could invert the images digitally, but he decided the work just didn’t look the same as when copied from a timed work print — he missed “a certain luminosity and pulsing quality.” So he conformed a work print frame-by-frame to the edit he made in Final Cut Pro. A high-quality surround-sound mix was also important to him.

Sanguedolce has been a teacher for almost 30 years teaching filmmaking at York University for a decade, and he has just begun teaching sound design at Humber College. Between classes, he works on his next project.

He has always seen his job as inventing a new way of telling stories. “We all dream differently. Why not try to find the particular way that you tell stories? I know I can never compete with multi-million-dollar films, but I can try to find a way of telling stories that is all my own.

“Shooting is not just capturing; it’s a way of perceiving and a discipline, like writing or dance or music. You have to work at finding your voice and a way that you belong in the medium.”