Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Translating a distinctive photographic style to film
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders earned his reputation as one of the country's foremost portraitists by shooting artists, politicians, actors, and other high achievers. His interest in people at the top of their various fields of endeavor is also the animating force behind his film work, which has included films on the performance artist Karen Finley, rock musician Lou Reed, and porn movie stars.
"I'm interested in people who are the best at what they do," Greenfield-Sanders says, "whether they are the best at art, music, or f**king."
His recent documentary The Black List, which debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival, is a collection of interviews conducted by film critic Elvis Mitchell with black Americans who have achieved renown: Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones, comedian Chris Rock, former secretary of state Colin Powell, and more. "These are people who not only are the best at what they do, but are extraordinary because of the circumstances they had to overcome to get where they are," says Greenfield-Sanders.
While the new film, which will air on HBO, is similar to his previous documentaries in that regard, it also represents a stylistic change. In the past, Greenfield-Sanders structured his films in standard documentary language -- filming a performance by Finley, or shooting porn stars "behind the scenes" during portrait sessions at his studio. For The Black List, he found a way to translate his still portraits into a film.
As a photographer, Greenfield-Sanders has developed a simple but effective visual technique, shooting his subjects against neutral backgrounds with an 8x10 camera and lighting them from one side with a strobe in a large umbrella for diffusion. For the film, the seamless backgrounds remained the same, while the strobe was replaced by an $8,000 daylight-balanced continuous light called the Joker, diffused with an Elinchrom Octabank.
Next Greenfield-Sanders struggled to duplicate the way subjects in his photographs gaze directly into his 8x10 camera's lens. "For the film, of course, they were being interviewed as we shot them, so we had to find a way to get them to look into the camera, not at the interviewer," he says.
The solution was a type of teleprompter called the Inquisitor, made by Toby Barraud and Stefan Springman. The device was placed directly in front of Greenfield-Sanders's digital video cameras: two Panasonic AG-HVX200 cameras -- one for closeups, the other for three-quarter compositions -- recording straight to Panasonic P2 cards, not to tape. The subjects would look at the teleprompter and see the face of Mitchell, who was actually sitting in another room. From the other side, of course, the teleprompter appeared as transparent as glass. Thus, as the subjects talked to Mitchell, they were actually gazing directly into Greenfield-Sanders's video cameras. The effect is thrillingly original, melding the iconographic power of Greenfield-Sanders's photos with the narrative of his films.
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