A look back at the Master Class with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke
By Margot Cavret for the AFCThe conference followed the rhythm of the screenings of excerpts, going chronologically through the collaboration between Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke, starting with The Tell- Tale Heart, a short film from 2008. Jarin Blaschke says: “It’s been a long journey to get to this point. When I was little, I loved taking photos and making up stories with my toys, and I dreamt of a job that would be the meeting point between the two, that would both fix reality on a medium and make people believe in the stories. I went to film school in New York, which wasn’t a cinematography school, but where I was able to practice a lot because I was able to be the cinematographer for all my fellow students’ films. After that I just scraped by, accepting any project, even the most shoddy short films, the really bad ones, while working in a bookshop on the side. Little by little, I was able to make better and better produced shorts, and finally I got my first feature film, but it was no less modest than the shorts. Then one day I got an email from Robert Eggers, with the script for The Tell-Tale Heart. I’d never seen anything like it. There was no voice, no dialogue, no voice-over, but he managed to convey all the details ; the dust on the floor, the breath of the characters, etc. I met him, I asked him lots of questions, I discovered that he had a huge knowledge of painting, design and literature. As I was older than him he thought I was testing him! We shot in 16mm in an abandoned house in New Hampshire. On location I’m always very focused on my work, and that gave Robert the impression that I didn’t like working with him. At the end of the shoot he said to me: ‘I really enjoyed working with you, it’s a shame we can’t continue...’. I was very surprised! I cleared up any misunderstanding and we never left each other’s side. We’ve created a relationship based on trust and honesty that’s very precious. If we don’t like something, we look together for a different way of doing it. We train each other to go further, it’s a collective effort unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before”.

The second extract is from the short film Brothers, released in 2013. “We started preparing The Witch in 2010, Robert had to shoot a short film to prove he could direct children. We shot in the woods, to get closer to the aesthetic of The Witch, and we shot digitally, because we had less money and time, but also because it was a more contemporary story. I took the opportunity to experiment with low contrast, with a contrast curve that was almost straight, which was interesting. In his scripts, Robert doesn’t describe the shots, but he does describe the world very precisely. Then we work together on a storyboard, with long descriptions of the shots. We filmed for a week in winter, and it was very cold. I always fall ill when I’m shooting his films, and I caught an eye infection from the eyepiece – it’s all part of working with Robert!”

Despite this being their first feature film together, Jarin Blaschke was very brief about the making of The Witch. “We wanted to establish the geography of the location very quickly,’ he explained simply after showing an extract from the beginning of the film. ‘We wanted to get the problem out of the way very quickly so that it didn’t effect the rest of the film. Every morning we checked the weather, and as soon as it was fine we shot the scenes outside. I simply overexposed the windows to connect the indoor scenes. As with Brothers, I used a high level of desaturation and a very low exposure. We colour-graded very quickly, on a television in a dark room, but in the end I realised that in a cinema it’s a bit too dark...”

This first feature has enabled Eggers to shoot a second, very daring feature: The Lighthouse, in 2019. Shot in an almost square ratio (1.19:1), on 35mm Double-X black and white film, with Baltar lenses and a filter specially designed for the film to recapture the orthochromatic aesthetic of late 19th century photographs. The film has a unique aesthetic signature, in keeping with the subject matter and the characters. “This time we didn’t do a storyboard”, says Jarin Blaschke, “we just made little drawings in the margins of the script. But we did make five different lookbooks! There was a general one, which took the film in chronological order, to find the general atmosphere, with lots of nineteenth-century paintings. And then there were more specific ones, like the one dedicated to sea creatures, which allowed us to go into more detail on important details, like the mermaid, which takes up a whole page, with intentions for costumes, hairstyles, etc. I also did a document on orthochromatic aesthetics, to explain how it worked; filtering out colours from yellow to red, whilst retaining green to ultra-violet. The result is very luminous skies and much darker skin, which, as well as being a reference to the photography of the period in which the film is set, goes well with the tone and atmosphere we wanted to create. I tried out a number of different lenses, and settled on the Baltars, which is not the Super Baltar series , but a set that dates back to the 1940s. They produced very beautiful halos and added texture and contrast to the black and white. Without a storyboard, we tried to push the language of the shots even further, trying to combine all the ideas in a single direction, in a single shot, looking for alternatives that were more original and more meaningful than simple reverse coverage”.

The Northman benefits from the huge success of The Lighthouse, and a much bigger budget than previous productions. “With this big budget, we were able to have a generous schedule, custom-built sets by the set design team, extensive preparation and the best technicians in the world, but there was huge pressure on Robert, who was often called upon by the production, and I had to do the storyboard alone because he wasn’t available. In the end, I think the restrictions gave us more creative freedom. We shot in 65mm, and we fell in love with this very clean look, which suited the idea of the epic film we were making. For the first time we had film references, and I really tried to adjust to these film images that we’d exchanged in preparation. I love a challenge, and all those images of fire at night were a real challenge! I tried a lot of things, like playing a low-definition video of a fire through a panel of tungsten bulbs, or filtering the camera and projectors, inspired by what we’d done for The Lighthouse to get very sharp colours from a glowing fire on a very dark night. It was complicated because to the eye the sets looked badly lit, but you had to keep in mind what the negative actually saw. I shot a lot with Daylight film, which is more sensitive to warm colours. We also pushed even further the idea of merging all the ideas into a single shot, of having a strong formal composition, and of having as much as possible a degree of subjectivity from the character. In the battle scenes, for example, we preferred to follow him around, rather than show objectively how the battle unfolded. I often suggest several shot options to Robert, and he chooses.”

Finally, Jarin Blaschke presented exclusive images from Nosferatu. In these images we find the same obsessions that have occupied the duo since their first films: nights with sharp blacks, long shots with choreography full of meaning, and of course a gallery of silent characters and disturbing settings that evoke both the world of Robert Eggers and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 film. “We try to pay attention to what we’re showing. We can’t concentrate on two things at once, so we always try to show things one after the other, in a sequence that makes sense. When we introduce a new character, for example, it’s very important to create a portrait that also shows what that character is like inside, what he knows, what he feels, what he thinks, and all this can be shown through the camera. We try to do in a single shot what another film would do in three or four. So that when the shot stops, it makes sense, it’s like a punctuation mark in the story. Murnau’s Nosferatu was a very important film in Robert’s youth, and our film is really constructed as a tribute. We drew a lot of inspiration from romantic paintings, and we eliminated all cinematic references, with the idea that at the time when the film takes place, cinema didn’t exist. I always try to find the image that will support the story, but I have a kind of instinct that always makes me put a bit of my taste and style into the films. It’s a balance to strike, between what serves the project and putting a bit of myself into it too. I’m happy to have persisted in this path, until I found Robert. I was stubborn enough to persevere for seven years after leaving school before I found him, then another seven years before our first feature film, I waited to find the right director, and I don’t regret it.”

(Report written by Margot Cavret for the AFC, and translated from French by Christian Abomnès)