Benjamin Kasulke thinks in image, in working method, in environment. "They’re all sort of tied together in this spirit of collaboration. I feel like a project is successful, at least the production end of it is successful, if you bring together individuals that bring all these collaborative talents together and they create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts," he explains.
Spotlighted by South By Southwest Film Festival premieres of both Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance and Joe Swanberg's Nights and Weekends this year, Kasulke's work sketches beauty built of clean lines and fluidity, its implicit message of unassuming tenderness and poignance.
Well before the announcement of the IFC Festival Direct release of My Effortless Brilliance this Wednesday, Kasulke and filmmaker Barry Jenkins sat down to chat about the freedom of the digital revolution, the importance of capturing new visual stimuli and the DIY approach of translating ideas to images.
The following interview adds to Jenkins' ongoing series, the preceding pieces with cinematographers Brett Jutkiewicz and Asif Siddiky.
SM: So, just give me a little bit of background, like your training.
BK: I did four years of undergrad film school at Ithaca College in upstate New York. I graduated in 99’, and before graduating I did some time at FAMU, the Czech National Film School in a program called the 3F program that was centered on the history of Czech New Wave and the Czech model of film production.
SM: What’s it feel like to be a DP on one of these DIY, these “smaller” films? It’s not like 40 years ago where you had to be a guy who went into the camera house and worked in the equipment room, and then you got to be a loader, and then a 2nd AC and then a 1st AC, etc., whereas you can just get together with a filmmaker like Lynn Shelton and go out and make a movie.
BK: I think it’s very interesting; I meet a lot of cinematographers and directors of photography and videographers out on the festival circuit, and they’re young, and they would be young for almost any industry but they’re really young in the context of either a classic Hollywood or European DP and…it’s strange, you know, to be lucky enough to have tools that just came out at a certain time. I think that the generation that came before us — I say us, I mean people in their 20s and 30s right now — the people that came before us probably had 16mm film and that got them out into the streets and out of the studio and out of the lighting environment. And now, Panasonic with the DVX100 really changed the way you could make films, you could see what exposures were gonna look like in the world of video, but you could get a look that looked like film so you weren’t compromising visuals as much. There’s always gonna be the video/film debate, but—
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Speaking of his documentary directorial debut Zebra Kids, a chronicle of adolescent growth via the learning of the teamwork of African drumming and dancing, filmmaker Gabriel Goodenough in this podcast shares his thoughts on what he calls America's third world cities, the importance of sharing art and the universality of youthful experience.
