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FRAMING THE PAST
FRAMING THE PAST
An interview with Nina Kellgren BSC
N ina Kellgren’s films, tele- vision dramas and docu-
mentaries have, down the years, won some dozen awards – including at least three for her Best Photography. But
not even prestigious prize-ware from festivals spanning Bulgaria to Banff and Cannes to Copenhagen could have quite matched the excitement of being in the final frame for this year’s Hollywood Oscars.
For Kellgren, who particularly treasures the collaborative nature of film-making, the experience of work- ing on Solomon And Gaenor was won- derful enough. But when writer-direc- tor Paul Morrison’s first-time feature then made it to the final five of the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards in March, it was surely the icing on the cake.
In the event Solomon And Gaenor, shot in Welsh and English, was - along with fellow contenders from Sweden, Nepal and France - finally pipped to the gold statuette by Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. But as they often say, “being nominated was enough.”
Around the time of the Oscars, Kellgren was actually to be found in altogether less glamorous surround- ings – in fact, within the confines of a partially disused mental hospital south west of London.
Inside one of the institution’s cavernous halls, they had created a dark, dank and dirty set known as Hellhole for a rather spectacular dance number on a curious Anglo- German family film fantasy called Mumbo Jumbo, set on the hexed island of Sinmouth.
As – and this is when it gets very strange indeed – some ecstatic young- sters escape from large bags of fertilis- er to the accompaniment of a pound- ing rock score, Kellgren’s camera crane swooped up and then forward into the eyeline of the young people now freed from a terrible curse.
Co-written and directed by Steve Cookson, Mumbo Jumbo features an extraordinarily eclectic cast, includ- ing Joss Ackland, Brian Blessed, Sylvester McCoy, John Inman, Richard O’Brien and young American import Jamie Walters, not to mention an eight-month pregnant Melinda Messenger (of Page 3 and Fort Boyard fame) as a fairy-tale princess.
Kellgren still giggles at the rec- ollection of this sort of cross between Fame and Roald Dahl - “it’s got a kind of surrealism to it that might just work,” she smiles - but the assignment itself, shot on a tight
schedule and even tighter budget, was particularly testing.
Using the new Fuji 500 stock for interiors and 250 for daylight and exteriors, Kellgren shot all the Sinmouth stuff – that’s about 80 per cent of the film - using a Storm filter: “It worked fantastically with the stock producing a lovely bluey grey green. We didn’t have the pre-production time to go to a bleach by-pass but doing it this way de-saturated the colours and gave it a fantastic ‘look’ which was perfect for this.”
It certainly couldn’t have con- trasted more vividly with Solomon And Gaenor – apart, that is, from the common budgetary restraints. Set in the Welsh Valleys in 1911, it’s a cross- cultural love story spanning the Welsh and Jewish communities which viewed each other with mutual suspicion.
“I was confirmed on the project early on and spent a lot of time with Paul Morrison at the early rehearsals and in the film’s preparation. I also had the opportunity to operate too which means that you begin to do things almost intuitively. When you see the rushes, you may rationalise then about what you were trying to do; at the time, you’re on roller skates.
“Paul showed me the work of a Polish photographer, Roman Vishniak, who using a hidden camera took photographs of Jewish commu- nities in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. What we wanted to recapture was the feel of these photographs which are very simple texturally.
“So we sought to give the film a visual simplicity. We also wanted to make sure the physical environment was present, so there’s plenty of smoke, coal dust and coal. And we avoided
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