https://believermag.com/an-interview-wi ... y-jenkins/
Das Thema ist altbekannt. Schon in den 70ern boykottierten Godard und andere Filmemacher Kodak, weil deren Filmmaterial für weiße Hauttöne optimiert war (mit dem weißen Model "Shirley" als Referenzbild) und schwarze Darsteller tatsächlich mit Öl geschminkt wurden, um in den Schatten mehr Zeichnung zu erzielen. Dazu gibt es auch wissenschaftliche Literatur."BJ: When I first got into film school, I was way behind the curve because I’m a little bit older than I seem. We shot everything on film when I was in film school. So you had to really learn how to expose an image, and that image went off to the lab, and it was like magic. It came back and you couldn’t see it on set, what it was. So I had to learn these techniques of how to expose skin on film. And both my films in film school featured people of color. I made one short film called Little Brown Boy that featured a protagonist very similar to Chiron in Moonlight. Then the other—I don’t know how the fuck this happened—is about an Arab American couple washing American flags in a post-9/11 South. And a lot of things in this country are systemically fucked-up. And the history of camera emotion, 35 mm emotion, is racist. It just is. It was marketed and calibrated to sell to suburban white families. And so 35 mm film was never intended to accurately reflect or replicate darker skin tones. So I learned all this shit on film because I kept making things and being like, Why does this look so bad? And there’s this cinematographer who used to work with Spike Lee named Malik Sayeed, who shot a film called Belly. And Belly is the most gorgeously shot film. Moonlight’s cool. [In] Belly, the cinematography is crazy. I mean just insane. And then there was a film called City of God with this Brazilian DP, César Charlone. And I remember listening to the commentary on City of God. There’s a scene where the actors are up in a tree. [It’s a] very dark film, like dark in tone and also very dark skins. And they shot it… I thought it was day-for-night, but it wasn’t. And I was like, How are they getting people who are darker than me to reflect, literally, moonlight? And César talks about taking—I mean, hey, this is Brazil, so they had to do what they had to do—like, literally taking cooking oil and just rubbing it all over the skin of the actors so it would literally catch the light and reflect it. And I was like, Oh, that’s a dope concept. And so typically when you make a film, you have a makeup department, and the makeup department uses what? Powder. They just put powder over everybody. But you don’t put powder on black skin. So I told my makeup person, I said, “Hey, this is a no-powder show. We need jojoba oil and shea butter.”
MJ: Yes!
BJ: And so everybody in Moonlight is just wearing oil. And then the other part of it, too, which is really cool: I feel like so many things that happened with Moonlight [were] just [about] timing. I’m just a very lucky and privileged person, because there’s this camera called the ARRI Alexa. And the Alexa is made in Germany. And we used these lenses called Hogg lenses that are also made in Germany. All the technical, like, lenses and glass in Moonlight come from Germany, which is a very strange thing. But this camera is digital, so it doesn’t abide by the rules of the systemically racist 35 mm emotion. Because of that, you can put a very dark subject next to a very bright subject. And this thing has so much latitude that, when you get in post, you can reach down into the shadow and you can pull it up however you want, and you can take that brightness and you can put it down how you want. So now you can calibrate it to whatever you want to calibrate it to. I think, had this movie been made in 2012, at the budget that it was, there’s no way it would look the way it did."
Auch dass digitale Kameras mehr Zeichnung/Dynamik in den Schatten haben als Film, ist unbestritten.
Aber AFAIK verbreitet Jenkins hier ein bisschen urbane Mythen, denn modernes Filmmaterial (wie Kodak Vision) sollte hinsichtlich der Hauttöne flexibler sein. Auch Kodak ersetzte Shirley irgendwann durch ein Referenzbild mit einem weißen, schwarzen und südostasiatischen Modell.
Andererseits: Dass bei "City of Gods" - also 2002 - und bei "Moonlight" immer noch mit Fettschminke gearbeitet wurde und die Regel galt (immer noch gilt?), schwarze Darsteller nicht zu pudern, erstaunt dann doch.
