With speeches by Paolo Carnera, CCS, and Timoty Aliprandi, CCS
Talking about Technovision Anamorphic Lenses. How did this project come about?
I was lucky enough to join Technovision in ’94. At that time, it was called ECE/Ace, founded by Henryk (Enrico) Chroscicki. One day we should also talk about Enrico’s story, which is simply amazing. Based on his intuition, Enrico would take the best ideas, innovations, and equipment from all around the world to Rome. In fact; he brought the anamorphic lenses, the crystal, the frontal lenses from Japan while he took the prime lenses Cooke from England. Throughout a long period, ECE/Ace Technovision represented Taylor Hobson Cooke Lenses, which later became Cooke Optics in Italy and some of other countries. Therefore, ECE/Ace had the exclusive right to represent those optics. At the beginning, the company had an optical and mechanical genius, Giuseppe Magni. In addition to Peppe, there were other engineers like Francesco Colelli. Mr. Colelli wasn’t a proper engineer, but he was able to make any kind of equipment from a simple piece of aluminium. The prime spherical lenses were the basic Technovision anamorphic lenses which could be made by Cooke, Zeiss, or Canon. The Technovision High-Speed lenses, recently used by Paolo Carnera, have the anamorphic Technovision element with the base mixed by Zeiss and K35. In some cases, a few 35mm were Zeiss Contax. Therefore we have the High-Speed Zeiss, High Speed Contax, High-Speed Canon K35 which all together make the High-Speed anamorphic series.
Which years are we talking about for this series?
We’re talking about ’78, ’79, maybe even earlier. Actually earlier [1974, editor’s note]. Those two series that we have available to rent, the same ones used by Paolo Carnera, were part of the package used by Storaro in Apocalypse Now. They weren’t similar: they were the same ones that we still have here today.
Were they in a package also included at Cooke Technovision?
Yes, Vittorio Storaro for Apocalypse Now had two sets of Cooke and one set of High-Speed. They came by Enrico Chroscicki and a Japanese collaborator, Kazuo Fukazawa, with whom he worked extensively. It is important to let people know that the majority of the crystal from all the world’s optical glass comes from Japan and it is the natural one made in quartz, not the one reproduced artificially. Therefore, all these vintage optics are originally from Japan, and Enrico went there to get these gems. Instead of producing only spherical lenses like Kowa, there was who just produced anamorphic lenses. Enrico started with the spherical parts to then added the anamorphic parts. Vittorio was one of the first to use these assembled optics with a housing that isn’t the one we use today, or that Carlo Rinaldi and Paolo Carnera used recently. It was an even older housing, very difficult to use. Enrico’s intuition came even earlier, in the ’60s, early ’60s: he had heard about an engineer in France who had put together three cylindrical lenses to place in front of a spherical one. The spherical lens was changed, but the anamorphic lens remained the same. You had to disassemble it…
A bit like Isco.
Yes, sort of… The Isco was the projection part, specifically for projectors. This was a Total Scope lens. It’s called that. We even have it here at Technovision. You would have three prime lenses, three or four prime lenses: 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 100mm, and you would change them as you needed to, but the anamorphic lens would always be the same. They weren’t round, but cylindrical, rectangular. Enrico went to buy this series, or rather this unique lens, without money. During Foffo Bartoli’s interviews, which we all thank for maintaining a historical archive of interviews, there is also Mario Vulpiani, an assistant and a friend of Chroscicki, who was also a cinematographer. He worked with Enrico, and in Bartoli’s video interview, he tells how Enrico went to be an engineer in Paris. He had no money and pretended to be talking to a banker in Italy by phone, in Rome: “Mario, look, I’m here. You have to send me five million to this address.” And Mario, on the other end, replied: “What are you saying? I don’t have a lira! What should I send you?” The French engineer, fortunately, didn’t speak Italian and let him take the lens of his word. Then Enrico returned and bought them all, paying him back three times as much. At that moment, Chroscicki was reborn, he built the Total Scope; I believe they even shot Cleopatra with those lenses.
How many sets did Enrico create? Three different sets?
So: the Total Scope, from the ’50s, ’60s. Then he had the idea to get the crystal in Japan, assembling it by first creating the Cooke part and then the High-Speed, which was a mix of Zeiss and K35.
Paolo Carnera intervenes: These sets have traveled through time.
Then Darius Khondji used them in Stealing Beauty.
How are these sets divided?
They are the Cooke Panchro sets that Carlo Rinaldi used for the series The King, and then the High-Speed series. But there was also a series called T2.1, mounted with Zeiss Standard Speed lenses, less appreciated.
Are they found only here in Rome and Paris?
No, no. And here we must mention another very important person, Joe Danton in London, and his company, JDC, Joe Danton Lenses, with whom Enrico collaborated.
They made the Xtal.
First, they came here from Japan to be assembled, later each of them was called as they wanted, then they expanded. Enrico called them Technovision Lenses, Joe Danton sold them as JDC, and he also sold them in Panavision as Xtal Cooke or Xtal Express. Call them what you want, but they were always the same.
So, they also have a Panchro base?
The world’s anamorphic vintage sets are only found in three types: Cooke Base, K35 / Contax Zeiss Base, and Standard Speed Base. You won’t find other elements. Because with a lens that had little coverage, you had vignetting on the anamorphic. So the attempt was to mount those optics that had less vignetting on the anamorphic. The film had a gate with an aperture of 12.5x22mm while today on digital we often have a base of 24mm by 2mm in height. For this reason, today the anamorphic lenses on digital cameras vignette more; these lenses suffer because they were conceived for other measures. In the world, you find Cinevision, Technovision, JDC, and other brands, but more or less these are the bases.
And were they all modified by Chroscicki and Joe Danton?
Also in America were Denny Clairmont and Otto Nemenz.
And do they look alike? However, the anamorphic element changes…
It changes, because then everyone had their mechanic, their optical technician. Giuseppe Magni and Marcello Saraga, in Technovision. I took over in ’94, and I had the good fortune to work with Marcello and especially with Peppe Magni just at the time when, at the end of his career – alas, he died after a few years – he was assembling other optics. There are three recognized systems in the world. Even John Power in his handbook of cinematography recognized three systems: Panavision, Arriflex, and Technovision. Technovision was creating base optics, let’s say, which others then used. For example, the 20-100 Cooke, the zoom, in Technovision with Peppe Magni, was made into many versions: 15-75, 18-90, and 25-220. Or the 20-60, again a small zoom from Cooke, had been made into 18.5-55. This is to make you understand that our brand served the cinematographer’s path, the demands of cinematography. “I need a wider angle, I don’t need more tele, but often, when I’m in a certain situation, I need more than 20 millimeters on a zoom,” and there Enrico and Peppe were studying to be able to widen the range, decrease it in phase on the narrow end but widen it on the wide end. That was an important insight because it gave a way to have a different expression than those zooms that were there at the time. The Angenieux was 25-250 and 17-102 and no other range. 20-100 and 25-50 instead of the Cooke part, that’s it. There were no other focal expressions.
Intervention by Paolo Carnera: Peppe Magni’s research came from a personal drive or there was some cinematographer who told him “I would like to… why don’t we try?”
There was a personal drive because, some, like Joe Danton, I repeat, were cinematographers and not surprisingly they created solutions that others did not have, but they were also often stimulated. Look at Vittorio Storaro, look at Pasqualino De Santis, and other big names we know, like Peppino Rotunno.
Intervention by Paolo Carnera: Vittorio took a big risk when he went to the Philippines to shoot Apocalypse Now with those lenses.
He took a big risk, because there was the possibility of working with Panavision. But instead he decided to bring the optics he knew and he had people to support him. And technical solutions. On the Internet you can find a picture of a 2C tethered with strings…it looks like it was tethered at random, but there was a mount there with rings so that he could create a stabilized first shot on the helicopters. Storaro had a mount that was not only optical, but also concerned solutions on the optical mechanical part. On the loop, the loop extension, the Magni loop from 2C, which revolutionized the film world at that time. There was no such thing before that on the finder of the 2C you had an ND, a magnifier; for the first time therefore you could magnify, focus well and re-enlarge, and most importantly you could have an anamorphic lens that, by switching, had the base with these three elements. It was Peppe Magni’s intuition, certainly stimulated by Vittorio, and by Chroscicki himself. It was, it was, a rental that supported cinematographers. That’s the difference with rentals that buy and find what you find, kind of like a McDonald’s, which always has the same things. Here, on the other hand, we have always done research, we did it with Paolo Carnera for M [ Joe Wright’s M the Son of the Century, cinematography by Seamus McGarvey ASC, BSC and Paolo Carnera, CCS], and for so many of his other projects, also for the D’Innocenzo brothers‘ films.
We also did his work with Martone, we mounted a 0.95 aperture lens, a Xenon lens that even today nobody has, only we have it, made for Carnera who had seen on that lens something different from the Canon “Dream Lens” something to give him a quid more; and we prepared a mount for that lens there, which did not exist. That’s the difference.
I wonder if your technicians creating these anamorphic sets changed some of the characteristics of the starting lenses, the aperture, or things like that, or did they keep them?
It was often done, but so was the rear lens or the front lens in order to give more aperture or coverage. The T-stop also changed. Our 18-90 superzooms, instead of being a T3.1 like the standard Cooke one, became a T2.5.
That was what was being sought.
Intervention by Timoty Aliprandi: Just a curiosity, how much do you feel the difference in color or style with that series with the Contax Zeiss and K35?
Not so much, because a nice selection was being made and the Contax and Zeiss that were used are still photographic optics, not born for film. So they have that look there.
Intervention by Timoty Aliprandi: So you don’t see the difference in the look so much.
As is also explained in the IRIS section, it is not only the optics, the crystal, that gives the characteristic of an optic, the character, but it is also the design of the diaphragm. It became famous the T1.4 optic, the first High Speed Zeiss, which was triangular, used for Shining. All the blurs in Shining, the torches, the louvers, are all triangular, and anyway, beyond this triangular element that you see on the blur, just all the blur is made different by an oval, circular, octagonal, hexagonal ring, you know? The design makes you different in both the blur and the passage of light and therefore the internal reflections. All the apertures are changed on these, replaced with diaphragms with a larger number of blades to be more circular, so that when you look at the aperture, they’re all the same.
It was done by rental, in this case, Technovision, but Joe Danton also did it.
But did the anamorphic element change the characteristics of the lens from an optical point of view?
Well, depending on the crystal they were using, yes. Hotter, less hot.
So there was a coating on the anamorphic element as well?
The coupling is also critical. If we take three focals in different parts of the world, a fifty Xtal in London, a fifty Xtal in New York, one in Japan, one in Rome, one in Paris, and so on, beyond how they are set up in terms of old age, what is critical to look at is whether the rental keeps them at a high level of alignment, spherical and cylindrical alignment.
I make a reference to the Xtals used for Ex Machina, a film I always show at the Centro Sperimentale to pupils. That film gives you the idea that he used deliberately shot optics to get even more blur, but mostly because I don’t know why Hardy used a Sony F65 which was not the best performing digital at that time, in fact, maybe it had a very bad look, very etched that sensor there and so he deliberately used almost shot optics. He confirmed this to me, saying he wanted to give a sense of more softness, blurring at the edges. So the way you put those optics on is critical.
Very little is needed: if you don’t do maintenance, the optic loses its quality, but when you do maintenance, disassemble, and reassemble, if you don’t have exact alignment, the optic is either beautiful, beautiful…
or ugly as hell!
And so now these sets what optics do they have, these sets that are present as focal lengths? You said that sometimes they have been modified, changed, and even the focal lengths, I would like to understand better… The basic focal length is that.
Here in D – Vision Movie People I only added a 135 that was missing and we are mounting a 200 of that High Speed part. So the High-Speed part of now is 24, 35, 55, 85, and 135. Soon there will be a 200. What about the COOKE Panchro base? The COOKE Panchro base instead is 32, 40, 50, 75, 100. That was the base at that time. Then they would put on zooms. For Apocalypse Now besides the 100, there were zooms and there were no other focal lengths, like for example the Russian ones that we have introduced now, which are complementary to those focal lengths: 135, 150, 180, 250, and they are wonderful.
Were the zooms that were used modified anamorphic zooms?
They were, basically, the spherical Cooke. So the 20-100 became the 40-200. The 25-250 became the 50-500. This is because we are still using them today, and Carlo Rinaldi also used them for The King.
Intervention by Timoty Aliprandi: Why do you think that today, indeed for the last few years, five to six years, in digital we are reusing these lenses so much?
I take a step back. Another time you asked me, “But why is it that for a while Cooke, that is, anamorphic Cooke, was not used anymore?” I, of course, lived through the period when there was only film, and there was an underlying problem: they were trying to have a panoramic format that was not difficult to interpret and to use, so it was not onerous on the light demand. So they worked for a lot of years, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, but maybe even longer, until 2002-2005, with a super 2.35 format. The super 2.35 format was the most used ever in cinema because you were exploiting a small portion of the negative, it was 10 mm high, 10.30X24MM. Then, what would happen?
This portion of the negative would go through the lab, we would go and recreate an inter-negative with an anamorphic lens that would redo the [deanamorfosi o decompressione] opposite desqueeze of what is done in projection, and then stretch the horizontal and compress the vertical. We would then end up with an anamorphic negative. Often and often there was a problem with the anamorphic lens in the lab because we would make large specimens, and we would go for the best, most qualitative optics. In fact, at that time we were looking for more etching because you had so many processes, unlike today when we look for the least etching. You would shoot, you had a negative, then from this negative, you would go and do all these processes to anamorphize, then contact print and then project with an anamorphic lens. So if you didn’t have an etched negative, you couldn’t see anything.
Often and often we would go to screenings, that was the time when the cinematographers would go to the theaters to see how the projection looked and what degree of quality the anamorphic lens had.
What anamorphic lenses did the lab use?
They were anamorphic lenses created by the people who made these machines. They would mount these machines, and often they weren’t even level. And you had the feeling that all your verticals were hanging a little bit.
You reminded me of something… A month ago, at our headquarters in Cinecittà, I ran into Pasquale Cuzzupoli who restored Novecento, among others, with Vittorio Storaro. Could he be a person to ask about all these proceedings?
Yes, it certainly could be interesting. With the advent of digital, the use of these optics has been crucial. They had been sidelined because of their poor engraving, but with digital, which has “worse” sensors than film, it became a perfect match. I remember a film with Fabio Zamarion in which we went to check the width of the skid of some screening rooms with the exhibitors. It was a huge effort, even expensive, to use very high-quality cameras and optics only to see the film projected in poor-quality cinemas, with lenses that were not even plumbed. With digital these problems have been overcome. I remember that among the first people who wanted to use them were Marcello Montarsi (CCS) himself and Paolo Carnera (CCS), and in advertising Agostino Castiglioni overbearingly brought anamorphic back into Milanese advertisements.
There has been a resurgence in the popularity of vintage lenses. Harald told me that they were developing Technovision with P+S Technik. I wanted to find out what you thought about this trend and the new Technovision lenses compared to vintage lenses.
Since the birth of digital, I have been experiencing a wonderful time. Before the market was stable, there were only three brands of optics. Paul, tell me if I am wrong, the Bauschs were almost unused because they had yellowed over the years. I remember an operator from the 80s-90s, Carlo Cerchio, who used only Bausch optics and he was the last one to use that optic there, but at that time they had Zeiss high speed, the 1.4, Cooke Panchro and then the Zeiss standard 2.1, the K35. The Canons were seen as optics to avoid because they were too soft.
Paolo, since you’re here, I’m going to include you in the conversation. During that time were you looking for maximum etching as your main choice? What was your approach to film before digital?
Paolo Carnera: I was always a Zeiss supporter. I was looking for maximum definition because I was terrified of projections in cinemas. I would see the images smashing, losing body and strength. It was distressing. Today I am more serene because with digital I can control the image on the set and check the effect of aberration. You control it — in the analog world, you only sensed it.
Are you of the opinion that digital projection today is better than film?
Paolo Carnera: No. You have more control of the image upstream, but you always have the highest quality visually in analog.I recently saw a commercial shot on film, and the crystal clear quality of a positive from a negative is incredible.
Massimo, tell me about the new Technovision.
As I said before, I am experiencing a wonderful moment. Before there were only three brands, now there are so many optics even from unknown worlds like China. There is not the perfect optic, but the one that fits the project.
New brands and different formats have been introduced. I can’t talk too much about the Technovision project because I was not part of it, but I have seen the Lupin series on Netflix, shot with these optics. I can’t say if they are better or worse, they are just more tools. Research is key, and having more tools is better for cinematographers.
The separation of Arri and Zeiss has stimulated both companies to create new optics such as the Supremes and others. Never before have there been so many instruments. It is a wonderful time with many new possibilities.
