Screenshot from trailer for Carol, directed by Todd Hayne.
The new Todd Hayne movie Carol has arrived and I can state that it’s a photographer’s film.
The story is a love affair between two women in early 1950s New York, a time when gay and lesbian romance was seen as a moral lapse, or worse. The implications in this for danger and secrecy, and the teasing development of their attraction, finds its visual expression in the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Ed Lachman.
In preparing for the film’s visual style Hayne and Lachman studied early 1950s still photography, looking for the right colour palette and focal qualities. They looked at women photographers of the time including Esther Bubley, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt and Ruth Orkin, but they found their principal reference in the work of Saul Leiter, an abstract painter and colleague of De Kooning, who had taken up photography and flourished.
Leiter’s beautiful Kodachromes captured the compression and layering of the Manhattan streetscape. He shot through shadows, blurs and reflections to capture the great cities ambiguity and mystery, and its poetry.
In the movie, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (both also Oscar-nominated for the film) are seen through a variety of obstacles, glimpsed in longshot, shrouded in shadow, and overlayed by reflections. It creates a rich visual texture which helps carry the film forward, rather like a writer’s literary style creates the right atmosphere for the events in a novel.
Lachman’s compositions as expert as Leiter’s, despite his assertion that he’s a cine photographer and not a still photographer. The movie was shot on film, in Super 16, not 35mm, to create “a certain emotional quality — you’re viewing the character through the texture of the grain but also feeling their emotions through the grain.”
One further pleasure for readers of blogs like this is that the character of Therese is a budding photographer herself, and we see her with cameras of the time and even in a picture conference at the New York Times where she works. Her interest in photography is not a casual plot point, it’s the perfect analogy for her character, discrete and watchful, her beautiful big eyes like camera lenses.
Greg Neville's photography blog 
The connection between Abstract Expressionism and photography is very germane to your very informed discussion of his movie (which I have not yet seen). It is clear that there is more than a connection, but in so much current art historical writing, photography is reported as being the derivative medium. As archives open up and wider research done, more may come to accept that the stimuli for this style operated equally on both mediums (just as William Klein and Franz Kline share similar sounding surnames), similarities arising from an imported European consciousness of responses to the changing social structures of the post-war/Cold War era in America, with profound fear (The Bomb, Russia, Korea, Cuba, the American Isthmus) glossed over by ramping technologies of consumerist culture. Saul Leiter who is just now getting the attention he deserves, is a case in point. Your posts on movies always provoke thoughts about photography.