In 1973, Gayne Rescher, ASC shot a film called Claudine, which was about the romance between a housekeeper (Diahann Carroll) and a garbageman (James Earl Jones). To convey the reality of life for these two regular people, the cinematographer crafted gritty, desaturated images. Recently, directors Coodie and Chike wanted to create a similar feeling in a video for Cruna’s “Take Me Higher,” and they asked cinematographer Frey Hoffman to reference Rescher’s work. Hoffman was able to glean inspiration and advice straight from the source. He recalls, “I sent Gayne an e-mail, and a few hours later, he gave me a call. He was great to talk to, and I picked his brain on what he did.” In the video, Cruna’s girlfriend is being hounded by a man who lies to her, claiming that Cruna has been fooling around with other women. As the girlfriend works in her beauty salon, Cruna talks to her over the phone, trying to tell her that the stories aren’t true, while his competitor tries to convince her that

they are. Eventually, at a nightclub show, Cruna steps off the stage and whisks his girlfriend away, leaving the disappointed antagonist to walk off on his own. “The characters are ordinary people trying to make love and life work,” says Hoffman.In forming his approach, Hoffman at first thought of trying to obtain the camera, lenses, lights and film stock that Rescher had used 32 years earlier. But it quickly became evident that he’d never be able to precisely re-create the same shooting conditions. The first problem was the stock: Kodak discontinued Eastman 5247, Rescher’s stock, long ago, and the grain structure of the company’s emulsions has changed dramatically in the intervening years. In the 1970s, the grains in Kodak stocks were composed of polyhedral silver-halide crystals; each grain had many multiple planes, rather like a clenched fist, and light tended to bounce off the crystals in various directions. But during the 1980s and 1990s, Kodak began to incorporate flattened, tabular

grains (T-grains) into its emulsions. These grains could be oriented so that they would absorb more light, which meant that they could be smaller and less numerous, resulting in images with a less grainy appearance.
After doing a lot of research, Hoffman concluded that the best solution was to use Kodak Vision 500T 7279, underexpose it by one stop and then push-process it by one stop. “It might seem odd to go to a 500-speed stock when the 5247 was rated at 125,” he notes, “but if I’d shot a 125-speed stock, the grain structure would have been so fine that even underexposing and push-processing would have gotten me nowhere near the grain of the original. I knew I had to have larger crystals, so I went with 7279.” Once Hoffman realized that capturing the essence of Rescher’s work could be accomplished without reassembling Rescher’s tools, he decided to work with other modern gear as well. Rescher shot Claudine with a Mitchell BNC and Cooke lenses, and Hoffman