The 360-degree man
The Berlinale is to award cameraman Michael Ballhaus an Honorary Bear for his lifetime achievement.
Cameraman Michael Ballhaus once said in an interview with the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “In many films I often remember the pictures but have no memory of the story or who took part. And important as the dialogues are, I like it best if a story can be told without words.” This quote also sums up his life’s work in the cinema. Michael Ballhaus will receive an Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement at the 2016 Berlinale.
The 360-degree tracking shot became his trademark
When he was 18, Michael Ballhaus, who was born in 1935, watched Max Ophüls working on the film Lola Montez. That’s when he decided to become a cameraman. In his early work in the late 1960s, he got to know the German auteur film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he would later shoot fifteen films – including the Marriage of Maria Braun, which won a Silver Bear in 1979. Ballhaus’s breakthrough had come earlier, however, with Martha (1974): during shooting, Fassbinder and Ballhaus were thinking about how best they could resolve the first meeting of a future couple as a magical moment. Ballhaus suggested a tracking shot in a semi-circle. Fassbinder demanded a full circle. The intensity of the scene fascinated the audience so much that the 360-degree tracking shot has since been regarded Ballhaus’s trademark. In 1982 Ballhaus went to Hollywood and worked with many prominent US directors – first and foremost with Martin Scorsese. They made seven films together, including The Color of Money (1986), Good Fellas (1990), Gangs of New York (2002) and Departed (2006). Talking about both directors, Ballhaus says today: “The really good ones always had something crazy about them.”
In 2014 Ballhaus announced that he had been suffering from glaucoma since 1996 and was progressively going blind. The Berlinale will be honouring him by showing ten of the total of over 80 films he made. “The pictures I’ve filmed become inner images. The movie is outside, somehow detached.”
Berlinale from 11 to 21 February 2016 in Berlin
