American cinematographer and film director born 1959 in Ziębice near Wrocław, Poland.

Janusz Kamiński left Poland as a very young man, deciding to stay abroad for good after he had heard the news of the wave of strikes in Poland while on holiday in Greece. Having obtained political asylum and spent a few months in Vienna, he left for the United States in early 1981. He took up a job in Chicago and enrolled at the Film and Fine Arts Department of Columbia College. In 1987 he moved to Los Angeles to take a one-year cinematography course at the American Film Institute. His film career started in late 1980s and early 1990s with work for Roger Corman, the producer of grade-B thrillers, first as assistant cameraman and later as a cinematographer on pictures of which none made it into the history of the cinema. The breakthrough came with Diane's Keaton's 1991 TV film Wildflower. Kamiński's photography attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg and so started Kamiński's association with Spielberg. Kamiński's Polish background may have been a factor in Spielberg's choice as he was planning to shoot his Schindler's List in Poland. Anyway, Kamiński's road to international fame lay open - and would lead him from success to success.

Though he is now known primarily as Spielberg's cinematographer, Kamiński has worked for other directors, too, and was the director of photography on Julian Schnabel's acclaimed picture Le scaphandre et le papillon / The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In recent years Kamiński tried his hand twice at filmmaking and one of his two films was produced in Poland. He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.

Kamiński's long list of cinematography awards is topped by two Academy Awards - for Schindler's List in 1994 and for Saving Private Ryan in 1999 - and two nominations for Academy Awards - for Spielberg's Amistad in 1998 and for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly ten years later. In 2002 he won the Hollywood Film Festival Outstanding Achievement Award. In 2007 and 2008, respectively, he received the Golden Frog at the Camerimage - International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography and the Independent Spirit Award which is awarded to independent filmmakers in the USA. He is also a two-times winner of the BAFTA Film Award for cinematography: for Schindler's List in 1994 and for Saving Private Ryan in 1999. His photography for The Diving Bell and The Butterfly earned him the Los Angeles Film Critics and New York Film Critics Awards.

"The cinematographer needs to understand the script and translate words into images. Regrettably, many of us often fail to resist the desire to produce beautiful shots. It's a mistake. The cinema is like life. It's not always beautiful. That's why you need to have real world images under you eyelids to re-create reality in the studio".
- Kamiński in an interview taken by Barbara Hollender, "Rzeczpospolita", 23rd of November 2007.

Kamiński followed this principle when working on photography for Schindler's List, the film which earned him his first Oscar. He looked for true images of those times in a album of photographs by Roman Wiśniak, a photographer of Jewish settlements in 1920-1939. It was this quest for truthfulness which made Kamiński suggest to Spielberg that the film be made in black and white (after Bartosz Michalak, "Polskie Oskary", Warszawa 2000, Prószyński i s-ka). Michalak quotes Kamiński:

"'Schindler's List' was deliberately made with a modest use of technology. We aimed for achieving a kind of roughness or rawness. ... I approached this film as if I had been working on it fifty years ago, with scant light and without a tripod. How would I have worked on it? Naturally, I would have made many shots hand held and equally many with a camera on the ground. Of course we did not make it that way - it wasn't our intention. But the presence of certain inaccuracies in the camera movement and the reduced sharpness of images lends an air of greater realism."

In an interview with Paweł Gula ("Film" 28/1993), Kamiński stresses that the point was not to make the vision of human suffering and of the atrocities of war too pretty and to stick to the documentary-like convention. This is why a number of photographs were taken hand-held. Equally, he had to incorporate Spielberg's must-do ideas, such as the red colouring of a girl's coat to get out a symbolic meaning out of the scene showing the girl forcing her way through the black-and-white crowd at which the Germans were shooting.

"Janusz is definitely the best of all the cinematographers I have worked with. ... When I met him I realized that there was a true artist standing in front me. Using the right kind of lighting he creates pictures like Chagall's one day and like Goya's or Monet's another day. I thought: 'I need to keep that guy close to myself'. And it has been like that so far".
- Spielberg in an interview with Jola Czaderska-Hayek, www.yola.stopoklatka.pl.

Kamiński faced a totally different challenge - that of computerized special effects - when he took over from Dean Cundey as cinematographer of The Lost World, a sequel of Spielberg's Jurassic Park. He had to be very flexible in adjusting to an imposed cinematographic style:

"A number of producing and technological ideas had already been discovered when the first film was made. We knew what technology to use, how to incorporate certain images. This made us work fast".
- Kamiński in the interview with Bartosz Michalak.

Spielberg and Kamiński teamed up again a few years later to make Amistad, a film about the 1839 rebellion of African slaves transported in a ship by that name.

"In the case of 'Amistad' I knew as soon as I had read the script that I could not use 'pretty' photography. I didn't want that film to fall into the stereotypical type of shooting which is used for stories taking place in past centuries".
- Kamiński in the interview with Michalak.

He went for a way of filming in which the light would support the gory and emotional tale of the script, and he and Spielberg looked for helpful clues in Goya's paintings. It was also the first time Kamiński used the ENR, a photographic system made popular by Vittorio Storaro, in which a special chemical process brings out greater contrast, increases the areas of shadow, lightens up the lit areas and makes colours more pastel. The achieved effect earned Kamiński an Academy Award nomination, but he lost to Russel Carpenter, the director of photography for Titanic.

A year later, the next film of the Spielberg-Kamiński team, Saving Private Ryan, had more luck. This time they made a war film in colour so that - to quote Kamiński from the same book - you could see a very important thing: the blood on the uniform. The colours were not full, though, but, to use Kamiński's term, "vanishing". He looked for inspiration in Robert Capa's war photographs, finding in them both realism and the metaphor.

"There are eight surviving photographs, eight phenomenal photographs taken during the Allied invasion of Normandy. He did a whole roll, but some strange accident occurred during the developing and only eight were rescued. The lighting had made a double image appear on each of them, blurring the silhouettes of the soldiers. Now my primary job was to create images that would show the escaping souls of these soldiers. So that you could see they were still alive, but would soon die."
- Kamiński

Visually, Saving Private Ryan was styled as a naturalistic frontline report, with a lot of cruelty, the camera lens sprinkled with blood like it would be on the front, and death looking real. According to Zygmunt Kałużyński and Tomasz Raczek ("Wprost" 15/1994), despite the naturalism of Kamiński's photography the film had a high dose of artificiality which was due to the way it was narrated and to its pompous music, and which made it no more than a well-designed marketing product.

Spielberg the director or producer has had Kamiński as director of photography on several of his films, including Munich, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can and, more recently, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. Now Kamiński's is planning to work on Spielberg's picture about Abraham Lincoln and one about hippies sued for their refusal to do military service in Vietnam.

Kamiński enjoys a reputation for embracing experiments and, according to Julian Schnabel, it is well deserved:

"I was looking for a cinematographer who would not be afraid of experimenting. A few refused, while Kaminski just asked, 'When do we start?'. He is a cinematographer of an extraordinary courage".
- In an interview taken by Barbara Hollender, "Rzeczpospolita" 26th February 2008.

Owing to Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Kamiński was again close to winning an Academy Award for cinematography. Schnabel's picture tells a true story of the former editor-in-chief of "Elle" magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a crippling stroke and for many months communicated with those around him by blinking his left eye. Kamiński's camera adopted the point of view of paralyzed Bauby, making the viewers see the world the way he did. The shots are blurred and Bauby, his field of vision limited, sees people fragmentarily, for instance without heads. This is what Kamiński said after he had finished filming The Diving Bell and The Butterfly:

"I want to do films which will have an audience. I am not interested in the so-called festival films, which will be seen by three hundred people. Besides, before I start filming, I like to know that the picture will have a distributor. This is not to say that I despise independent cinema. After all, I have just made a film with Julian Schnabel. It is niche cinema, but I know that the picture - because of the subject or the actors - will appeal to the viewers".
- In an interview with Michał Burszta, www.filmweb.pl, 30th November 2007.

Kamiński debuted as director in 2000, with The Lost Souls.

"I grew up with the European and American films of 1970s. I watched them - 'Serpico', 'Easy Rider', 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and lots of others - as a teenager, still in Poland. They were excellent films, leaving a number of things not quite explained. I am fascinated by the cinema which makes you think instead of providing answers".
- In an interview by Artur Kosiński, "Cinema Polska" 1/2000.

For Kamiński, The Lost Souls was to be his way of approaching a mystery, and he hired Mauro Fiore as the cinematographer:

"I wanted to show the murky reality which exists parallel to the one we know. Hence the use of chiaroscuro, an almost complete lack of colour, the characters going out from the shadow into a blinding light, interiors in immediate danger of disintegration ...".
- In an interview taken by Agnieszka Topornicka, "Film" 1/2001.

The formula of a horror film proved, however, ill-fitting Kamiński's goal of talking about mystery and making people think. The subject-matter was as old as the world: the Satan is to come to the Earth and become man; naturally, this needs to be prevented at all cost. Critics tended to see The Lost Souls as one big artistic mistake:

"Although the plot is well constructed and moves on swiftly, the film is of a very dubious quality. This is because Kamiński is a non-believing prophet, one who does not believe in his own prophesies, but preaches them to entertain us, to make money and to make himself more socially popular".
- Krzysztof Kłopotowski, "Film" 1/2001.

Hania, Kamiński's Polish film made six years later, with himself as the cinematographer, proved a flop, too. Here, too, Kamiński the director attempted to say something about mystery, this time serving the viewers a sweet dish in the formula of a family film and a Christmas story.

"Kamiński was given a saccharine script about a Warsaw couple who invite an orphanage boy for Christmas. The child, who turns out a messenger from heaven, changes the couple's life. In America this shamelessly kitsch little story would immediately get to Christmas programmes of commercial television channels".
- Bartosz Żurawiecki, "Film", 12/2007.

Other critics did not show much more understanding, either.

Kamiński, who thought of making another film, has put the idea off for a while. Apparently, he did so for financial reasons, though the widely critical feedback on his previous directing projects may have impacted his decision, too.

Selected Filmography

Cinematographer:

• 1990 - Grim Prairie Tales, dir. Wayne Coe.
   
• 1990 - The Terror Within II, dir. Andrew Stevens.
   
• 1990 - The Rain Killer, dir. Ken Stein.
   
• 1991 - Wildflower, dir. Diane Keaton.
   
• 1991 - Killer Instinct, dir. Gregory Hoblit.
   
• 1991 - Cool As Ice, dir. David Kellogg.
   
• 1991- Pyrates, dir. Noah Stern.
   
• 1992 - Mad Dog Coll, dir. Noah Stern.
   
• 1993 - Trouble Bound, dir. Jeffrey Reiner.
   
• 1993 - Class of '61, dir. Gregory Hoblit.
   
• 1993 - Schindler's List / Lista Schindlera, dir. Steven Spielberg. Awards: 1993 - New York Film Critics Circle Best Cinematography Award; 1994 - Academy Award - Best Cinematograpy; BAFTA Cinematography Award; British Society of Cinematography - Best Cinematography Award; Chicago Film Critics Association Best Cinematography Award; National Society of Film Critics Award, USA)
   
• 1993 - The Adventures of Huck Finn, dir. Stephen Sommers.
   
• 1994 - Little Giants, dir. Duwayne Dunnam.
   
• 1995 - Tall Tale, dir. Jeremiash S. Chechlik.
   
• 1995 - How To Make an American Quilt, dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse.
   
• 1996 - Jerry Maguire, jointly with Chuck Cohen, dir. Cameron Crowe.
   
• 1997 - Amistad, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 1997 - The Lost World: Jurassic Park, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 1998 - Saving Private Ryan, dir. Steven Spielberg. Awards: 1998 - Academy Award - Best Cinematography; BSFC Best Cinematography Award; 1999 - Florida Film Critics Circle Best Cinematography Award
   
• 2001 - Artificial Intelligence: AI, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2002 - Minority Report, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2002 - Catch Me If You Can, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2004 - Jumbo Girl, short feature, jointly with Mauro Fiore, dir. Daniel Curran.
   
• 2004 - The Terminal, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2005 - Munich, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2005 - War of The Worlds, dir. Steven Spielberg.
   
• 2007 - Hania, dir. Janusz Kamiński.
   
• 2007 - Mission Zero, dir. Kathryn Bieglow.
   
• 2007 - Le scaphandre et le papillon / The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, dir. Julian Schnabel. Awards: 2007 - Boston Society of Films Critics Best Cinematography Award; Cannes Film Festival CST Jury Award; Camerimage Łodź Golden Frog
   
• 2008 - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, dir. Steven Spielberg

Director:

• 2000 - The Lost Souls, cinematography by Mauro Fiore. Written by Pierce Gardner and Betsy Stahl. Genre: horror film. The Satan is to descend on the Earth as man in the last year of the millennium. This will lead to the end of the world. Maya, a member of an exorcist group, has a vision which tells her whose body the ruler of the underground is going to take. She wants to prevent this from happening and meets the man chosen by the Satan. Unlike the deeply religious Maya, Peter is skeptical about religion and doubts the existence of the Satan. Peter cannot be persuaded that he is a part of a larger plan which aims to annihilate the Earth - until he finds it out for himself.
   
• 2007 - Hania, also cinematographer. Written by Andrzej Gołda. A family film about a Warsaw couple who could not decide to have children. The life lived by Ola, a trained cellist, and her husband, a graphic artist, seems happy, but is not so. When Ola runs into a schoolmate of hers who now works in a children's orphanage she decides to invite one of the home's inmates for Christmas. This proves a breakthrough decision, for the boy turns out to be a messenger from heaven and makes the couple realize what is missing in their lives.

Janusz Kamiński is the hero of Krzysztof Bukowski's documentary Janusz Kamiński - szkic do portretu artysty (1999).

Author: Ewa Nawój, August 2008.