CINEMATOGRAPHERS' TREASURE TROVE OF IMAGES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News film Writer

Lighting, camera movement, frame composition and lens choice make up the true language of motion pictures. Cinematographers are the essential artists who design those pictures. And this year's nominees brought us a treasure trove of indelible images.

Remi Adefarasin (``Elizabeth''): The British cinematographer oversaw the mesmerizing, second-unit desert photography for the Oscar-winning ``The English Patient'' before going on to make this study of the Virgin Queen's rise to power a dazzling display of moody shadows, precision illumination and carefully deployed camera pyrotechnics.

``Rembrandt's paintings really summarized the whole look we were going for. They have pools of light that fall down and bathe the main protagonists, but we didn't want it to look theatrical, like a spotlight was falling on them.

``So, the sets were deliberately made dark, so it would be easier for me to keep the light off. That way, you could see that you were in a real environment, but the light could be pinpointed on where the story was without overcooking it. We didn't want it to be so stylized that you felt like you were being manipulated.''

Richard Greatrex (``Shakespeare in Love''): A BBC-trained cameraman who also shot ``Mrs. Brown'' with director John Madden, Greatrex tried to create a realistic environment for ``Shakespeare's'' farcical goings-on while providing unobtrusive illumination for its large cast of declaiming characters.

``John's shots are always exceedingly elaborate, so you try to create a lighting style that can cope with that, which often takes rather a lot of doing. A shot very rarely holds still; it develops from close-up into wide and back into close-up again, and from one room into another.

``The other thing is to give space to the actors that allows them to feel free. I try not to tie actors up with `you've got to hit this mark because this light's here.' I think an essential part of the storytelling is to permit actors to concentrate on being the characters and not have to think about all these terrible technicalities all the time.''

Conrad Hall (``A Civil Action''): This is veteran director of photography Hall's eighth Oscar nomination; he won the award for ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.'' His brief on ``A Civil Action'' was to help director Steven Zaillian pare down a highly technical, complicated and lengthy corporate malfeasance lawsuit to its dramatic basics.

``Our story involves living rooms, bathrooms, hallways, kitchens, that kind of thing, which is a lot different than forests or mountains or oceans or costumes. It was particularly interesting to try to find a look for the essence of the story, which is about trying to find the truth about whether polluted well water poisoned children.

``For me, it was like the difference between clear water and polluted water. I tried to find the clarity of image that would be representative of a search for the truth. The clear, crisp imagery we tried to create helped to reinforce the sense of that search.''

Janusz Kaminski (``Saving Private Ryan''): Kaminski won an Oscar for ``Schindler's List,'' his first collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, and was also nominated for their third film together, ``Amistad.'' Many feel that his visualization of the D-Day invasion in ``Saving Private Ryan'' is the most realistic combat footage ever staged.

``My aim was to make the viewers feel like they were active participants in the invasion of Normandy. And I felt I succeeded in making the camera an active participant as well, rather than just being an objective observer.

``I read somewhere that the operators were let free and they just ran around the beach with cameras. That's simply impossible to do, because you have the whole field prerigged with squibs and explosives. Since those are going off all through the take, the actors and cameramen had to rehearse their moves. It may appear chaotic on the screen, but the operators were following carefully choreographed action. Nothing happened haphazard; it was very much calculated.''

John Toll (``The Thin Red Line''): Toll earned Oscars for shooting ``Braveheart'' and ``Legends of the Fall,'' and his ``Red Line'' work recently won this year's American Society of Cinematographers' outstanding achievement award. Toll's visuals have been praised for their beauty and lending a formal coherence to Terrence Malick's narratively diffuse World War II film.

``The visual idea of all this violence occurring in such a beautiful place was really striking. It's really a film about the tragedy of war, and that really contrasted the horrible nature of the combat on Guadalcanal.

``The challenge was to re-create this event and to get inside the heads of the characters in a way that, cinematically, felt very natural. We wanted the audience to feel as if they were witnessing these events and feel the emotions of the characters very close-up and firsthand. We did it by trying to re-create the natural circumstances of the war in that environment. You do that by using the camera to tell the story; in our particular case, we were really interested in almost putting the camera into the story somehow.''

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos

Photo: (1) no caption (Remi Adefarasin)

(2) no caption (Richard Greatrex)

(3) no caption (Conrad Hall)

(4) no caption (Janusz Kaminski)

(5) no caption (John Toll)