Films that used silver retention / bleach bypass

[gateway2000X]

I read in a journal years ago about Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) I think it is mentioned that bleach bypass was used, maybe just for the scenes in India. Does anyone have a source for old American Cinematographer issues to check for this and others?

[Virtualcrane]

I read in a journal years ago about Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) I think it is mentioned that bleach bypass was used, maybe just for the scenes in India. Does anyone have a source for old American Cinematographer issues to check for this and others?

Yes, bleach-bypass was used for select scenes. Here are some relevant quotes from the Alexander spotlight in the November 2004 issue of American Cinematographer you mentioned. These are listed in the order that they appear in the article:

Exteriors were filmed in Morocco and northern Thailand...Prieto enhanced them with a strategy that incorporated six film stocks, a variety of filtration and a selective use of bleach-bypass processing. He firmed up these choices after several weeks of testing at Eclair, which processed all of the production's footage and generated 35mm dailies and high-definition (HD) video dailies throughout the shoot. (The production's financing arrangement mandated the use of a French lab.)

The varied visuals the filmmakers had in mind were one reason they decided early on to finish Alexander with a DI...However, the decision to do a DI raised some questions about Prieto's desire to do a bleach bypass on a significant portion of the negative. He recalls, "That came up constantly in preproduction: 'Why do it on the negative?' I was told that you can achieve a very similar effect digitally, but I don't think it's the same; the difference is in the grain structure. Also, there's something about doing the process on the negative that creates surprises; I've done it several times and am always surprised by the results. I wanted to use it in Alexander for sequences set in India, where the Macedonians encounter extreme hardship. I wanted to create the feeling of difficulty, and in a sense, having my work be difficult — having areas go very dark and highlights blow out without my control — was something I thought was appropriate. When it's an effect you add in post, you might shy away from adding quite so much contrast, but when it's built into the negative, it is what it is, and all of its defects or difficulties are part of its beauty."

"When they head into India, I wanted to create a feeling of greater difficulty, a sense that their objective has become muddied, so I switched to [Kodak Vision 500T] 5279 and did a ⅓ bleach bypass on the negative — I found during prep that a ⅓ bleach bypass at Eclair is pretty intense, almost equivalent to a full bleach bypass in L.A. labs. We continue that look through all of the India scenes up to the point where Alexander tells his men they're finally going home. That scene was shot on 79 but processed normally." For scenes intended for bleach bypass, [Prieto] underexposed 5279 by ⅓ of a stop and used only 85 filters and Polarizers on the lens.

Timing 'Alexander' insert:

ASC: Is it difficult to deal with bleach bypass in DI?

Prieto: Scanning the 35mm is very difficult. On 25th Hour we had to rescan several shots. The contrast is so great that sometimes the highlights were okay but we couldn't darken it enough — we would darken but get no detail. So we had to rescan it and tilt the scale toward the darks.

ASC: How are you grading the bleach bypass?

Prieto: Most of the time we've been adding saturation, like in the Indian palace, where the concept of the scene is the contrast of color as well as the contrast of light and dark. We used bleach bypass for the pure contrast, but we brought back the color with grading.

ASC: That's a new approach to bleach bypass. With traditional film grading, bleach bypass has often been used to desaturate the image. Now, that is easily done in DI. What else do you like about bleach bypass?

Prieto: The grain comes alive. Perhaps the grain also becomes more apparent when you exaggerate contrast digitally, but I feel the grain structure is more organic when it's integrated into the negative.