Hollywood and the film industry it contains can be described as
an ego factory, a sprawling industrial complex with assembly lines
churning out rafts of self-adoring aggrandizers. Notwithstanding
the wannabe celebrities and industry muckety-mucks, there are
still sincere and serious hardworking people on both sides of the
camera striving to disseminate real art in the midst of a look-at-me
milieu. Cinematographer Sandra Valde-Hansen is such a person.
Born to first-generation Filipino Americans, Valde-Hansen grew
up in Florida and began her fixation on film at the age of nine. “It’s
something I started thinking about really early on, eight or nine, I
think,” she says. “I wanted to make movies—not direct them, film
them . . . I got into cameras as a kid, and in high school I was in a
dark room all the time.”
Her apprenticeship featured a nice mix of the academic and the
practical. She attended film school at Florida State University, a
graduate program in cinema studies at NYU, and the American
Film Institute. She also, early in her career, was fortunate to work
on films with Tony Forresta, her mentor, a director who came up
during the cinema verité movement. Her initial job with Forresta
led to more work, and her career evolved from there.
Her style has been largely associated with the cinematographic
work she’s done for Gregg Arraki, a director who came to
prominence in the nineties as a driving force in the New Queer
Cinema era. Her first collaboration with the director occurred on
the film Kaboom.
“Gregg is influenced by many things: the eighties, music, fashion,
pop culture—his style in Kaboom is visually and emotionally
frenetic in a wonderful way,” says Valde-Hansen. She sees a
nihilistic strain that’s exhilarating amidst the postmodern pastiche
of visual and thematic elements.
“Some directors say they can recognize my work because of
the lighting,” she told me. “I don’t know that I can describe my
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