One might use the term ‘the best of both worlds’ when describing the use of both film and video in the feature-length doc Undying Love, written and directed by Helene Klodawsky and shot by DOP Francois Dagenais.

Undying Love recounts some of the loves lost and found after World War II among Jewish concentration camp survivors. The stories are told through archival footage, interviews with survivors, dramatic re-enactments and glimpses of life today.

‘The challenge in a film like Undying Love, where you have a combination of storytelling techniques, is to find ways of shooting where the various kinds of formats will work in sync,’ explains producer Ina Fichman of Montreal’s La Fete Productions.

Originally the plan was to shoot the entire doc on a Sony 700 Digital Betacam video camera. But when the Montreal-based Dagenais came into the picture, he made some suggestions.

‘I proposed that the dramatic re-enactments be done on film [Super 16mm] to obtain a different texture and more of a poignant feel,’ he recalls.

Dagenais showed Fichman and Klodawsky music videos to illustrate film techniques he had employed such as cross process and bleach-bypass.

‘These techniques cause a shift in color and add a lot of grain to give it a fairly unique texture. It resembled some of the pictures the director had shown me from the beginning of the century – since she wanted more of an impressionistic feel in the re-enactments – and a look that generated a feeling of memory,’ he says.

The DOP went on to shoot Kodak Vision 7277 320T and 7246 250D film stocks, primarily on an Aaton camera. The interviews were shot on digiBeta.

‘The focus was on the characters, not on the background, and we wanted the shots to have a certain depth of field,’ Fichman explains. ‘It wasn’t an option for us to shoot interviews on film because we were interviewing elderly people and we knew the interviews would be quite long.’

Dagenais says it was a challenge for him and Klodawsky to construct the video-shot interviews to look interesting and more abstract.

‘Most of the people we interviewed were between 70 and 80 years old. I used a lot of filtration to take out that harshness of the video and because [Klodawsky] wanted them to look like movie stars,’ he recalls.

A sequence in Undying Love that shows elderly couples ballroom dancing was shot using both Super 16mm and digiBeta. The scene serves as both a hard cut and soft transition that the viewer is brought back to several times.

‘One of the subjects says ‘I don’t believe in love’, so we went back to the film version because we had a grainier, harder look. The video was shot in a softer way, to show contrasting emotions in the person speaking,’ Dagenais says.

The crew shot some scenes in Poland on film with a Bolex camera. ‘We’d arrive in a village, put costumes on people and shoot them in film so that it looks a bit like a re-enactment,’ recalls Dagenais. Period costumes were acquired from the Roman Polanski production The Pianist.

One of Dagenais’ most challenging scenes in video was when a group of elderly female Holocaust survivors had their hair done in a salon, which was of particular importance to them since they remembered being without hair in the camps.

‘In that scene we needed the same quality and consistency as the other scenes in the movie that were more controlled, such as the re-enactments and the interviews,’ he says.

Dagenais says he’s wary of being set on just one shooting format.

‘There are advantages to different formats. I do believe that film – in terms of pure optical quality – is better than video. What I liked on Undying Love especially is that I was able to use some old processing, like the cross process and bleach-bypass,’ he says. ‘Film and photography go back 100 years, so there are all these processes and old tricks you can go back to. Video is extremely new technology. For me, the arrival of video will just stretch filmmakers [in terms of] what they can do.’

Dagenais was recently nominated for a Canadian Society of Cinematographers award for Undying Love. The awards will be presented March 29th.

The film, which was recently broadcast on CTV, Tele-Quebec and the Netherlands’ NIK Media, is distributed by La Fete and is currently making the US festival rounds. It will be seen on Vision TV in May.