Name Rob Tregenza | Role Cinematographer | |
 | ||
Nominations Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography Movies Inside/Out, Werckmeister Harmonies, Three Businessmen, Talking to Strangers, The Arc Similar People Gabor Medvigy, Miklos Gurban, Agnes Hranitzky, Jean‑Luc Godard, Mikkel Gaup | ||
Rob Tregenza (born November 14, 1950) is a North American cinematographer, film director, and producer. Besides shooting his own projects, Tregenza also worked as a director of photography with other directors, including Béla Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies), Claude Miller (Marching Band), Pierre William Glenn (The Sad and Lonely Death of Edgar Allan Poe), and Alex Cox (Three Businessmen).
Contents
Early work
Tregenza earned his PhD from UCLA in 1982. He has produced, directed and photographed four feature films: Talking to Strangers (1987), which appeared at the Berlin International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival; The Arc (1991), a co-production with Film Four International which showed in Berlin, Edinburgh, Toronto, and Chicago; Inside/Out (1997), which screened at Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Sundance; and Gavagai (2016).
Tregenza's first feature, Talking to Strangers, won him acclaim and the eye and praise of Jean-Luc Godard, who personally selected the film in 1996 to be showcased at the Toronto Film Festival. Richard Brody, of The New Yorker, wrote of the main character, Jesse, in the film: "The drive for [his] purity extends through all domains—intimate, intellectual, artistic, and, for that matter, religious—as the quest for experience comes into conflict with the yearning for the realization of a higher, even transcendently great, ideal."
Tregenza's third feature, Inside/Out, premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section.
Tregenza's fourth feature film, GAVAGAI (2016) was shot in 35mm, in Telemark,Norway. It stars Andreas Lust (The Robber 2010, Revanche 2008), Anni-Kristiina Juuso (The Cuckoo 2009) and Mikkel Gaup (Kautokeino Rebellion 2008) GAVAGAI was based on 15 poems by Tarjei Vesaas.
Cinematic technique
Tregenza's work often employs the use of long takes to create mise en scene. His cinematic inspirations include the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, Kenji Mizoguchi, & Jean-Luc Godard. He believes that cinema, in the words of Godard, is "reality walking hand in hand with fiction."
VCUarts Cinema
Tregenza is currently the Director of the Cinema Program at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. In its 9th year, the VCUarts Cinema Program is a 3 year program that dually emphasizes on theory and production in the fall and spring semesters. Students shoot 4-8 shorts (ranging from 20–40 minutes) each summer generally on 35 mm film with Arriflex film cameras. His lectures range from Mise en scène theory to the work of Gilles Deleuze and "the fold."