Ethan Mass: Cinematographer

Ethan Mass found his vocation at the School of Visual Arts in New York. It was his experience there with filmmaking equipment and exploring how all of it worked that led to his career as a cinematographer. A freelance artist, Ethan has an extensive résumé that includes a wide variety of projects: experimental films, independent films, documentaries, TV real-life dramas, TV series, MTV and corporate work—and feature films with his wife, filmmaker Hilary Brougher. Ethan and Hilary moved to Westbeth in 2016 with their two children, Violet and Guthrie. Not long after his arrival here, Ethan was elected WARC’s Community Relations chair. In that role, he has been delighting residents with monthly movie nights in the Community Room. He is also on the camera crew for the Westbeth Icons series.

Terry Stoller spoke with Ethan Mass on June 19, 2024, about his time at the School of Visual Arts and important lessons about camerawork that he learned there, his development as a professional cinematographer, his work in the 1990s on experimental films, his connections that led to a longtime freelance gig as a DP, his experiences as a videographer for real-life dramas, and the feature films he made with Hilary Brougher.

Terry Stoller: The School of Visual Arts was important to your career. What went into your choice to go to that school?

Ethan Mass: Actually, it was my mother who found that school for me. I had an interest in film from an early age. I had gone to Brooklyn College for a year, 1982-83, in their film program right after high school. But it was more of a film studies program. You watched movies and talked about them. I was interested in a filmmaking program, and this was the kind of four-year undergraduate program where they don’t hand you a camera till your third year, maybe. That was a turnoff for me. So I left halfway through the second semester. Then I spent two years working in retail. I was in a band, I hung out with friends. I kind of goofed off—I did unproductive maturation. I took a couple of years to get my feet on the ground.

I grew up on Staten Island. My mother was very progressive for the time and for the area. She was a spiritual therapist. There was a nascent community television thing going on there, and she appeared on a local talk show at a TV studio. It was very early in public access. She came back and said, I met this guy, he’s got a TV studio, you should call him up and ask him if he needs anyone to help out; she knew I was interested in the work. I called up, and the guy said, Sure, come down Saturday. We’re filming a thing. So I went down. I tried not to walk into any equipment. I tried not to spill water on anything. I went to the studio a couple of times, and met a young woman there who was kind of second in charge. She was about my age, but she seemed more mature. She told me she was a student at SVA, about to go into her second year there.

In the fall I got back in touch with her. She invited me to come in and audit one of her classes, a production class. I went to the class and met the teacher, Lenny Wong, who years later would be my second-year production teacher. The students were doing all the things I wanted to do. Everything was primitive, but they had sets, they had flats, they had lighting. This was second year production. In your second year, you’re already working with all this equipment and making things. I remember they needed a red lightbulb for a scene they were shooting. I said, I think I can get you one. I went down the hall to an exit sign I was able to reach. I took the red lightbulb out of the exit sign, and brought it to the classroom. I was the hero of the shoot. Sometime thereafter, my mother got me the application materials, and I applied as a screenwriter—because I didn’t have any filmmaking experience. At the time, it was relatively affordable. I took out loans. I went there from 1985 to 1989. And I had a great time there.

When did you understand you had a facility with the camera?

It wasn’t so much a facility with the camera for me. I really liked knowing how things worked, and I really liked movies. From an early age, I was interested in the old Universal monster movies: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man. I imagined I’d love to do special effects makeup. So it was a combination of that type of movie magic and loving the mechanics of how movies are made.

What were you studying at SVA, and when did you start using the camera?

What I liked about SVA was that they were teaching filmmaking as a commercial art, which worked really well for me. So your first year as a film student, Film Production 101, you have a curriculum of assignments. You’ve got to do a three-minute-long project on this and a three-minute-long project on that. I was immediately handed a camera. Week 1, you meet the teacher; week 2, we’re going to start filming things in class; week 3, take a camera home over the weekend; week 4, we’re going to teach you how to edit the film you just shot; week 5, we’re going to screen it and talk about it. That was freshman year at SVA. I was fascinated. This was exactly what I wanted to do.

In my second year, I got a job in the production office. All these film schools have a production office, where they keep the cameras and lights that can be checked out for classes. I took that job because it was a few dollars a week, but also because it gave me nearly unlimited access to the school’s inventory of film equipment. Any weekend that there was no production going on, I was allowed to use this equipment. I got a book, and I taught myself how to use just about every piece of equipment in this office. It was the kind of school where if an older filmmaker retired or passed away, their equipment would be donated to the school. So we had cameras that only I knew how to use.

What were you imagining you were going to be doing with the equipment?

I remember one of the first classes, this editing teacher looked at this room of fifteen or twenty kids and said, By the time you guys get out of here, if you’re lucky four or five of you will be able to make careers out of this business. I thought to myself, The more I can learn, the better chance I have. Of course, we all thought we were going to be directors. I thought, If I could really excel at learning cinematography and camerawork, it would put me in a better position as a director to be able to communicate with a cinematographer. I was looking at it as learning a language for communicating with a collaborator. Ultimately the collaboration went the other way. I basically learned the language so that I could better communicate it to directors.

You met Hilary Brougher at SVA.

That’s right. She was a year behind me. For the first couple of years, she was doing production work with her classmates. The way the school was structured, by the time you were in the third or fourth year, they didn’t discourage cross-grade collaboration. By the time I was in the third year, other students asked me to work as a cinematographer. I worked on Hilary’s second-year film as part of the crew. I shot part of her third-year film, and I came back after I graduated in 1989 to shoot her fourth-year thesis film as well as thesis films of some of her classmates.

What else did you do after graduation?

When you’re at school, you’re meant to create a professional reel, five to seven minutes of representative work. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. After I graduated, I ended up moving back to Staten Island, to my parents’ house. I lived there for a couple of years. It was an opportunity to reconnect with some old friends and meet new friends. I got a job working at a comic book store in Manhattan. I printed up a business card and waited for the phone to ring. In spring ’91, Hilary and I moved in together. Then sometime in the summer of ’91, the people who ran the equipment room at SVA asked me if I wanted a full-time job there starting in September.

Ethan Mass and Mary Patierno in the SVA equipment room, early 1990s.

I went back and worked in the SVA equipment room full time from fall of ’91 to spring of ’92. And I met filmmaker Maria Beatty there. Maria was doing a video project with Annie Sprinkle, who had graduated as a photography major from SVA. Annie was taking her work into a performance art direction. There was a day coming up on the shoot where they needed help with lighting. Maria felt I would be a good candidate and a reasonable person to have on set to be their gaffer. In hindsight, I realize how pivotal an opportunity that was for me.

The piece was titled The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, which was a self-help guide for women to capture their sexual chakra energy—the shoot was very like that. But the important thing for me was that I was a man welcomed into their crew. It was my first real opportunity working with professionals who were doing the kind of work that had a film school energy on a professional scale. They were trying things; they weren’t answering to a producer that I knew of. They were very open to suggestions. If something seemed interesting, they were willing to do it.

As the semester was coming to an end in the spring, Abigail Child, a filmmaker who was teaching at the school, had a feature project in mind, and she asked me to leave my job in order to join her crew for the film. It was unclear—and it’s still unclear—what my role in that film was.

You’re listed as second camera for that film, B/side.

That’s true. But Abby comes from a really interesting world of hands-on single person filmmaking production. They make art film, whose intended audience is museum goers or niche audience film festivals. Up until this point, she had made films five minutes, seven minutes long. This was Abby’s first experience working on a larger scale. She had written a screenplay, and it revolved around these squatters on the Lower East Side and the homeless encampment. She wanted to create a kind of fictional quasi documentary about that environment and the people associated with it. She called my job assistant camera, but when she said assistant camera, she meant a person who films alongside of her and also provides general camera department support. She directed this film, but she’s not someone who doesn’t want to have a camera in her hands. With all respect to her, she’s going to see things the way she wants to see them, and that’s something she wants to put on the screen. It became clear that my job was going to be standing over here with a fancier camera while she stood over there with her personal camera. And we’re both filming the action, and she’s telling the actors what she wants them to do. And I’m doing my best to capture what the actors are doing in some amalgam of what I want to see and what I think Abby wants to see. The experience of working on B/side was formative.

Abby was doing very aggressively graphic work. There was a moment on B/side where we filmed something outdoors in bright sun but under the dappled shade of some moving branches, and I think I may have put the branches there, creating these moving shadows—it was the happiest I had seen her at that point. I felt I was on the right track because I had created something that looked to her like one of her movies.

It was a challenge trying to take what Abby was communicating to me verbally and translate that visually. That was an important experience, especially considering what I did thereafter. I started off this work trying to satisfy a singular vision and mesh with that, and I did a lot more of that in the ’90s. All the work was word of mouth. This was a very hot time for women reclaiming sexually explicit work.

From The Black Glove, directed by Maria Beatty, 1996.

You worked with Maria Beatty on The Elegant Spanking [1995]* and The Black Glove [1996], and Maria’s project with Carolee Schneemann in which you filmed women pulling scrolls out of their vaginas.

Maria had this quality where she could be a real provocateur. I remember sometimes her giving me a smile or a wink. She got a kick out of trying to shock me.

In the early ’90s, you also worked on a documentary about the composer Milton Babbitt.

That was directed by Robert Hilferty. It was not completed in his lifetime. At the time I was a breakfast regular at the Cafe Mogador on St. Mark’s Place. I would go there maybe three times a week with a couple of film crew friends. I remember meeting Hilferty there. One way or another he asked me to work on this project about Milton Babbitt, whom I had never heard of. Hilferty had probably shot a bunch of it on his own or shot some of it with other DPs. A documentary takes forever to make, and often becomes a collage of contributions. I did a handful of shoots with him. We went up to Princeton, interviewed Babbitt out there. We interviewed Stephen Sondheim at his home in New York.

The documentary is on YouTube. My work on it is fairly primitive. I had done very little work at the time. One of the things that experience teaches you, for example, is how to walk into a room and choose the best place for the camera. At SVA, there was a film professor who said, “When you point a camera at something, you’re pointing it away from something else.” It’s not a one-way decision—it’s a two-way decision, and it’s helpful to be conscious of your choice. One of the things you learn is it takes a long time to be able to walk into a room and know where the best place to put a camera is and where the best place to put the subject is.

You were working on the feminist films in the early ’90s, and in 1996 you made a film with Hilary.

I was actually doing a lot of other stuff between ’92 and ’96. One of my breakfast friends, Dave Park, a coworker from the SVA equipment room, had gotten a job working as the camera assistant for a director of photography who had a contract to do three dozen Burger King commercials. They traveled around the country doing these commercials, and my friend said, We’re doing one in Manhattan. Let me see if the DP needs a second assistant, which would be the guy who loads the film into the camera magazine. I said great. That’s the way the business works. You offer opportunities to crew members that you think have an aptitude. I went to work on the Burger King commercial and met the DP, a lovely guy, who became something of a professional mentor to me. He owned a production company that had a contract to produce almost everything that MTV put on television that was not music videos and wasn’t music artists in their studio. His company handled shoots where, for example, a VJ would go out on location to interview an artist, or would cover a concert and go backstage—that’s the kind of thing I would film for his company. When I met the DP, he said, Do you also do camerawork? I said, Yes, and he said, Why don’t you come in next week because I need someone to shoot a thing, and we’ll see how it goes. I went in, and I shot the thing, and it went great. From 1992 till about 2007, I was probably one of their first-call freelance DPs. So I was shooting corporate work, I was shooting for broadcast and cable, shooting red carpets and interviews with executives and shooting all the big names in music and film at that period—Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé.

Freelance camerawork for VH1 and MTV: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish.

I would work for them Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, because they would just call me as needed, and Tuesday I would spend a day filming with Maria, and someone else might call, a choreographer who got my name from somewhere. She wanted to film a dance piece with candles in a church. I was doing a lot of different stuff. I even taught at Hofstra for about a year and a half.

And by 1996, you were working on The Sticky Fingers of Time with Hilary.

Hilary had been trying to get a feature off the ground for a little while. She had a couple of really interesting scripts that couldn’t get funded, or she didn’t know how to get them funded. We didn’t have that kind of relationship with producers. We did have one friend, Isen Robbins, whom I had met when I moved back to Staten Island after graduating. He went to film school and became a film producer. He ended up being one of the producers on The Sticky Fingers of Time. The camera assistant on Sticky Fingers was part of the breakfast group— Dan Hersey. And there was another AC named Suzie Baer, who had been a classmate at SVA.

Terumi Matthews in The Sticky Fingers of Time, directed by Hilary Brougher, 1997.

[The Sticky Fingers of Time is set in the 1950s and the 1990s. Two writers, one published, one aspiring (played by Terumi Matthews and Nicole Zaray), meet in the time travel “adventure”; a mystery unfolds in the effort to rewrite and undo the murder of the 1950s author.]**

You shot the film in New York.

Brooklyn and Manhattan. Isen and his longtime girlfriend lived on the ground floor of the building on Devoe Street that we shot the film in. We needed an apartment that could serve as two time periods, that we could afford and control. There was a vacant apartment in that building that we used. We filmed it for one time period, then we did a bunch of exteriors, did other stuff on location and during that time, art department had to convert the apartment to the other time period. For a movie without a lot of money, it was a lot of moving parts. We did go upstate to do the motel stuff, some driving stuff; we shot in a bar, in Tompkins Square Park, and we used the bookstore two doors down from Cafe Mogador. The house in Staten Island we used was the producer’s family’s house.

Ethan Mass and Hilary Brougher on set of The Sticky Fingers of Time.

This first feature was a big accomplishment.

We were planning on making Sticky Fingers on a home video camera. We were at the point where we were resourceless. And Isen and Jean Castelli and Susan Stover, our producers, were able to put together enough of a budget that we could make a movie out of it. And it’s such a fun script. I was proud of the work. Some of it is clumsy on my part. It was the second feature I had shot. I had shot one earlier that year that didn’t work out real well. I hadn’t done fiction since school. All the work I had been doing up until then had been this esoteric art movie stuff or very textbook video work.

After that, you go back to your freelance work, and you’re doing reality TV.

I don’t call it reality TV. What it was called by the producers who made it was video journalism. This predates what we now think of as reality TV. I was more interested in the video part than the journalism part. The job meant I was on my own in the nurses’ station of a hospital for 12-hour shifts. I have a camera and a microphone, and I’m meant to put microphones on a couple of doctors, and I’m meant to wait for folks having the worst day of their lives to show up through the door and to film what happens to them once I get them to agree to be on television. I have a bunch of pads of paper that I carry around in order to get appearance releases from victims of tragedy and their loved ones and to take notes. I’m there to see how the doctors deal with the patients and how the injured and their loved ones deal with the stuff happening to them. I was in Nashville for a month filming whatever happened in the hospital.

Ethan Mass behind the scenes, corporate work.

I did a couple of episodes of Trauma: Life in the ER. And I did a spinoff called Paramedics, where I was riding around in an ambulance. I had a great time. The EMTs were excellent, and the doctors I worked with were all wonderful, and most of the patients were great. I just didn’t like what was happening. I wasn’t that interested in filming orthopedic surgery. There was a trigger that made me stop doing it. The producers who were making the show (it was very popular) had concocted another show called A Baby Story. The premise was that they were going to follow a pregnancy. I declined. The success of these shows relies on medical drama. I didn’t want to be filming a pregnancy with the hopes that something would go wrong because it would be good for TV.

Ethan Mass behind the scenes, Discovery ID.

There was one thing I did that I really enjoyed called Frenemies, which were re-creations for a true crime show. They would shoot interviews for crime stories, and then we would film re-enacted dramas. The schedule was two days a week for two months. In that case, I know I have two days a week in the calendar and don’t have to turn down other work.

You have worked on an incredible variety of jobs and made a go of freelancing.

I have never had an agent, and I didn’t join the camera union until six months ago. All the work I was doing was nonunion work with no agent. I’ve been a freelancer waiting for the phone to ring since 1991. Our kids were born in March 2002. At that point, I didn’t want to be taking long-term commitments or out-of-town commitments that were really long. That was one of the reasons I shied away from reality TV as I think of it because those jobs are six weeks in this city and another job is five weeks in this city, and features are the same way. That wasn’t the kind of life I wanted to have with infant children. I was looking for short-term work, day playing. If I could get four days a week on four different jobs, I’d much rather have that.

From promotional film, 1-800-Flowers.com for JPMorganChase.

The thing about freelancing is, you don’t want to tell clients you’re not available for six weeks. When Hilary made Stephanie Daley, I took off from work for six months to take care of our kids, from summer 2006 to January 2007. When I returned to freelance work, the business had changed a bit, and so my work network shifted a bit. I was able to get back to being as busy as I needed to be, but there was a shift in who I was doing work with.

You’ve done a fair amount of work with filmmaker Lynne Sachs.

I’m so grateful for the work I’ve done with Lynne. Cathy Cook, a fellow filmmaker who had worked on the Abby Child film, gave my name to Lynne, who called me cold. I first worked with Lynne Sachs in 2008-9, a little more than ten years since I’d worked with Abby Child. Lynne’s great. In a sense, she’s a filmmaker not unlike Abby Child. They are filmmakers for whom the physical act is a key component—holding the camera, pointing it at what they want to point it at. For Lynne to invite me to contribute to one of her projects is different from being hired by a producer who merely likes my work.

From Your Day Is My Night, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2013.

I’d like to hear about your experiences on Lynne Sachs’s film Your Day Is My Night [2013], which she calls a “hybrid documentary.” I’m not clear what that means.

She was fascinated by the shift-bed culture. There was a guy who lived in Chinatown, who I’m pretty sure sang at Chinese weddings and had a relationship with that culture and might have lived like that at one point or knew a lot of Chinatown residents who did. We went to a number of these apartments to film vignettes. I remember there was a scene where some women are at a table; I think they’re working with beans. I don’t know whether they would have been doing that without our being there, or whether Lynne said, What is it that you would do at the table? and they said, This, and she said, Can you do that so that we can film it? From my observation, the ideas for the film evolve as she makes it. At some point she wanted to integrate a scripted character, a young woman [played by actress Veraalba Santa]. I filmed a bedroom conversation with her and these women. There may have been a prompt for the conversation, but I don’t believe it was scripted as such. I filmed a shot she uses as publicity for the film, a closeup of a man’s face in silhouette. And I filmed a scene in the bedroom that was a woman with a mirror. My involvement with Lynne is a narrow part of her filmmaking continuum. I worked on Tip of My Tongue [2017] briefly. I spent a day or two contributing to Film About a Father Who [2020], a documentary about her father. I’m always grateful when she does reach out for things that she feels I would be a good fit for. I like working with filmmakers who have that singular vision but who are comfortable inviting collaborators in.

Let’s talk about South Mountain [2019], the other feature that you made with Hilary. It got lovely reviews.

Talia Balsam in South Mountain, directed by Hilary Brougher, 2019.

[South Mountain is centered on a family breaking apart, parents separating, their teenagers growing up, with one moving on, and a close family friend threatened with serious illness. The beauty of the natural environment is the backdrop to the drama.]

Critics and audiences really liked it. South Mountain is another movie made under very modest circumstances. It’s a cliché that when you have too many tools to choose from, you end up getting bogged down. That said, throughout the production, there were certainly times when I was grumbling about the lack of options for things. What made it work was that it was a small dedicated group working toward the same goal, and Hilary did a great job of making everybody into a collaborator across departments. When Hilary was putting the movie together, we were looking at the way it was going to be made in a limited amount of time. It was going to be mostly crewed up by current and former students of hers at Columbia, who were wonderful and who contributed a lot. Our friend Maria Rosenblum played a large part in that movie, on set and in the editing.

Filming South Mountain. On steps, from top: Talia Balsam, Andrus Nichols, Maria Rosenblum, Violet Rea.

You had wonderful actors in that film, especially your leads, Talia Balsam and Scott Cohen.

It really gave me an appreciation for performance. I’ve filmed actors acting, but there was something very naturalistic about this movie. As I mentioned from my fondness for things like Frankenstein and Dracula, I am very comfortable with hyperbolized performance and lighting and filmmaking. But something that feels more like watching a real conversation can be very hypnotic. When you’ve got your eye to the camera, you’re a filmmaker AND you’re the audience. When you’re on set watching performances like those in South Mountain, it’s easy to become an audience member. You have to remember you’re rolling. Instead of pressing record, you want to reach for popcorn.

Ethan Mass filming South Mountain.

Notes:

* The dates for films and videos are mostly the release dates, which in some cases don’t represent the year that Ethan Mass had worked on those projects. Where the year that he worked on a project is clear from the context, I’ve omitted a date.

** The descriptions of The Sticky Fingers of Time and South Mountain also appear in Hilary Brougher’s Profile in Art. For further discussion of those films, see her interview.

Photo credit: Top photo—David Woodson. All images courtesy of Ethan Mass.

For more about Ethan Mass and to see clips of his work, go to www.ethanmassdp.com.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2024 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council