Spoilers ahead!
Almost three weeks ago, critically-acclaimed Severance launched the directorial debut of their cinematographer, Jessica Lee Gagné. In the episode, “Chikhai Bardo”, the audience took a break from the wintry town of Kier, PE, and the white ant farm of Lumon’s severed floor to a snow-free Ganz of a time before.
“Chikhai Bardo” is a flashback episode beginning where Mark and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) meet at a blood bank at Ganz College, and throughout the episode are points in time of their relationship, with emphasis on their struggle to conceive, intertwined with Gemma’s entrapment in the testing floor. The episode was imbued with Mark and Gemma’s window-full house as well as, for the first time, a season that is not winter. Alternatively, the audience finally discovered the file names that MDR had been working on corresponded with testing rooms on the testing floor. Gagné had to create whole other different worlds and explore the use of one of the show’s most elusive colors, green.
Green, generally known as a sign for nature or refuge, is used in very interesting ways throughout the show. Firstly, it is the color of the floor and dividers in the MDR department of the severed floor. It is also the color of the inside and outside of the Wellness Room in the first season.
In “Chikhai Bardo”, the show implicitly communicates how purposeful color symbolism is. Green is the predominant color of one of the testing rooms where right-handed Gemma has to write a stack of thank you cards with her left hand. (She also hates writing thank you cards.) In this scene, Dr. Mauer, the scientist running and participating in the experiment, tells Gemma, “I love you,” which is not only unethical in practice, but Gemma simply does not love Dr. Mauer back. And she, in this room, is forced to be his wife. Where green supposedly signals safety, it is actually a false reality Lumon sells to their severed workers.
The texture of the flashback scenes were also starkly different from the rest of the show. In an interview with IndieWire, Lee Gagné reveals that they shot the flashback scenes in 35mm film. Being that many of the scenes incorporated outside spaces with indoor ones, they also had to work around the sun. She cites Jane Campion’s 2009 film, Bright Star and the 2022 Belgian film, Close by Lukas Dhont as visual references for the cinematography.
Apple TV+ just launched another series that embraces the same color palette that “Chikhai Bardo” had, and right at the same time. Only two days before, the first and second episodes of Berlin ER released on the platform.
On February 21, Apple TV+ released a drone-filmed trailer for Berlin ER on Instagram Reels, garnering 2 million views. Already, it sold the vibe of the show, as the shot took on a chaotic track, ending with following an ambulance into the ER dock. The text overlay’s font is the same as the one used in Severance and seen on the rest of Apple’s media, the in-house designed San Francisco font.
According to Apple TV+, Berlin ER, or Krank Berlin, in the show’s language, is as follows:
Managing a chaotic emergency room in the toughest and most overcrowded hospital in Berlin is no small task for the young Dr. Parker (Jones), who is seeking a fresh start in the big city after her private life implodes in Munich. When she tries to implement necessary reforms, Parker is confronted with resistance from the underpaid, ill-equipped and chronically fatigued hospital staff who only survive with an indispensable dose of black humor. But in the face of an increasingly merciless health care system, the battered team must put aside their differences and pull together to save lives.
The tone of the show is quite the opposite to Severance, as Berlin ER captures the inner and outer chaos of underappreciated healthcare workers in one of Germany’s largest cities. Being in a hospital, there was the opportunity to make the ER clinical and stark, but cinematographers Tim Kuhn and Jieun Li, put humanity at the heart of the the setting by flooding the show with warm tones and grain, both inside and outside the ER.
The show also used MiniHawk lenses, most likely for their close-up handheld scenes. This handheld set up communicates the anxiety of being in the ER with the doctors. In the cold open, we see Ben Weber (Slavko Popadic) dancing in a club, extremely high, and trying to hail a cab. The sequence features many long-exposure B-roll footage to illustrate the dream-like lost state of being high. Who we think is a patient is actually a doctor when he injects himself with a epinephrine to help an actual patient. At the shot of epinephrine, the handheld set up takes immediate effect, first tracking Dr. Weber’s face, and the long-exposure effect leaves.
You can take a peek at such camera work below.
Whether or not the co-release of “Chikhai Bardo” and Berlin ER‘s pilot were intentional, the similar aesthetics definitely did work to persuade viewers to check out the latter.