Rob Tregenza


Rob Tregenza is a North American cinematographer, film director, and producer who has worked as a director of photography with other directors, including Béla Tarr, Claude Miller, Pierre William Glenn, and Alex Cox.

Early work

Tregenza earned his PhD from UCLA in 1982. He has produced, directed and photographed four feature films: Talking to Strangers, The Arc, a co-production with Film Four International, Inside/Out, and Gavagai.
Tregenza's first feature, Talking to Strangers, won him the praise of Jean-Luc Godard, who subsequently helped Tregenza make Inside/Out. Richard Brody, of The New Yorker, wrote of the main character, Jesse, in the film: "The drive for 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 was shot in 35mm, in Telemark,Norway.
It stars Andreas Lust, Anni-Kristiina Juuso and Mikkel Gaup GAVAGAI was based on 15 poems by Tarjei Vesaas. It was distributed theatrically in North America by and was sixth in Metacritic's list of the best-reviewed feature films distributed in 2018.

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."