Visions of Light

This collection of film clips and interviews with various DPs (director of photography) and camera operators such as Allen Daviau, William A. Frakeman, Haskell Wexler, and Nestor Almendros reveals their influences, the period during which they worked, what techniques were evolving, and anecdotes. Clips from about two hundred or so films are examined.

Yes, as Ernest Dickerson says, cinematography's the way one responds to light. Initially, there was just a director and cameraman, the director in charge of the actors, the cameraman in charge of everything else. And the stationary cameras didn't give them much to do, but of course that changed over time with the camera dollies and booms, and later, handheld cameras, made more effective by Steadicams, whose inventors won a special Oscar in 1977 in the technical field. But camera movement gave the DP greater ability to achieve his visual triumphs.

Other than the Katz quote, DPs were to tell the story visually and to make actors and actresses more handsome and prettier but to enhance special features. Actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo required special attention, but boy, did they sparkle! Dietrich's cheeks were made narrower with the lighting used in Shanghai Express. And small wonder Harold Rosson made Jean Harlow prettier in Red Dust--he even married her (lucky guy!) after her husband Paul Bern committed suicide.

This takes a chronological history of lighting, from the silent era up to the late 1980's, and puts it in context with the history of film. For example, the role of cinematography changed with the advent of sound. According to cinematographer John Bailey, the 1920's were the golden age of cinematography because at the time, the camera was unencumbered by sound and all devices accompanying verbal dialogue storytelling. And when anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen came to be used, DPs had to find some way to use that extra space on either side, as they did with Lawrence Of Arabia, like the scene of Lawrence, having rescued Qaseem, who is greeted by one of the boys, riding towards him. And with the gradual independence from the studio system, previous errors such as flaring lenses were deliberately used as new techniques.

My favourite era is the film noir era, which borrowed from the German Expressionism of the 1920's. Sparse lighting, slashes of light, dark shadows, dense rarified vocabulary of visual information, low angles define the characteristics of such films as The Killers, Out Of The Past, and Touch Of Evil. It's stark black and wide, hardly any greys.

But other uses of dark or darkly lit techniques were shown with the candlelit sequence in Grapes of Wrath, a clip from Fat City, and the accurate capture of period dramas, where there was no electricity and so thus families relied on light from windows.

As for best uses of technique, the pure visual accident in In Cold Blood, where Robert Blake's character is speaking to the chaplain about his father, and the light reflecting off the pouring rain on the window shone on Blake's face, making it look as if he were crying.

This collaboration between the American Film Institute and Japan's NHK Television is ideally for film students/buffs and for moviegoers of a more intelligent and inquisitive calibre, which I hope will comprise of enough people.