Great Cinematographers
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Henri Alekan was born on 10 February 1909 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer and director, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Roman Holiday (1953) and Beauty and the Beast (1946). He was married to Nadia Starcevic. He died on 15 June 2001 in Auxerre, Yonne, France.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
One of the highest appraised contemporary cinematographers. He was born in Spain but moved to Cuba by age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cineclub and wrote film reviews. Then, he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro-regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente en la playa (1960) and La Tumba Francesca) had been banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favourite cameraman of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his impressive Hollywood-career. In his later years, he co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Improper Conduct (1984) (about the persecution of gay people) and Nadie escuchaba (1987). He shot several prestigious commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Nestor Almendros died of cancer.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Almost universally considered one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, Jack Cardiff was also a notable director. He described his childhood as very happy and his parents as quite loving. They performed in music hall as comedians, so he grew up with the fun that came with their theatrical life in pantomime and vaudeville. His father once worked with Charles Chaplin. His parents did occasional film appearances, and young Jack appeared in some of their films, such as My Son, My Son (1918), at the age of four. He had the lead in Billy's Rose (1922) with his parents playing his character's parents in the film. Jack was a production runner, or what he would call a "general gopher", for The Informer (1929) in which his father appeared. For one scene he was asked by the first assistant cameraman to "follow focus", which he said was his first real brush with photography of any kind, but he claimed that it was the lure of travel that led to him joining a camera department making films in a studio. He had, however, become impressed with the use of light and color in paintings by the age of seven or eight, and described how he watched art directors in theaters painting backdrops setting lights. His friend Ted Moore was also a camera assistant in this period when both worked in a camera department run by Freddie Young, who would also become a legendary cinematographer. He worked for Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of The Skin Game (1931).
By 1936 Cardiff had risen to being a camera operator at Denham Studios when the Technicolor Company hired him on the basis of what he told them in interview about the use of light by master painters. This led to his operating camera for the first Technicolor film shot in Britain, Wings of the Morning (1937). He finally was offered the full position of director of photography by Michael Powell for A Matter of Life and Death (1946), ironically working in B&W for the first time in some sequences. His next assignment was on Black Narcissus (1947), where he acknowledged the influence of painters Vermeer and Caravaggio and their use of shadow. He won the Academy Award for best color cinematography for this film. Jack certainly got to travel when it was decided to shoot The African Queen (1951) on location in the Congo. Errol Flynn offered Jack the chance to direct The Story of William Tell (1953) that would star Flynn. It would have been the second film made in CinemaScope had it been completed, but the production ran out of money part way through filming in Switzerland.
It has been said that Marilyn Monroe requested that Jack photograph The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). Although he had already directed some small productions, he had a critical breakthrough with Sons and Lovers (1960). He continued directing other films through the 1960s, including the commercial hit Dark of the Sun (1968), but for the most part returned to working for other directors as a very sought-after cinematographer in the 1970s and beyond. He continued to work into the new century, almost until his death. He was made an OBE in 2000 and received a lifetime achievement award at the 73rd Academy Awards.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Visual Effects
Stanley Cortez was born Samuel Krantz in New York City, New York, the son of Sarah (Lefkowitz) and Moses/Morris Krantz, Austrian Jewish immigrants. His famous actor brother, born Jacob Krantz, changed his name to Ricardo Cortez in order to acquire a more suitably romantic Hollywood image. Stanley changed his name accordingly. After studies at New York University he embarked on a photographic career, first as assistant to noted portrait photographers Streichan and Bachrach (he designed many of their lavish background sets), then as camera assistant for Pathé Revue and for various Manhattan-based film companies. Grabbing the chance to join Gloria Swanson Productions, Stanley then spent a lengthy apprenticeship in the 1920s and early 1930s learning the intricacies of his craft from such established Hollywood cinematographers as Lee Garmes and Hal Mohr. After moving from studio to studio, either as a camera assistant or shooting screen tests, he was signed to a seven-year contract by Universal in 1936, albeit consigned to its "B" unit. His first film as full director of photography was Four Days Wonder (1936). During World War II, he was assigned to the Army Pictorial Service of the Signals Corps.
Much of his subsequent career was spent on fairly routine and undistinguished second features and it was not until he started working for charismatic filmmakers like Orson Welles and David O. Selznick that he was able to fully develop some of his experimental techniques. One of his low-budget outings, a gothic old-dark-house horror/comedy entitled The Black Cat (1941), rather impressed the genial Mr. Welles who promptly hired him for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). This was the first of two Cortez films generally regarded as visual masterpieces, with beautiful lighting effects, clever angles and lingering close-ups. Of particular note are the staircase scene and the famous long shot -- via hand-held camera -- of the abandoned mansion. Despite critical plaudits, "Ambersons" was a financial disaster for RKO (it cost $1,1 million and lost $624,000 at the box office) and Cortez was partly blamed for costly delays and extravagant scenes, some 40-50 minutes of which were cut by direct orders from studio boss George Schaefer without consulting either Welles or Cortez. The latter ended up being indirectly censured by receiving lesser assignments. What remained of "Ambersons" has become more appreciated as a sublime visual experience with the passing of time.
The second outstanding Cortez contribution was the chillingly dark, haunting thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955)--a brilliant allegory of good versus evil masterminded by Charles Laughton in his sole directorial effort. Cortez's lighting and use of irises are reminiscent of German expressionist cinema, or, at least, the work of Karl Struss and Charles Rosher on Sunrise (1927). Among many indelible images are the flowing hair of drowned Shelley Winters in the underwater current and the lights flickering across the water in what is an almost surreal nightly landscape.
A third Cortez effort deserving of mention is the superior psychological drama The Three Faces of Eve (1957), his differential lighting for the face of schizophrenic Eve White (Joanne Woodward) effectively contrasting the multiple personalities within her psyche. Sadly, by the end of the decade Cortez's career went into a decline. It continued that way through the 1960s, the quality of his assignments fluctuating wildly between the occasional "A" picture (The Bridge at Remagen (1969)) and Z-grade turkeys like The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Raoul Coutard was born on 16 September 1924 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer and director, known for Hoa Binh (1970), Alphaville (1965) and Z (1969). He died on 8 November 2016 in Labenne, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Producer
Oscar-winning director of photography William Daniels was a master of black-and-white cinematographer most famous for the 21 films he shot that starred the immortal Greta Garbo between 1926 and 1939. Among the Gabro classics he lensed were The Torrent (1924), Flesh and the Devil (1926), Love (1927) (Garbo and home studio MGM's first crack at Lev Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"), Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), the sound remake of Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939).
He won fame for his lensing of Garbo, but to those who claimed that he was essential to his success, Daniels replied, "I didn't create a 'Garbo face.' I just did portraits of her I would have done for any star. My lighting of her was determined by the requirements of a scene. I didn't, as some say I did, keep one side of her face light and the other dark. But I did always try to make the camera peer into the eyes, to see what was there."
Though he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the 1930 English-language version of Anna Christie (1930) (he also shot the 1931 German-language version Anna Christie (1930)), ironically, it was his only nomination for a Garbo film. He won his Oscar in 1949 for his brilliant B+W cinematography on the classic film noir The Naked City (1948).
Daniels received two other Oscar nominations. He was President of the American Society of Cinematographers from 1961 to 1963.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Bruno Delbonnel was born in 1957 in Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France. He is a cinematographer and director, known for The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Karl Freund, an innovative director of photography responsible for development of the three-camera system used to shoot television situation comedies, was born on January 16, 1890, in the Bohemian city of Koeniginhof, then part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire (now known as Dvur Kralove in the Czech Republic). Freund went to work at the age of 15 as a movie projectionist, and by the age of 17, he was a camera operator shooting shot subjects and newsreels. Subsequently, he was employed at Germany's famous UFA Studios during the 1920s, when the German cinema was the most innovative in the world.
At UFA, Freund worked as a cameraman for such illustrious directors as F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. For Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) (aka The Last Laugh), screenwriter Carl Mayer worked closely with Freund to develop a scenario that would employ the moving camera that became a hallmark of Weimar German cinema. One of the most beautiful and critically acclaimed silent films, The Last Laugh (1924) is considered the perfect silent by some critics as the images do most of the storytelling, allowing for a minimal amount of inter-titles. The collaborative genius of Murnau, Mayer, and Freund meant that the images communicated the integral part of the narrative, visualizing and elucidating the protagonist's psyche. Freund filmed a drunk scene with the camera secured on his chest, with a battery pack on his back for balance, enabling him to stumble about and produce vertiginous shots suggesting intoxication.
Director Ewald André Dupont gave credit for the innovative camera work on his masterpiece Variety (1925) (aka Variety) to Freund, praising his ingenuity in an article published in The New York Times. Freund was one of the cameramen and the co-writer (with Carl Mayer and director Walter Ruttmann) on Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis (1927) (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City), an artistic documentary that used a hidden camera to capture the people of the city going about their daily lives. Always technically innovative, Freund developed a high-speed film stock to aid his shooting in low-light situations. This film also is hailed as a classic. Other classic German films that Freund shot were The Golem (1920) (aka The Golem) and Lang's Metropolis (1927).
Now possessing an international reputation, Freund emigrated to the U.S. in 1929, where he was employed by the Technicolor Co. to help perfect its color process. Subsequently, he was hired as a cinematographer and director by Universal Studios, where he cut his teeth, uncredited, as a cinematographer on the great anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Universal's first Oscar winner as Best Picture.
Universal's bread and butter in the early 1930s were its horror films, and Freund was involved in the production of several classics. Among his Universal assignments, Freund shot Dracula (1931) and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), and directed The Mummy (1932). The Mummy (1932) was Freund's first directorial effort, and co-star Zita Johann, who disliked Freund, claimed he was incompetent, which is unfair, seeing as how the film is now considered a classic of its genre. The film uses the undead sorcerer Imhotep's pool with which he can impose his will over the living by spreading some tana leaves on the water, as a visual metaphor for the subconscious. The film is arresting visually due to Freund's cinematic eye that created a sense of "otherness." The film is infused with a dream-like state that seems rooted in the subconscious mind. Freund's other directorial efforts at Universal proved less satisfying.
Moving to MGM, Freund directed just one more motion picture, Mad Love (1935) (aka The Hands of Orlac) a horror classic that utilized the expressionism of his UFA apprenticeship. With the great lighting cameraman Gregg Toland as his director of photography, the collaboration of Freund and Toland created a European sensibility unique for a Hollywood horror film. The compositions of the shots featured arch shapes and utilized the expressive shadows of the best of the European avant-garde films of the 1920s.
But MGM wanted Freund for his genius at camera work. He shot the rooftop numbers for The Great Ziegfeld (1936), another Best Picture Oscar winner, and worked with William H. Daniels, Garbo's favorite cameraman, on "Camille" (1936). He shot Greta Garbo's Conquest (1937) solo, though he never worked with Garbo again. That same year, he was the director of photography on The Good Earth (1937), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
Other major MGM pictures he shot were Pride and Prejudice (1940), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, Tortilla Flat (1942), and A Guy Named Joe (1943). He also worked for other studios, shooting Golden Boy (1939) for Columbia. In 1942, he pulled off a rare double: he was nominated for Best Cinematography in both the black and white and color categories, for The Chocolate Soldier (1941) and Blossoms in the Dust (1941), respectively.
One of the last films he shot for MGM was Two Smart People (1946), starring Lucille Ball. In 1947, he moved on to Warner Bros, where he shot the classic Key Largo (1948) for John Huston. His last film as a director of photography was Michael Curtiz' Montana (1950), which starred Gary Cooper.
Always the technical innovator, Freund founded the Photo Research Corp. in 1944, a laboratory for the development of new cinematographic techniques and equipment. His technical work culminated in his receipt of a Class II Technical Award in 1955 from the Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences for the design of a direct-reading light meter. That same year, he had the honor of representing his adopted country at the International Conference on Illumination in Zurich, Switzerland.
It was perhaps inevitable that the technical and innovation-minded Freund would get to work for a brand new visual medium, television. Lucille Ball, whom he had photographed when she was a contract player at MGM, became his boss when he was hired as the director of photography at Desilu Productions, owned by Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz. Desilu hired the great Freund as its owners were determined to shoot the show I Love Lucy (1951) on film rather than produce the show live, as was standard in the early 1950s. Most shows were shot live, while a film of the program was simultaneously shot from a monitor, a process that created a "kinescope." The kinescope would be shown in other time zones on the network's affiliates. Desilu's owners disliked the quality of kinescopes, and needed Freund to come up with a solution to their problem of how to maintain the intimacy of a live show on film.
Freund agreed that the show should be shot on film rather than live, as film enabled thorough planning and allowed for cutting, which was impossible with live TV. Freud knew that film would allow Desilu to eliminate the fluffs which were a staple of early television, and would allow the producers to re-shoot scenes to improve the show, if needed.
I Love Lucy (1951) had to be filmed before an audience to retain the immediacy of a live TV show, which meant that the traditional, time-consuming methods of studio production with one camera would not work. Freund decided to shoot I Love Lucy (1951) with three 35mm Mitchell BNC cameras, one of each to simultaneously shoot long shots, medium shots and close-ups. Thus, the editor would have adequate coverage to create the 22 minutes of footage needed for a half-hour commercial network show.
The then-innovative, now-standard technique of simultaneously shooting a situation comedy with three 35mm cameras cut the production time needed to produce a 22-minute program to one-hour. The cameras were mounted on dollies, with the center camera outfitted with a 40mm wide-angle lens, and the side cameras outfitted with 3- and 4-inch lenses. The resulting shots were edited on a Movieola. A script girl in a booth overlooking the stage cued the camera operators. Due to extensive rehearsal time before the show was shot live, the camera operators had floor marks to guide them, but Freund's system was enabled by the script girl overseeing their actions via a 2-way intercom. The system made the shooting, breaking-down, and setting-up process for the next scenes on the three sets of the I Love Lucy (1951) stage very economical in terms of time, averaging one and one-half minutes between shots.
Freund worked out the lighting during the rehearsal period. Almost all of the lighting was overhead, except for portable fill lights mounted above the matte box on each camera. In Freund's system, there were no lighting changes during shooting, other than the use of a dimming board. Since the lighting was mounted overhead on catwalks, power cables were kept off the floor, which facilitated the dollying that was essential for making the system work fluidly.
Freund's solution to the problem of shooting a show on film economically was to make lighting as uniform as possible, taking advantage of adding highlights whenever possible, since a comedy show required high-key illumination. Due to the high contrast of the tubes in the image pickup systems at the television stations, contrast was a potential problem, as any contrast in the film would be exaggerated upon transmission of the film. To keep the film contrast to what Freund called a "fine medium," the sets were painted in various shades of gray. Props and costumes also were gray to promote a uniformity of color and tone that would not defeat Freund's carefully devised illumination scheme.
In a typical workweek, the I Love Lucy (1951) company engaged in pre-production planning and rehearsals on Monday through Thursday. I Love Lucy (1951) was filmed before a live audience at 8:00 o'clock PM on Friday evenings, and Freund's camera crew worked only on that Friday and the preceding Thursday. Freund, however, attended the Wednesday afternoon rehearsal of the cast to study the movements of the players around the sets, noting the blocking and their entrances and exits, in order to plan his lighting and camera work. Thursday morning at 8:00 o'clock AM, Freund and the gaffers would begin lighting the sets, which typically would be done by noon, the time the camera crew was required to report on set to be briefed on camera movements. Then, Freund would rehearse the camera action in order to make necessary changes in the lighting and the dollying of the cameras.
It was during the Thursday full-crew rehearsal that the cues for the dimmer operator were set, and the floor was marked to indicate the cameras' positions for various shots. For each shot, the focus was pre-measured and noted for each camera position with chalk marks on the stage floor. Another rehearsal was held at 4:30 PM with the full production crew. Though a full-dress rehearsal was held at 7:30 PM, with the attendance of the full crew, the cameras were not brought onto the set. The director would take the opportunity to discuss the plan of the show and solicit input from the cast and crew on how to tighten the show and improve its pacing.
The next call for the entire company was at 1:00 PM on Friday to discuss any major changes that were discussed the previous night. After this meeting, the cameras would be brought out onto the stage, and at 4:30 PM, there would be a final dress rehearsal during which Freund would check his lighting and make any required changes.
After a dinner break, the cast and production crew would hold a "talk through" of the show to solicit further suggestions and solve any remaining problems. At 8:00 PM, the cast and production crew were ready to start filming the show before a live audience. Before shooting, one of the cast or a member of the company had briefed the audience on the filming procedure, emphasizing the need for the audience's reactions to be spontaneous and natural.
Shooting was over in about an hour due to the rapid set-ups and break-downs of the crew, which shot the show in chronological order. Due to the thorough planning and rehearsals, retakes were seldom necessary. Camera operators in Freund's system had to make each take the right way the first time, every time, to keep the system working smoothly, and they did. An average of 7,500 feet of film was shot for each show at a cost that was significantly less than a comparable major studio production.
Freund also served as the cinematographer on the TV series Our Miss Brooks (1952), which was shot at Desilu Studios, and Desilu's own December Bride (1954). It was no accident that Desilu productions turned to Karl Freund to realize their dream of creating a high-quality show on film. Freund had the broadest experience of any cameraman of his stature, starting in silent pictures, and then excelling in both B&W and color in the sound era. With his penchant for technical innovation, he was the ideal man to develop solutions for filming a television show. Freund met the challenge of creating high quality filmed images in a young medium still handicapped by its primitive technology.
Freund became the dean of cinematographers in a new medium, with Desilu's I Love Lucy (1951) and its other shows recognized as the gold standard for TV production. His work ensured the fortunes of Desilu Productions, and the personal fortunes of Desilu owners Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, as he provided them with quality films of each show that could be easily syndicated into perpetuity, whereas the live shows filmed secondarily off of flickering TV monitors as kinescopes could not.
After retiring as a cinematographer, Freund continued his research at the Photo Research Corp. He died on May 3, 1969.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Writer
Born in Tahiti, the son of writer James Norman Hall, author of "Mutiny on the Bounty," Conrad Hall studied filmmaking at USC. He and two classmates formed a production company and sold a project to a local television station. Hall's company branched out into making industrial films and TV commercials. They were hired to shoot location footage for several feature films, including's Disney's The Living Desert (1953). In the early 1960s, Hall was hired as a camera assistant on several features and worked his way up to camera operator. He received his first cinematographer credit in 1965. Hall won acclaim for his rich and complex compositions, especially for In Cold Blood (1967) and won an Academy Award for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He won two more Oscars, for American Beauty (1999), in 2000, and Road to Perdition (2002).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Master cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose career stretched from silent pictures through the mid-'70s, was born Wong Tung Jim in Canton (now Guangzhou), China, on August 28, 1899, the son of Wong How. His father emigrated to America the year James was born, settling in Pasco, Washington, where he worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Wong How eventually went into business for himself in Pasco, opening a general store, which he made a success, despite the bigotry of the locals.
When he was five years old, Wong Tung Jim joined his father in the US. His childhood was unhappy due to the discrimination he faced, which manifested itself in racist taunting by the neighborhood children. To get the kids to play with him, Jimmie often resorted to bribing them with candy from his father's store. When Jimmie, as he was known to his friends and later to his co-workers in the movie industry, was about 12 years old he bought a Kodak Brownie camera from a drugstore. Though his father was an old-fashioned Chinese, suspicious about having his picture taken and opposed to his new hobby, Jimmie went ahead and photographed his brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, when the photos were developed, the heads of his siblings had been cut off, as the Brownie lacked a viewfinder.
His childhood dream was to be a prizefighter, and as a teenager he moved to Oregon to fight. However, his interest soon waned, and he moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job as an assistant to a commercial photographer. His duties included making deliveries, but he was fired when he developed some passport photos for a friend in the firm's darkroom. Reduced to making a living as a busboy at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he journeyed down to Chinatown on Sundays to watch movies being shot there.
Jimmie Howe made the acquaintance of a cameraman on one of the location shoots, who suggested he give the movies a try. He got hired by the Jesse Lasky Studios' photography department at the princely sum of $10 per week, but the man in charge thought he was too little to lug equipment around, so he assigned Jimmie custodial work. Thus the future Academy Award-wining cinematographer James Wong Howe's first job in Hollywood was picking up scraps of nitrate stock from the cutting-room floor (more important than it sounds, as nitrate fires in editing rooms were not uncommon). The job allowed him to familiarize himself with movie cameras, lighting equipment and the movie film-development process.
His was a genuine Horatio Alger "Up From His Bootstraps" narrative, as by 1917 he had graduated from editing room assistant to working as a slate boy on Cecil B. DeMille's pictures. The promotion came when DeMille needed all his camera assistants to man multiple cameras on a film. This left no one to hold the chalkboard identifying each scene as a header as the take is shot on film, so Jimmie was drafted and given the title "fourth assistant cameraman. He endeared himself to DeMille when the director and his production crew were unable to get a canary to sing for a close-up. The fourth assistant cameraman lodged a piece of chewing gum in the bird's beak, and as it moved its beak to try to dislodge the gum, it looked like the canary was singing. DeMille promptly gave Jimmie a 50% raise.
In 1919 he was being prepared for his future profession of cameraman. "I held the slate on Male and Female (1919)", he told George C. Pratt in an interview published 60 years later, "and when Mr. DeMille rehearsed a scene, I had to crank a little counter . . . and I would have to grind 16 frames per second. And when he stopped, I would have to give him the footage. He wanted to know how long the scene ran. So besides writing the slate numbers down and keeping a report, I had to turn this crank. That was the beginning of learning how to turn 16 frames".
Because of the problem with early orthochromatic film registering blue eyes on screen, Howe was soon promoted to operating cameraman at Paramount (the new name for the Lasky Studio), where his talents were noted. A long-time photography buff, Jimmie Howe enjoyed taking still pictures and made extra money photographing the stars. One of his clients was professional "sweet young thing" Mary Miles Minter, of the William Desmond Taylor shooting scandal, who praised Jimmie's photographs because they made her pale blue eyes, which did not register well on film, look dark. When she asked him if he could replicate the effect on motion picture film, he told her he could, and she offered him a job as her cameraman.
Howe did not know how he'd made Minter's eyes look dark, but he soon realized that the reflection of a piece of black velvet at the studio that had been tacked up near his still camera had cast a shadow in her eyes, causing them to register darkly. Promoted to Minter's cameraman, he fashioned a frame of black velvet through which the camera's lens could protrude; filming Minter's close-ups with the device darkened her eyes, just as she desired. The studio was abuzz with the news that Minter had acquired a mysterious Chinese cameraman who made her blue eyes register on film. Since other blue-eyed actors had the same problem, they began to demand that Jimmie shoot them, and a cinematography star was born.
Jimmie Howe was soon advanced beyond operating cameraman to lighting cameraman (called "director of photography" in Hollywood) on Minter's Drums of Fate (1923), and he served as director of photography on The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1923) the next year. As a lighting cameraman he was much in demand, and started to freelance. Notable silent pictures on which he served as the director of photography include Paramount's Mantrap (1926), starring "It Girl" Clara Bow, and MGM's Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), starring silent superstar John Gilbert opposite Joan Crawford.
The cinematography on "Mantrap" was his breakthrough as a star lighting cameraman, in which his lighting added enormously to bringing out Clara Bow's sex appeal. He bathed Bow in a soft glow, surrounding the flapper with shimmering natural light, transforming her into a seemingly three-dimensional sex goddess. Even at this early a stage in his career, Howe had developed a solid aesthetic approach to film, based on inventive, expressive lighting. The film solidified his reputation as a master in the careful handling of female subjects, a rep that would get him his last job a half-century later, on Barbra Streisand's Funny Lady (1975).
Jimmie Howe journeyed back to China at the end of the decade to shoot location backgrounds for a movie about China he planned to make as a director. Though the movie was never made, the footage was later used in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932). When he returned to the US, Hollywood was in the midst of a technological upheaval as sound pictures were finishing off the silent movie, which had matured into a medium of expression now being hailed as "The Seventh Art." The silent film, in a generation, had matured into a set art form with its own techniques of craftsmanship, and pictures like 7th Heaven (1927) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) generally were thought to be examples of the "photoplay" reaching perfection as a medium. This mature medium now was violently overthrown by the revolutionary upstart, Sound. The talkies had arrived.
The Hollywood Howe returned to was in a panic. All the wisdom about making motion pictures had been jettisoned by nervous studio heads, and the new Hollywood dogma held that only cameramen with experience in sound cinematography could shoot the new talking pictures, thus freezing out many cameramen who had recently been seen as master craftsmen in the silent cinema. Director William K. Howard, who was in pre-production with his film Transatlantic (1931), wanted Jimmie Howe's expertise. Having just acquired some new lenses with $700 of his own money, Howe shot some tests for the film, which impressed the studio enough to gave Howard permission to hire Jimmie to shoot it.
Once again, his career thrived and he was much in demand. He earned the sobriquet "Low-Key Howe" for his low-contrast lighting of interiors, exerting aesthetic control over the dark spots of a frame in the way that a great musician "played" the silences between notes. In 1933 he gave up freelancing and started working in-house at MGM, where he won a reputation for efficiency. He shot The Thin Man (1934) in 18 days and Manhattan Melodrama (1934) in 28 days. It was at MGM that he became credited as "James Wong Howe". Howe's original screen credit was "James Howe" or "Jimmie Howe", but during his early years at MGM "Wong" was added to his name by the front office, "for exotic flair", and his salary reached $500 a week. After shooting 15 pictures for MGM, he moved over to Warner Bros. for Algiers (1938), garnering him his first Academy Award nomination. Studio boss Jack L. Warner was so thrilled by Howe's work with Hedy Lamarr that he signed Jimmie to a seven-year contract. James Wong Howe shot 26 movies at Warners through 1947, and four others on loanout to other studios.
A master at the use of shadow, Howe was one of the first DPs to use deep-focus cinematography, photography in which both foreground and distant planes remain in focus. His camerawork typically was unobtrusive, but could be quite spectacular when the narrative called for it. In the context of the studio-bound production of the time, Wong Howe's lighting sense is impressive given his use of location shooting. Citic James Agee called him one of "the few men who use this country for background as it ought to be used in films." Wong Howe used backgrounds to elucidate the psychology of the film's characters and their psychology, such as in Pursued (1947), where the austere desert landscape serves to highlight the tortured psyche of Robert Mitchum's character.
Wong Howe was famed for his innovations, including putting a cameraman with a hand-held camera on roller skates inside a boxing ring for Body and Soul (1947) to draw the audience into the ring. He strapped cameras to the actors' waists in The Brave Bulls (1951) to give a closer and tighter perspective on bullfighting, a sport in which fractions of an inch can mean the difference between life and death. He was hailed for his revolutionary work with tracking and distortion in Seconds (1966), in which he used a 9mm "fish-eye" lens to suggest mental instability.
James Wong Howe became the most famous cameraman in the world in the 1930s, and he bought a Duesenberg, one of the most prestigious and expensive automobiles in the world. His driving his "Doozy" around Hollywood made for an incongruous sight, as Chinese typically were gardeners and houseboys in prewar America, a deeply racist time. During World War II anti-Asian bigotry intensified, despite the fact that China was an ally of the United States in its war with Japan. Mistaken for a Japanese (despite their having been relocated to concentration camps away from the Pacific Coast), he wore a button that declared "I am Chinese." His close friend James Cagney also wore the same button, out of solidarity with his friend.
Wong Howe was involved in a long-term relationship with the writer Sanora Babb, who was a Caucasian. Anti-miscegenation laws on the books in California until 1948 forbade Caucasians from marrying Chinese, and the couple could not legally marry until 1949, after the laws had been repealed. In September of 1949 they finally tied the knot, and Sanora Babb Wong Howe later told a family member that they had to hunt for three days for a sympathetic judge who would marry them.
Wong Howe eventually bought a Chinese restaurant located near the Ventura Freeway, which he managed with Sanora. When a photographer from a San Fernando Valley newspaper came to take a picture of the eatery, Howe counseled that he should put a wide-angle lens on his camera so he wouldn't have to stand so close to the freeway to get the shot. "I'll take the picture," the photographer unknowingly snapped at one of the master cinematographers of the world, "you just mind your goddamned noodles!"
Perhaps due to the sting of racism, the hypocrisy of a country fighting the Nazis and their eugenics policies that itself allowed the proscription of racial intermarriage, which kept him from legally marrying the woman he loved, or perhaps because of the Red-baiting that consumed Hollywood after the War, James Wong Howe's professional reputation began to decline in the late 1940s. Losing his reputation for efficiency, he was branded "difficult to work with," and producers began to fear his on-set temper tantrums. Though Wong Howe was never blacklisted, he came under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his propensity for working with "Reds", "Pinks" and "fellow-travelers" such as John Garfield. Though he was never hauled in front of HUAC, Wong Howe's good friend Cagney had been a noted liberal in the 1930s. James Wong Howe felt the chill cast over the industry by McCarthyism.
In 1953 Wong Howe was given the opportunity to direct a feature film for the first time, being hired to helm a biography of Harlem Globetrotters founder Abe Saperstein, Go Man Go (1954). The film, which was brought in at 21 days on a $130,000 budget, did nothing to enhance his reputation. Howe managed to pull out of his career doldrums, and after McCarthyism crested in 1954 he won his first Oscar for the B+W cinematography of The Rose Tattoo (1955), in which the shadows created by Howe's cinematography reveal the protagonist Serafina's emotional turmoil as much as the words of Tennessee Williams. He directed one more picture, the undistinguished Invisible Avenger (1958), a B-movie in which The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, investigated the murder of a New Orleans bandleader, before returning to his true vocation, the motion picture camera.
By the mid-'50s Howe had made it back to the top of the profession. In 1957 he did some of his most brilliant work on Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a textbook primer on the richness of B+W cinematography. Ironically, he was not Oscar-nominated for his work on the film, but was nominated the following year for his color work on The Old Man and the Sea (1958) and won his second Oscar for the B+W photography of Hud (1963). Once again Wong Howe used a landscape, the barren and lonely West Texas plains, to highlight the psychological state of the film's protagonist, the amoral and go-it-alone title character played by Paul Newman.
One of Wong Howe's favorite assignments in his career was the five-month shoot under the once-blacklisted Martin Ritt on The Molly Maguires (1970), a tale of labor strife, which was shot on location in the Pennsylvania coal fields. His health started to fail after the shoot, and he was forced into retirement, requiring frequent hospitalization in the final years of his life. Reportedly he had to turn down the offer to shoot The Godfather (1972), as he was not healthy enough to undertake the assignment. Gordon Willis got the job instead.
When Funny Lady (1975) producer Ray Stark fired Vilmos Zsigmond as the director of photography of his Funny Girl (1968) sequel, he hired Howe due to his faith that the great lighting cameraman who had done wonders with Mary Miles Minter, Clara Bow, and Hedy Lamarr could glamorize his star, Barbra Streisand. Howe took over the shoot, but his health gave out after a short time and he collapsed on the set. Oscar-winner Ernest Laszlo, then-president of the American Society of Cinematographers, filled in until Howe returned from the hospital and finished the shoot. He received his last Oscar nomination for his work on the film. It marked the end of a remarkable career in motion pictures that spanned almost 60 years.
By the time of his retirement, he had long been acknowledged as a master of his art, one of the greatest lighting cameramen of all time, credited with shooting over 130 pictures in Hollywood and England. He worked with many of the greatest and most important directors in cinema history, from Allan Dwan in the silent era to Sidney Lumet in the 1960s. He created three production companies during his professional career, an untopped career in which he racked up ten Academy Award nominations in both B+W white and color (including notoriously difficult Technicolor), in formats ranging from the Academy ratio to CinemaScope, all of which he mastered. An even greater honor than his two Oscar wins came his way. In 1949, when he was chosen to shoot test footage for the proposed comeback of the great Greta Garbo in the proposed movie "La Duchesse de Langeais," such was his reputation.
Sanora Babb Wong Howe wrote after his death, "My husband loved his work. He spent all his adult life from age 17 to 75, a year before his death, in the motion picture industry. When he died at 77, courageous in illness as in health, he was still thinking of new ways to make pictures. He was critical of poor quality in any area of film, but quick to see and appreciate the good. His mature style was realistic, never naturalistic. If the story demanded, his work could be harsh and have a documentary quality, but that quality was strictly Wong Howe. If the story allowed, his style was poetic realism, for he was a poet of the camera. This was a part of his nature, his impulse toward the beautiful, but it did not prevent his flexibility in dealing with all aspects of reality."
His greatest asset to film may have been his adaptability, the many ways in which he could vary his aesthetic in service of a story. Howe initially fought the notoriously gimmicky John Frankenheimer over his desire to use a fish-eye lens for "Seconds." Subsequently, Howe used the lens masterfully to convey the psychological torment of the protagonist, locked in a beyond-Kafkaesque nightmare that simply relying on sets and lighting couldn't bring across. He had made it work by adapting his aesthetic to the needs of the story and its characters, in service to his director.
Howe's work was given retrospectives at the 2002 Seattle International Film Festival, and in San Francisco in 2004, a rare honor for a cinematographer. It was testimony to his continuing reputation, more than a quarter century after his death, as one of the greatest and most innovative lighting cameramen the world of cinema has ever known.
Perhaps the greatest honor that can be bestowed on James Wong Howe is that this master craftsman, a genius of lighting, refutes the auteur theory, which holds that the director solely is "author" of a film. No one could reasonably make that claim on any picture on which Howe was the director of photography.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
A somewhat underrated figure in cinematographic history, Australian-born Robert Krasker handled some of the most memorable films made in Britain after the Second World War. In his youth he attended art classes in Paris and studied photography at the Photohaendler Schule in Dresden. He briefly worked for Paramount in Paris before joining Alexander Korda's London Films at Denham Studios in 1932. As a camera operator, Krasker cut his teeth on Technicolor spectacles like The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). From 1942, he worked as director of photography, showing his flair in all photographic media, from the softly lit, subtle black & white of Brief Encounter (1945) to the gaudy 'cartoon colour' pageantry of Henry V (1944).
He adopted a suitably harsher, almost semi-documentary look working with director Carol Reed on Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949). Both films are characterised by expressionistic camera angles, chiaroscuro lighting and conspicuous close-ups. Krasker deservedly won an Oscar for his work on 'The Third Man' and went on to shoot the visually glorious Senso (1954) for Luchino Visconti in Italy, in turn followed by one of the best-looking epics of the 50s: El Cid (1961) -- with its famous long shot of the dead hero, riding away tied upright to his horse. Krasker's style of photography went out of fashion with the increasing popularity of the New Wave in the 1960s. Disenchantment, combining with failing health led to his retirement in 1965. One of the great cameramen of cinema's "Golden Age", he deserves to be remembered.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Producer
Lubezki began his career in Mexican film and television productions in the late 1980s. His first international production was the 1993 independent film Twenty Bucks (1993), which followed the journey of a single twenty-dollar bill.
Lubezki is a frequent collaborator with fellow Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. The two have been friends since they were teenagers and attended the same film school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Together they have worked on six motion pictures: Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991), A Little Princess (1995), Great Expectations (1998), And Your Mother Too (2001), Children of Men (2006), and Gravity (2013). His work with Cuarón on Children of Men (2006), has received universal acclaim. The film utilized a number of new technologies and distinctive techniques. The "roadside ambush" scene was shot in one extended take utilizing a special camera rig invented by Doggicam systems, developed from the company's Power Slide system. For the scene, a vehicle was modified to enable seats to tilt and lower actors out of the way of the camera. The windshield of the car was designed to tilt out of the way to allow camera movement in and out through the front windscreen. A crew of four, including Lubezki, rode on the roof. Children of Men (2006) also features a seven-and-a-half-minute battle sequence composed of roughly five seamless edits.
Lubezki has been nominated for eight Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, winning three, for Gravity (2013), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), and The Revenant (2015). He is the first cinematographer in history to win three consecutive Academy Awards.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
One of the most respected cinematographers in the industry, Polish-born Rudolph Mate entered the film business after his graduation from the University of Budapest. He worked in Hungary as an assistant cameraman for Alexander Korda and later worked throughout Europe with noted cameraman Karl Freund. Mate was hired to shoot some second-unit footage for Carl Theodor Dreyer and Erich Pommer, and they were so impressed with his work that they hired him as cinematographer on Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) (US title: "The Passion of Joan of Arc"). Mate was soon working on some of Europe's most prestigious films, cementing his reputation as one of the continent's premier cinematographers. Hollywood came calling in 1935, and Mate shot films there for the next 12 years before turning to directing in 1947. Unfortunately, while many of his directorial efforts were visually impressive (especially his sci-fi epic When Worlds Collide (1951)), the films themselves were for the most part undistinguished, with his best work probably being the film-noir classic D.O.A. (1949).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Additional Crew
Cinematographer Russell Metty, a superb craftsman who worked with such top directors as John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles, was born in Los Angeles on September 20, 1906. Entering the movie industry as a lab assistant, he apprenticed as an assistant cameraman and graduated to lighting cameraman at RKO Radio Pictures in 1935. Metty's ability to create effects with black-and-white contrast while shooting twilight and night were on display in two films he shot for Welles, The Stranger (1946) and the classic Touch of Evil (1958), the latter showing his mastery of complex crane shots. (Metty shot additional scenes for Welles' second masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), whose lighting cameraman was Stanley Cortez but had the look of Citizen Kane (1941), which was shot by Gregg Toland). At Universal in the 1950s, he enjoyed a productive collaboration with director Douglas Sirk on ten films from 1953-59, including Sirk's masterpieces Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959), a remake of the 1934 classic (Imitation of Life (1934)). However, his collaboration with Kubrick on Spartacus (1960) proved troublesome.
A union cinematographer himself who had been an accomplished professional photographer, Kubrick exerted control over the look of his films. Kubrick gave far less leeway to his directors of photography than did traditional directors, even directors such as Welles and noted bizarre-camera-angle freak Sidney J. Furie (The Appaloosa (1966)), men who were extraordinarily active partners in crafting the look of their films. Kubrick was not deferential to his directors of photography, even to such top cameramen as Lucien Ballard and future Academy Award winners Oswald Morris and Geoffrey Unsworth. Metty and Kubrick clashed over the filming of "Spartacus," as Kubrick--with his extraordinary sense of light and effect--considered himself to be the director of photography on the film.
Ironically, it was "Spartacus" that won Metty his sole Academy Award, for color cinematography (he received his second nomination for the color cinematography on Flower Drum Song (1961)). Metty continued to work on top productions into the 1970s, including The Misfits (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), Madigan (1968), and The Omega Man (1971). Metty also worked extensively on television, including Columbo (1971) and The Waltons (1972).
Russell Metty died on April 28, 1978, in Canoga Park, California. He was 71 years old.- Cinematographer
- Animation Department
- Camera and Electrical Department
Kazuo Miyagawa was born on 25 February 1908 in Kyoto, Japan. He was a cinematographer, known for Yojimbo (1961), Rashomon (1950) and Brother (1960). He was married to Kazuko ?. He died on 7 August 1999 in Tokyo, Japan.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Sven Nykvist was considered by many in the industry to be one of the world's greatest cinematographers. During his long career that spanned almost half a century, Nyvist perfected the art of cinematography to its most simple attributes, and he helped give the films he had worked on the simplest and most natural look imaginable. Indeed, Mr. Nykvist prided himself on the simplicity and naturalness of his lighting schemes. Nykvist used light to create mood and, more significantly, to bring out the natural flesh tones in the human face so that the emotion of the scene could be played out on the face without the light becoming intrusive.
Nykvist entered the Swedish film industry when he was 19 and worked his way up to becoming a director of photography. He first worked with the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman on the film Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), but his collaboration with Bergman began in earnest with The Virgin Spring (1960). From that point on, Nykvist replaced the great Gunnar Fischer as Bergman's cameraman, and the two men started a collaboration that would last for a quarter of a century. The switch from Fischer to Nykvist created a marked difference in the look of Bergman's films. In many respects, it was like the difference between Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Fischer's lighting was a study in light and darkness, while Nykvist preferred a more naturalistic, more subtle approach that in many ways relied on the northern light compositions of the many great Scandinavian painters.
Nykvist's work with Bergman is one of the most glorious collaborations in movie history. Nykvist created a markedly different look for each installment of Bergman's Faith Trilogy. Through a Glass Darkly (1961) had an almost suffocating quality to it, and The Silence (1963) hearkened back to the days of German Expressionism. Winter Light (1963), the middle part of the trilogy, may very well be the most perfect work of Nykvist's repertoire. Having studied the light in a real provincial church carefully, he then recreated the subtle changes in the light as the day went on on a Stockholm sound stage. Indeed, it's hard to believe that the film was shot on a stage and not in a real church in Northern Sweden. For Persona (1966), Nykvist relied heavily on Sweden's famous Midnight Sun. In The Passion of Anna (1969), Nykvist was able to capture the chilly, soggy, and melancholy look of Faro, one of Nykvist's first color films. Both Nykvist and Bergman were both very reluctant to film in color. He created a fascinating study of white and red in Cries & Whispers (1972), for which Nykvist won an Oscar. He won an Oscar again for the last feature-length theatrical film that Bergman made, Fanny and Alexander (1982).
During the late 1970s, Nykvist began making films elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, working for directors such as Louis Malle (Pretty Baby (1978)), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)), Bob Fosse (Star 80 (1983)), Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle (1993)), Woody Allen (Another Woman (1988), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)), Richard Attenborough (Chaplin (1992)), and fellow Swede Lasse Hallström (What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)). The documentary Ljuset håller mig sällskap (2000) paid homage to Nykvist, although it does not grant us any real secrets about his working methods. Nykvist died in 2006.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Vittorio Storaro, the award-winning cinematographer who won Oscars for "Apocalypse Now (1979)", "Reds (1981)" and "The Last Emperor (1987)". He was born on June 24, 1940 in Rome, where his father was a projectionist at the Lux Film Studio. At the age of 11, he began studying photography at a technical school. He enrolled at C.I.A.C (Italian Cinemagraphic Training Centre) and subsequently continued his education at the state cinematography school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. When he enrolled at the school at the age of 18, he was one of its youngest students ever.
At the age of 20, he was employed as an assistant cameraman and was promoted to camera operator within a year. Storaro spent several years visiting galleries and studying the works of great painters, writers, musicians and other artists. In 1966, he went back to work as an assistant cameraman on Before the Revolution (1964), one of the first films directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Storaro earned his first credit as a cinematographer in 1968 for "Giovinezza, giovinezza". His third film was "The Spider's Stratagem (1970)" which began his long collaboration with Bertolucci. He also shot "The Conformist (1970)", "Last Tango in Paris (1972)", "Luna (1979)", "The Sheltering Sky (1990)_", "Little Buddha (1993)," for Bertolucci.
He won his first Oscar for the cinematography of "Apocalypse Now (1979)", for which director Francis Ford Coppola gave him free rein to design the visual look of the picture. Storaro originally had been reluctant to take the assignment as he considered Gordon Willis to be Coppola's cinematographer, but Coppola wanted him, possibly because of his having shot "Last Tango in Paris (1972), which had starred Marlon Brando. Brando's performance in the film had been semi-improvised, and Coppola has planned on a similar tack for his scenes in the jungle with Brando's character Colonel Kurtz.
The results of their collaboration were masterful, and he later shot the 3-D short "Captain EO (1986)", the feature films "One from the Heart (1981)" and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)," and the "Life without Zoe" segment of "New York Stories (1989)" for Coppola. He won his second Oscar as the director of photography on Warren Beatty's "Reds (1981)" and subsequently shot "Dick Tracy (1990)" and "Bulworth (1998)" for Beatty He won his third Oscar as the director of photography on Bertolucci's Best Picture Academy Award-winner "The Last Emperor (1987)".
"All great films are a resolution of a conflict between darkness and light," Storaro says. "There is no single right way to express yourself. There are infinite possibilities for the use of light with shadows and colors. The decisions you make about composition, movement and the countless combinations of these and other variables is what makes it an art."
According to Storaro, "Some people will tell you that technology will make it easier for one person to make a movie alone but cinema is not an individual art." Storaro disagrees. "It takes many people to make a movie. You can call them collaborators or co-authors. There is a common intelligence. The cinema never has the reality of a painting or a photograph because you make decisions about what the audience should see, hear and how it is presented to them. You make choices which super-impose your own interpretations of reality."
Storaro believes that, "It is our obligation to defend the audiences' rights to see the images and to hear the sounds the way we have expressed ourselves as artists,".
During the 1970s, the metaphor of cinematography as 'painting with light' took hold. Storaro, however, adds motion to the mix. Cinematography, to the great D.P., is writing with light and motion, the literal translation of the word cinematography, which derives from Greek
"It describes the real meaning of what we are attempting to accomplish," Storaro says. "We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings."
As a cinematographer, he is highly innovative. He had Rosco International fabricate a series of custom color gels for his lighting, which he used to implement his theories about emotional response to color. The "Storaro Selection" of color gels is available for other cinematographers from Rosco.
He created the "Univision" film system, which is a 35mm format based on film stock with three perforation that provides an aspect ratio of 2:1, which Storaro feels is a good compromise between the 2.35:1 and 1.85:1 wide-screen ratios favored by most filmmakers. Storaro developed the new technology with the intention of 2:1 becoming the universal aspect ratio for both movies and television in the digital age. He first shot the television mini-series "Dune" with the Univision system.
Storaro is the youngest person to receive the American Society of Cinematographer's Lifetime Achievement Award, and only the second recipient after Sven Nykvist not to be a U.S. citizen.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Additional Crew
Robert L. Surtees began his working life as a portrait photographer and retoucher, before becoming camera assistant at Universal in 1927. He spent a lengthy apprenticeship (15 years) working under such experienced cinematographers as Hal Mohr, Joseph Ruttenberg and Gregg Toland. Between 1929 and 1930, he was seconded to the Universal studios in Berlin, subsequently spending the remainder of the decade at First National, Warner Brothers and Pathe. He settled at MGM in 1943 (remaining under contract until 1962), and soon developed a reputation as one of Hollywood's foremost lighting cameramen.
In keeping with the glamorous, lavish look of MGM product of the time, Surtees typically employed high-key lighting. This particularly suited big budget colour epics, like Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959) (filmed in the large screen Camera 65 process with anamorphic lenses, which greatly enhanced colour definition and sharpness); expansive outdoor musicals like Oklahoma! (1955) (the first picture shot in 70 mm Todd-AO ultra wide- screen format); or lush, romantic period drama like Raintree County (1957). Forever at the cutting edge of technological innovation, Surtees was an extremely versatile craftsman. He excelled at every genre and photographic process, superb at shooting sweeping scenery (for example, his Technicolor lensing of King Solomon's Mines (1950)on location in Africa), or bringing the best out of his close-ups. An undoubted high point in his career would have to be the 9-minute chariot race from "Ben-Hur".
Surtees received the first of his 16 Oscar nominations for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) (when the studio system was at its peak), and his last - some 33 years later - for The Turning Point (1977). Testimony to his ageless endurance was being picked by director Peter Bogdanovich to shoot The Last Picture Show (1971). In the same nostalgic vein, his work on The Sting (1973), photographed in subtle sepia tones (the film was deemed by the Library of Congress as 'aesthetically significant'), contributed greatly to its winning 7 Academy Awards.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Born in Illinois in 1904, the only child of Jennie and Frank Toland, Gregg and his mother moved to California several years after his parents divorced in 1910. Through Jennie's work as a housekeeper for several people in the movie business, Gregg may had gotten a $12-a-week job at age 15 as an office boy at William Fox Studios. Soon he was making $18 a week as an assistant cameraman. When sound came to movies in 1927, the audible whir of movie cameras became a problem, requiring the cumbersome use of soundproof booths. Toland helped devise a tool which silenced the camera's noise and which allowed the camera to move about more freely. In 1931, Toland received his first solo credit for the Eddie Cantor comedy, "Palmy Days." In 1939 he earned his first Oscar for his work on William Wyler's "Wuthering Heights." In the following year he sought out Orson Welles who then hired him to photograph "Citizen Kane." (Toland was said to have protected the inexperienced Welles from potential embarrassment by conferring with him in private about technical matters rather than bringing these up in front of the assembled cast and crew.) For "Kane" Toland used a method which became known as "deep focus" because it showed background objects as clearly as foreground objects. (Film theorist Andre Bazin said that Toland brought democracy to film-making by allowing viewers to discover what was interesting to them in a scene rather than having this choice dictated by the director.) Toland quickly became the highest paid cinematographer in the business, earning as much as $200,000 over a three year period. He also became perhaps the first cinematographer to receive prominent billing in the opening credits, rather than being relegated to a card containing seven or more other names. Tragically, Toland's career was cut short in 1948 by his untimely death at age 44. Toland had a daughter, Lothian, by his second wife and two sons, Gregg jr. and Timothy, by his third. Lothian became the wife of comic Red Skelton.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
Sergei Urusevsky is an Soviet cinematographer best known for his work on the films of the Mikhail Kalatozov.
He started as a painter and photographer studying under the great graphic artist Vladimir Favorsky at the Institute of Fine Art in Moscow. Bringing a pictorial tradition to cinema, Urusevsky started his career with Mark Donskoy on The Village Teacher (1947), Vsevolod Pudovkin on Vasili's Return (1953), and Grigoriy Chukhray on The Forty-First (1956). Urusevsky also served during World War II as a cameraman on the front lines.
With The First Echelon he combined his marvelous visual sense with Kalatozov's breathtaking technical skills - a partnership that made The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Letter Never Sent (1960) and I Am Cuba (1964) landmarks in the history of cinematography. It was with The Cranes Are Flying (1957) where their use of the hand held camera really started, especially with the scene of Veronica running through the streets where the camera finally and miraculously leaps into the air with an overhead shot. It was Urusevsky and Yuri Ilyenko who had profound influence throughout the Soviet film industry - not since the 1920s had Soviet film style been acclaimed throughout the world. Urusevsky's poetic camerawork, no matter how daring, was always an organic search into the emotional possibilities of the script. In 1969 Urusevsky directed Beg inokhodtsa (1969), adapted from the Kirghiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov's short novel. Urusevsky followed this up with Poj pesnyu, poet (1973) based on the poems of Sergei Esenin.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Producer
John Toll is an American cinematographer. His filmography spans a wide variety of genres, including epic period drama, comedy, science fiction, and contemporary drama. He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in both 1994 and 1995 for Legends of the Fall and Braveheart respectively.
He has collaborated with several noteworthy directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Edward Zwick, Terrence Malick, Mel Gibson, John Madden, The Wachowskis, and Ang Lee. Outside of film, he has shot several commercials, the pilot episode of Golden Globe-winning drama series Breaking Bad, and has served as chief cinematographer on the Netflix original series Sense8.
Toll was also nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The Thin Red Line (1998).- Cinematographer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Sacha Vierny was born on 10 August 1919 in Bois-le-Roi, Seine-et-Marne, France. He was a cinematographer and assistant director, known for The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), The Pillow Book (1995) and Belle de Jour (1967). He died on 15 May 2001 in Vannes, Morbihan, France.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Gordon Willis was an American cinematographer. He's best known for his work on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films, as well asWoody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979).
His work on the first two Godfather films turned out to be groundbreaking in its use of low-light photography and underexposed film, as well as in his control of lighting and exposure to create the sepia tones that denoted period scenes in The Godfather Part II (1974).
In the seven-year period up to 1977, Willis was the director of photography on six films that received among them 39 Academy Award nominations, winning 19 times, including three awards for Best Picture. During this time he did not receive a single nomination for Best Cinematography.
He directed one film of his own, Windows (1980). His last film as a cinematographer was The Devil's Own (1997), directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Willis died of cancer on May 18, 2014, ten days before his 83rd birthday, at the age of 82.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Freddie Young was a British cinematographer. He is best known for his work on David Lean's films Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Ryan's Daughter (1970), all three of which won him Academy Awards for Best Cinematography.
Young was an cinematographer on 130 films, including Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), 49th Parallel (1941), Ivanhoe (1952), Lust for Life (1956), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), Lord Jim (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).
He was also the first British cinematographer to film in CinemaScope.
Young died from natural causes in 1998 at the age of 96.
In 2003, a survey conducted by the International Cinematographers Guild placed Young among the ten most influential cinematographers in history.