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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
- Actor
Along with László Kovács, a fellow student who fled Hungary in 1956, Zsigmond rose to prominence in the 1970s. He is known for his use of natural light and vivid use of color on features such as The Long Goodbye (1973) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).- 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
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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
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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
Sven Nyquist is known for Democrazy (2005).- Cinematographer
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Starting out in 1924 as a lab technician at MGM, John Alton left there for Paramount to become a cameraman. He traveled to France and then to South America, where he wrote, photographed and directed several Spanish-language films. Returning to Hollywood in 1937, he soon achieved a reputation as one of the industry's most accomplished cinematographers. In 1951, he and Alfred Gilks won an Academy Award for color photography for An American in Paris (1951).- Cinematographer
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Giuseppe 'Peppino' Rotunno entered the film industry as a still photographer at Cinecitta but lost his job due to his anti-fascist views. Conscripted and sent to Greece in 1942, he then served as a newsreel cameraman with the Italian army film unit. A year later, he was captured during the German occupation of Greece and spent two years internment in Germany. Freed by US troops in April 1945, Rotunno returned to Italy. During the following decade, he worked his way up the ladder from a humbly paid assistant cameraman to director of photography. The romantic comedy Scandal in Sorrento (1955) was the first motion picture he shot in that capacity and he has since worked with some of Italy's leading post-war directors. His most famous collaborations were with Luchino Visconti, whom he regarded as his mentor (White Nights (1957), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963)) and with Federico Fellini (Fellini Satyricon (1969), Amarcord (1973)). Rotunno acquired a well-deserved reputation for creating realistic, opulent, nostalgic or uncanny atmospheres through ingenious use of lighting techniques. His work in the international field has included the Ava Gardner starrers The Naked Maja (1958) and The Angel Wore Red (1960), Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), Arthur Hiller's Man of La Mancha (1972), Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) (1981 BAFTA winner and 1980 Oscar nominee) and the remake of Sabrina (1995), starring Harrison Ford. In 1966, Rotunno became the first non-US citizen admitted to join the American Society of Cinematographers. From 1988, he taught at the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia in Rome where he died on February 7 2021 at the age of 97..- Cinematographer
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Christopher Doyle was born on 2 May 1952 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for Paranoid Park (2007), Hero (2002) and 2046 (2004).- Cinematographer
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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
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Two-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler was adjudged one of the ten most influential cinematographers in movie history, according to an International Cinematographers Guild survey of its membership. He won his Oscars in both black & white and color, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) (1966) and Bound for Glory (1976) (1976). He also shot part of Days of Heaven (1978) (1978), for which credited director of photography Nestor Almendros -- won a Best Cinematography Oscar that Wexler initially felt should have been jointly shared by both. Later he admitted he was just finishing the work of Almendros and when Bert Schneider offer him more credit in the Criterion Dvd release of the film, he turned down the offer. In 1993, Wexler was awarded a Lifetime Achivement award by the cinematographer's guild, the American Society of Cinematographers. He received five Oscar nominations for his cinematography, in total, plus one Emmy Award in a career that has spanned six decades.
In addition to his masterful cinematography, Wexler directed the seminal late Sixties film Medium Cool (1969) and has directed and/or shot many documentaries that display his progressive political views. He was the subject of a 2004 documentary shot by his son Mark Wexler, Tell Them Who You Are (2004).- Cinematographer
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Italian-born Nicholas Musuraca's first job in the film business was as a chauffeur to early pioneering producer/director J. Stuart Blackton. Having a knack for photography, he worked behind the cameras in a variety of jobs before finally becoming a cinematographer (or, as they were called in those days, "lighting cameraman"). Musuraca spent most of his career at RKO Pictures, where he became known as a master of lighting--he was once admiringly described by a fellow cameraman as "a painter with light"--and was largely responsible for the gritty, moody camerawork that became that studio's signature. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on I Remember Mama (1948). After leaving RKO in the late '50s he worked for a short period at Warner Bros., but then joined Desilu Studios and spent the remainder of his career in television.- Cinematographer
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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
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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
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Roger Deakins is an English cinematographer best known for his work on the films of the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve.
He is a member of both the American and British Society of Cinematographers.
Deakins' first feature film in America as cinematographer was Mountains of the Moon (1990). He began his collaboration with the Coen brothers in 1991 on the film Barton Fink. He received his first major award from the American Society of Cinematographers for his outstanding achievement in cinematography for the internationally praised major motion picture The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
He is also known for his work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit (2010), Skyfall (2012), Sicario (2015), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
Deakins also worked as one of the visual consultants for Pixar's animated feature WALL-E.
In 2018 he won an Oscar for best cinematographer for his work in Blade Runner 2049.- Cinematographer
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Tonino Delli Colli was born on 20 November 1922 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for The Name of the Rose (1986), Life Is Beautiful (1997) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). He was married to Alexandra Delli Colli. He died on 16 August 2005 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Cinematographer
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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
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Boris Kaufman, the Oscar-winning cinematographer who shot Jean Vigo's oeuvre and helped introduce a neo-realistic style into American films, was born on August 24, 1897, in Bialystok, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. The youngest son of librarians, the Soviet directors Denis Kaufman (a.k.a. Dziga Vertov, meaning "Spinning Top") and Mikhail Kaufman were his older brothers. Dziga Vertov was one of the great innovators in Soviet cinema, the father of the agit-prop film, who directed Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and his brother Boris imitated his beloved camera tricks when he shot the documentary À Propos de Nice (1930) for Vigo.
The Kaufmans' parents decided to move to Moscow at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and Denis went to school in St. Petersburg. In 1917, Russia experienced two revolutions, one which overthrew the Czar and the later, the "October" Revolution, which overthrew the bourgeois democracy and established the Bolshevik Party as the new rulers of what they called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Denis and his brother Mikhail were enamored of the October Revolution and volunteered their services as filmmakersto the new socialist state.
During the revolutionary period, Kaufman's parents moved back to Poland, which after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, became independent from the Soviet Union. They took along Boris, who was much younger than his brothers. Poland and the Soviet Union eventually fought a border war, and the young Kaufman's parents sent him to Paris to be educated. Their son Denis, now Dziga Vertov, whose new name connoted the speed of the new medium and of his new life as a revolutionary artist, as well as the revolutions of a film reel, become a cinema philosopher as well as director. Dziga Vertov issued manifestos calling for filmmakers to take a formative role in shaping the new socialist order, replacing "dream films" with movies articulating "Soviet actuality."
Boris Kaufman, who eventually emigrated to France in 1927, later credited his brother Mikhail with his education as a cameraman. "Mikhail taught me cinematography by mail," he told Columbia University Professor Erik Barnouw.
After the Kaufman brothers' parents died, Mikhail had taken on a paternal responsibility for Boris, writing him regularly, and informing him about his film work. Though the brothers never met again after 1917, they did stay in touch via the mails throughout their lives. Boris viewed his brother's films in Paris and was drawn to similar work with Jean Vigo.
A photographer himself, Vigo had acquired a movie camera in order to make films, but he couldn't master it. Vigo had the great luck of meeting and collaborating with Kaufman, who was to evolve into one of the masters of black-and-white cinematography. It was Kaufman who is responsible for the wintry style of L'Atalante (1934), Vigo's sole feature film, as well as the imagery of his other filmed worked, such as Zero for Conduct (1933). As a cinematographer, Kaufman was instrumental in helping Vigo realize his vision on film. The films Kaufman shot for Vigo are both romantic and surreal, infused with a dream-like quality.
Vigo, a consumptive, died of tuberculosis in October 1934, ending their great collaboration that had started with À Propos de Nice (1930), and had continued with the documentary about the swimmer Jean Taris, Taris (1931). The latter documentary featured underwater visuals captured by Kaufman that underscored the dreamy quality of swimming, of being underwater. Vigo and Kaufman enhanced this dreaminess by utilizing slow-motion photography, to serve as correlative for the natural slowing of the body in swimming and to elucidate the glow of skin under water.
The collaborators moved on to fiction with Zero for Conduct (1933), a short film drawn from Vigo's memories of an authoritarian boarding school. The movie influenced the directors of the French New Wave, particularly François Truffaut and his The 400 Blows (1959), and was the inspiration for Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). The great classic "L'Atalante" (1934) finished up the collaboration, one of the greatest between a director and a cinematographer. The realization of Vigo's genius would have been unthinkable without Kaufman.
Kaufman shot Lucrezia Borgia (1935) for Abel Gance, but with the passing of Vigo, he temporarily lost his direction. He shot two shorts for the avant-garde director Dimitri Kirsanoff and was the director of photography on four films with director Léo Joannon.
After serving in the French Army during the sitzkrieg and the Battle of France, Kaufman emigrated to Canada as a war refugee. He was hired by John Grierson to be a cameraman for the National Film Board of Canada. Kaufman moved to the United States in 1942, where he eventually became a citizen. Locked out of feature work by the guild system, Kaufman supported himself shooting short subjects and documentaries before Elia Kazan chose him to shoot On the Waterfront (1954). The Kazan film, for which Kaufman won an Academy Award for cinematography, was his first American feature.
Kazan had wanted Kaufman, with his roots in the documentary, as a collaborator as he planned to inject realism on the order of the Italian neo-realists into American film. Kazan, in his autobiography "A Life" says it was his collaboration with Kaufman that taught him that cinematographers were artists in their own right. (Interestingly, being a former Russian/Soviet citizen and the brother of two prominent Soviet directors, Kuafman was under suspicion during the Cold War of communist sympathies. It was likely that his correspondence with his brother in the USSR was read by U.S. intelligence agents. His lack of career progression until Kazan picked him to shoot On the Waterfront (1954) may have been a result of anti-red paranoia. Thus, only someone like Kazan -- one of the few directors, and the most prominent filmmaker to testify as a friendly witness before the Houe Un-American Activities Committee -- having established his anti-communist credentials, could have employed Boris Kaufman during the height of the post-World War II Red Scare. And, of course, the film Kaufman shot for Kazan is a not-so-thinly veiled anti-communist apologia for informing.)
Kaufman also photographed Baby Doll (1956) (for which he received a second Oscar nomination) in B+W and Splendor in the Grass (1961) in color for Kazan. He was the director of photography on Sidney Lumet's first film, 12 Angry Men (1957), and he also shot The Fugitive Kind (1960), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) and the gritty The Pawnbroker (1964) for Lumet, all in B+W.
Interestingly, Kaufman shot the landmark nudist film Garden of Eden (1954), which led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Excelsior Pictures Corp. v. Regents of University of New York State), in which the majority held that the film was not obscene or indecent, and that nudity was not itself obscene. A decade later, he shot Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's sole foray into film, Film (1965), which was directed by Alan Schneider from Beckett's screenplay. These two movies are testimonials to his adventuresome and iconoclastic spirit, rooted in the experimental cinema.
Boris Kaufman retired in 1970, after shooting for Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970) for Otto Preminger. He died on June 24, 1980, in New York, New York.- Cinematographer
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Caleb Deschanel is an American film cinematographer and film/television director. He has been nominated for six Academy Awards, each time in the field of cinematography. The first nomination came in 1983 for the film The Right Stuff (1983). His second was in 1984 for The Natural (1984), the third in 1996 for Fly Away Home (1996), the fourth in 2000 for The Patriot (2000), the fifth for The Passion of the Christ (2004), and the sixth for Never Look Away (2018).
He is the father of actresses Emily Deschanel and Zooey Deschanel.- Cinematographer
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Lucien Ballard, the cinematographer best known for his collaboration with director Sam Peckinpah on such films as The Wild Bunch (1969), was born in Miami, Oklahoma. Ballard became a wanderer after dropping out of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma, journeying to China in search of opportunity. When he returned to the United States after not finding any, Ballard gained employment in the lumber business, working in a mill sawing trees and surveying land.
Near the end of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, Ballard visited a woman friend who worked as a script clerk at Paramount, and that was the connection that brought him into show business. He was hired by Paramount as a manual laborer loading trucks and worked his way onto a camera crew, starting as a camera assistant. He eventually served a five year apprenticeship, during which he moved his way up the hierarchy to camera operator, the member of the camera crew second-in-seniority to the cinematographer (or lighting cameraman, also known as the director of photography) that actually operates the camera, working with directors Victor Milner, Charles Rosher, and others. He also became experienced as as a film editor at Paramount. Ballard eventually was assigned to the cinematography unit assigned to director Josef von Sternberg, who used him as a camera operator and later as a lighting cameraman. (It was on the set of Von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) that Ballard first worked with Henry Hathaway, then an assistant director but who later, as a director, used Ballard extensively.)
Von Sternberg, who oversaw and constructed the visuals on his early films, was credited as cinematographer for The Devil Is a Woman (1935). Though Ballard did not receive credit as a lighting cameraman on the film, this is usually credited (despite the non-credit) as his first film as a director of photographer (a more honored title for a lighting cameraman; just as "Written By" is a privilege for screenwriters to be credited with, so is "Director of Photography" for the cinematographer). Indeed, Ballard and Von Sternberg jointly were cited by the 1935 Venice Film Festival award for "Best Cinematography" for The Devil Is a Woman (1935), though officially, Ballard received his first credit for cinematography on B.P. Schulberg's production of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1935), which also was directed by Von Sternberg.
Ballard and Von Sternbereg collaborated once more on the musical The King Steps Out (1936), but parted ways after falling out, likely over control of the visuals. Ballard moved over to Columbia in 1935, where he worked as a director of photography for five years, primely for the B-movie unit on their less-prestigious low-budgeted "B-pictures" and on two-reel shorts. After quitting Columbia in 1940, he went to work for Howard Hughes on the eccentric multi-millionaire's attempted-smut fest, The Outlaw (1943). Hughes wanted to show off the twin assets of Jane Russell, which -- for his taste -- required innovative camera angles of her cleavage, one of the then-wonders of the then (natural) world. Ballard shot test scenes for the flick and worked as an assistant on the first-unit crew of the great cinematographer Gregg Toland and as the lighting cameraman on the second unit. Though the film was shot in 1940 and 1941, due to Hughes' perfectionism and censorship troubles, the film, though completed and screened in 1943, was be distributed until after World War II, in 1946.
After Hughes, Ballard shot two pictures for R.K.O., and then moved on to 20th Century Fox for the war period (1941-45). It was at Fox, working on A-pictures, that Ballard first established his reputation, as a master of motion pictures shot on studio sets. On the set of the 1944 movie The Lodger (1944), Ballard met actress Merle Oberon, whom he married in 1945. After Oberon sustained facial scarring after a near-fatal automobile accident, Ballard invented a key light to be mounted by the side of the camera. The light, nicknamed the "Obie" after his wife, directed light onto the subject's face to wash out blemishes and wrinkles so they would not be caught on film. Ballard and Oberon divorced in 1949.
After the war, Ballard spent two years at Universal and another two years at R.K.O. (working again for Hughes, who now owned the studio), before returning to 20th Century Fox for a six-year stint. Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck had committed the studio to turning out pictures shot in the widescreen CinemaScope process and in Technicolor. The widescreen anamorphic process based on the the "hypergonar" lens called "Anamorphoscope" that 20th Century-Fox bought and redubbed "CinemaScope" had actually been invented by the Frenchman 'Henri Chrétien' in the late 1920s.
It was at Fox that Ballard gained his renowned experience in shooting both widescreen and color, particularly with his Westerns, establishing his reputation as a first-rate D.P. anew in these "new" media. His mastery of the wide-screen was fully evident when he shot +The Wild Bunch), a film in which he completely used the widescreen frame. (By the mid-1970s, due to the insistence of television, most widescreen films were shot by bunching the main action in a center frame approximating the Academy aperture of 4:3, thus obviating the expense of creating "pan and scan" movies for TV-broadcast. This eventually led to faux widescreen, when the industry jettisoned the entire use of the frame, which was squeezed onto the negative, and merely masked a camera, producing a simulation of widescreen without the need for squeezing that did not use the full frame. Thus, a film could be shown theatrically by masking a screen at the theater, and the unmasked film could be shown on TV in the 4:3 aspect. However, men like Ballard and Freddie Young were masters of the "true" widescreen.)
His old friend Henry Hathaway, now a major director, used Ballard extensively in the early 1950s. They collaborated on Diplomatic Courier (1952), O. Henry's Full House (1952), and Prince Valiant (1954) in that decade, though by 1956, Ballard was sufficiently established to go freelance. This meant their next collaborations did not come until the 1960s: The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Nevada Smith (1966), and True Grit (1969). Ballard was also able to establish a long-time collaboration -- and friendship -- with director Budd Boetticher, shooting the director's The Magnificent Matador (1955), The Killer Is Loose (1956) (1956), the pilot episode for the television show Maverick (1957), and the Randolph Scott Buchanan Rides Alone (1958). In 1959, he shot The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), Boetticher's last film before the quixotic director pursued his monumental cinema biography of the Mexican matador Carlos Arruza, a decade-long labor of love. Boetticher later told of how when the "Legs Diamond" producer saw the flat look Ballard had created for the film, after discussions with Boetticher, to recreate an authentic look and feel of the 1920s by mimicking the cinematography of that era, the producer criticized Ballard's footage. Not understanding what they were after, he complained to Boetticher, "I thought you said Ballard was a good cameraman!"
In addition to much of the bull-fighting footage contained in the docudrama Arruza (1972), Ballard shot Boetticher's last feature film, A Time for Dying (1969). As a favor to his friend, Ballard also shot Boetticher's documentary about his horse farm, My Kingdom for... (1995), after having retired seven years before.
One collaboration that didn't stick was with Stanley Kubrick, who was 20 years Ballard's junior, though their joint effort produced a memorable look and atmosphere for Kubricks's breakthrough work, the seminal crime drama The Killing (1956). (This film was the true inspiration for the time-shifts favored by '90s cinema wunderkind 'Quentin Tarrantino' .) The experienced and respected Ballard returned to his Black + Whites roots as the cinematographer on The Killing (1956), but Kubrick always experienced friction with his directors of photography as he, a very talented photographer, essentially considered himself his own D.P.
The relationship that Ballard is most famous for was with Sam Peckinpah. They first worked together on the 'Brian Keith' TV series _The Westerner (1960)_ , which had been created by Peckinpah but only lasted half-a-season, and then on the classic 'Randolph Scott' -Joel McCrea Western Ride the High Country (1962). However, it was their next collaboration, The Wild Bunch (1969), that elevated Peckinpah into the pantheon of great directors and made Ballard well-known outside the small circle of professional cinematographers and cult cineastes. Ballard also shot The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The Getaway (1972), and Junior Bonner (1972) for Peckinpah, becoming a principle collaborator with the emotionally troubled and producer-plagued director during the period of his greatness.
Surprisingly, though he worked as director of photography on almost 130 films during his career as a lighting cameraman from 1935 to 1978, Lucien Ballard was nominated just once for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, in 1964 for for his Black + White work on The Caretakers (1963). The oversight is inexplicable, particularly as there were two awards for cinematography (B+W and color) during the bulk of his career. In 1970, he was honored by the National Society of Film Critics with its "Best Cinematography" for his great widescreen work on Peckinpah's epic masterpiece The Wild Bunch (1969), which somehow failed to generate an Oscar nomination. (The American Society of Cinematographers was a tightly controlled clan that provided the bulk of the voters for the Oscar nominations. The Oscar voters also inexplicably blackballed the great Gordon Willis during his career.)
Lucien Ballard died near his Rancho Mirage, California, home in a car accident on October 1, 1988. He was 80 years old.- Cinematographer
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Robert Richardson has won three Academy Awards and earned seven Academy Award nominations for his cinematography. His work on director Oliver Stone's JFK earned him his first Oscar. His second and third came with The Aviator and Hugo directed by Martin Scorsese. These two films also garnered him BAFTA nominations for Best Cinematographer.
Prior to regularly collaborating with well-known directors like Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, Richardson served an apprenticeship shooting second unit on Repo Man while filming television documentaries for PBS and the BBC. His work in television led Stone to hire Richardson to shoot both Salvador and Platoon. From there, he worked almost exclusively with Stone, filming Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and The Doors, while occasionally branching out to shoot films like John Sayles' Eight Men Out and City of Hope.
Richardson also shot Stone's Natural Born Killers, Nixon and U-Turn. He then began collaborating with Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Scorsese chose him as DP on 1999's Bringing Out the Dead, while Tarantino snapped him up for Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
Richardson continued to make his mark as Tarantino's DP on 2012's Django Unchained and 2015's The Hateful Eight, as well as on Ben Affleck's 2016 film Live By Night. He shot Director Andy Serkis's 2017 Breathe starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy; 2018's Adrift for Director Balthasar Kormakur starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin for STX, and 2018's A Private War for Director Matthew Heineman starring Rosamund Pike. Richardson then shot Tarantino's 2020 hit Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, and 2021's Venom 2 for Sony/Director Andy Serkis.
Recent credits include 2022's Emancipation again with Fuqua for Apple Studios, 2023's Air directed by Ben Affleck for Amazon Studios, and The Equalizer 3 for Director Antoine Fuqua and for Columbia Pictures.- Cinematographer
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Peter Suschitzky was born on 25 July 1941 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland. He is a cinematographer and director, known for Dead Ringers (1988), Eastern Promises (2007) and Naked Lunch (1991).- Cinematographer
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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
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As an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who made the successful segue to directing features, Chris Menges has carved out a successful, but understated career. Menges got his start as an assistant editor and camera operator and even worked as a sound recordist several times, before working his way up to director of photography. Menges had his first real break as a documentary camera person and editor in the 1960s and 1970s, traveling wherever there was war and insurrection - Burma, Angola, Vietnam and Tibet - while working with filmmaker Adrian Cowell. Once he made the permanent jump to feature films in the 1980s, Menges developed a style as a cinematographer that never overwhelmed audiences with gaudy colors or outlandish camera moves In fact, Menges understood the oft-accepted theory that color could be less realistic than black and white, because it focused the audience away from emotion to an object. Menges' work was defined by a low-key naturalism, plain composition, and a mix of lenses to tug at the audience at the appropriate moments, which helped him craft memorable images in several award-winning films, including "The Killing Fields" (1984), "Michael Collins" (1996) and "The Reader" (2008).- Cinematographer
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Agnès Godard was born on 29 May 1951 in Dun-sur-Auron, Cher, France. She is a cinematographer and production manager, known for Beau Travail (1999), Home (2008) and Wings of Desire (1987).- Cinematographer
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Gabriel Figueroa was born on 24 April 1907 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He was a cinematographer, known for The Pearl (1947), The Young and the Damned (1950) and Maria Candelaria (1944). He died on 27 April 1997 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico.- Director
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During his last years at school he spent most of his time writing a thesis on 'the future of film' On leaving school he joined Gaumont British Studios at Lime Grove as an apprentice to a stills photographer for a year. He claimed this taught him more about the art of photography than any other form of training could. He then became a clapper boy at B.I.P. Studios at Elstree then moved to British Dominion where he became a a camera assistant. Next was a move to Pinewood and his call up for war duty much of which was spent as a one man film unit based at Aldershot where he learnt more about his craft than about soldering.. After the war he returned to Shepperton Studios to work for Alexander Korda and Powell and Pressburger. He also worked for John Huston on 'Moby Dick' for which he was responsible for all the second unit photography and special effects.- Cinematographer
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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
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Michael Ballhaus was a German cinematographer. He worked on many American films, including Baby It's You (1983), Old Enough (1984), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Departed (2006).
Ballhaus was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for Broadcast News (1987), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), and Gangs of New York (2002), but never won.
His son Florian Ballhaus is also a cinematographer who worked on Flightplan (2005) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006).
Ballhaus died on 11 April 2017, at the age of 81.- Cinematographer
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Harris Savides was born on 28 September 1957 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Elephant (2003), Zodiac (2007) and Birth (2004). He was married to Medine Chenet. He died on 9 October 2012 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- 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
- Actor
Robby Müller was born on 4 April 1940 in Willemstad, Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Breaking the Waves (1996), Paris, Texas (1984) and Repo Man (1984). He died on 3 July 2018 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.- Cinematographer
Yoshio Miyajima was born on 3 February 1910 in Nagono, Japan. He was a cinematographer, known for Harakiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964) and Kanikôsen (1953). He died on 21 February 1998.- 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.- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
- Cinematographer
When he made his directorial debut in 1970, Nicolas Roeg was already a 23-year veteran of the British film industry, starting out in 1947 as an editing apprentice and working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He first came to attention as part of the second unit on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964) two years later containing his first really distinctive solo work. He went on to photograph films for such distinguished directors as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)), John Schlesinger (Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)) and Richard Lester (Petulia (1968)) before his sensational directorial debut in 1968. Co-directed with writer (and painter) Donald Cammell, Performance (1970) was intended to be a simple-minded star vehicle for Mick Jagger and Warner Bros were so horrified when they saw the final multi-layered kaleidoscope of sex, violence, and questions of identity that they delayed its release for two years. Roeg went to Australia for his solo debut as director (Walkabout (1971)), which was also his last film as cinematographer, and throughout the next decade he produced a world-class body of work (Don't Look Now (1973); The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980)) that revealed his uniquely off-kilter view of the world, expressed through fragmented, dislocated images and a highly original yet strangely accessible approach to narrative. He married the star of Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), the elegant Theresa Russell who would play the female lead in nearly all his subsequent films, though these have generally found less favor with critics and audiences, and the release of both Eureka (1983) and Cold Heaven (1991) was severely restricted due to problems with the films' distributors.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
One of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood's Golden Age, Lang spent most of his career at Paramount (1929-1952), where he contributed to the studio's well-earned reputation for visual style. Lang was educated at Lincoln High School in L.A., then proceeded to the University of Southern California to study law. He quickly changed his career plans, however, and joined his father, the photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr, at the small Realart Studio. He served a lengthy apprenticeship as a laboratory assistant and still photographer, before advancing to assistant cameraman, working with pioneering cinematographers H. Kinley Martin and L. Guy Wilky. Lang left Realart in 1922, had a stint with the Preferred Picture Corporation, then joined Paramount which had, by then, absorbed Realart at the end of the decade. In 1929, he became a full director of photography.
During the 1930's, Lang was one of a formidable team of cinematographers working at Paramount, including such illustrious craftsmen as Lee Garmes, Karl Struss and Victor Milner. At this time, the studio dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, particularly in the field of black & white romantic and period film. Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating the mood for every genre and style, from the sombre Peter Ibbetson (1935) to the glamour of Desire (1936) and the Parisian chic of Midnight (1939). Lang was an innovator in the use of long tracking shots. He was also liked by many female stars, such as Helen Hayes and Marlene Dietrich (and, later, Audrey Hepburn, because of his uncanny ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often using subdued lighting and diffusion techniques. Though nominated eighteen times for Academy Awards, he won just once, for A Farewell to Arms (1932). Among his many outstanding films of the 30's and 40's, are the lavishly photographed Bob Hope comedy/thriller The Cat and the Canary (1939) and the romantic, atmospheric The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).
Lang's work with chiaroscuro lighting adapted itself perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of films noir in the 1950's, most noteworthy examples being Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Big Heat (1953). He was at his best working with the directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang. The success of films like Sabrina (1954), Separate Tables (1958) and Some Like It Hot (1959) - all Oscar nominees for Lang's cinematography - owed much to his excellent camera work. Though he preferred the medium of black & white, he became equally proficient in the use of colour photography, working with different processes (Cinerama, VistaVision, etc.) on expansive, richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns like The Magnificent Seven (1960) and How the West Was Won (1962), as well as romantic thrillers like Charade (1963) and How to Steal a Million (1966). In 1990, Lang received a Special Eastman Kodak Award for colour cinematography.
Lang was known in the industry as one of the 'best-dressed men' behind the cameras, modest, yet a perfectionist and a consummate professional. He lived to the ripe old age of 96, dying in Santa Monica, California, in April 1998.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Although Henri Decaë gained fame as a cinematographer, he actually entered the film industry as an editor and soundman. Serving as a cameraman in the French army during WW II, upon his release he began making documentaries and directing and photographing industrial and commercial films, then in 1947 made his first feature. His documentary background showed in the look of the films he photographed, and he worked often with directors Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol. From those early, gritty films, Decae evolved into one of the premier cinematographers of plush, big-budget extravaganzas.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
László Kovács was born on May 14, 1933 in Cece, Hungary. He is known for his work on Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Ghostbusters (1984) and Copycat (1995). He won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASC in 2002. He was married to Audrey. He died on July 22, 2007 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Edward Lachman was born on 31 March 1948 in Morristown, New Jersey, USA. He is a cinematographer and director, known for Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015) and Ken Park (2002).- Cinematographer
- Visual Effects
- Camera and Electrical Department
Robert Elswit is an American cinematographer. He is best known for Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), There Will Be Blood (2007), Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011), Inherent Vice (2014), and Nightcrawler (2014).
Elswit frequently works with director Paul Thomas Anderson and has worked with George Clooney several times. He shot Clooney's black and white, multiple-Oscar nominated film Good Night, and Good Luck. Notably, Elswit shot the film in color, then converted the film into black and white in post production.
He received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography in 2006 for his work on the movie Good Night, and Good Luck. Two years later, he would again be nominated and this time win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, for his work on There Will Be Blood.- 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
- 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
- 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
Gianni Di Venanzo was born on 18 December 1920 in Teramo, Abruzzo, Italy. He was a cinematographer, known for 8½ (1963), The Girlfriends (1955) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). He died on 3 February 1966 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Jordan Cronenweth was born on 20 February 1935 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Blade Runner (1982), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Altered States (1980). He was married to Carolyn June Ervin. He died on 29 November 1996 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Janusz Kaminski is a Polish cinematographer and film director. He has established a partnership with Steven Spielberg, working as a cinematographer on his movies since 1993. He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
His other film's as an cinematographer includes Amistad (1997), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015), The BFG (2016), and Ready Player One (2018).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Descended from a wealthy family of landowners in what was then Austria-Hungary, Franz Planer understood the importance of photography as an art form early in his life. He first stood behind the camera as a portrait photographer, working out of Vienna from 1910. He soon branched out, filming newsreels in Paris and, in 1919, joined the growing German film industry as chief cameraman for Emelka (which became Bavaria Studios in 1932), in Munich. During the 1920s and early 1930's, he acquired a reputation for style, having worked as cinematographer for such distinguished directors as F.W. Murnau and Wilhelm Thiele, most of his films being commercially popular entertainments.
Anticipating the "Anschluss" - the forcible annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler - Planer left Austria in 1937 and, using the pseudonym Frank F. Planer, sought work in Hollywood. He joined the American Society of Cinematorgaphers and was signed under contract at Columbia from 1938-45, and, again, from 1949-50 (in between working at Universal from 1947-49), filming in a variety of different genres. At this stage in his career, he often used real-life locations and shot primarily in black-and-white, in almost semi-documentary style. Like other European cinematographers, he was heavily influenced by German expressionism and used chiaroscuro lighting and stark contrasts between light and shade to achieve thematic mood requirements - particularly for films noir, such as Criss Cross (1949) and 711 Ocean Drive (1950). Planer's creative collaboration with director Max Ophüls is frequently cited as among his best work, notably the melancholic romantic drama Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).
During the 1950s Planer was much in demand and used by many of Hollywood's top directors, including Robert Siodmak, John Huston, Edward Dmytryk and Stanley Kramer. Increasingly comfortable with color photography from 1954, Planer worked on several A-grade productions. He created a particularly realistic feel for The Caine Mutiny (1954) and The Nun's Story (1959) by utilizing sparse, functional interiors. Unusual camera angles/perspectives, tracking shots and objects inserted between camera and subject contributed to the look of the popular Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Planer never won an Academy Award, though he was nominated five times: for Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), The Nun's Story (1959) and The Children's Hour (1961).- 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
- Actor
- Camera and Electrical Department
Michael Chapman is an American cinematographer. He is best known for Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Fugitive (1993), and Primal Fear (1996).
Chapman began his film career as a camera operator before making the leap to cinematographer. As a cinematographer, he became famous for his two collaborations with Martin Scorsese.
He was also cinematographer for the hit remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
In 1987, Chapman collaborated again with Martin Scorsese on the 18-minute short film that served as the music video for Michael Jackson: Bad (1987).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Sol Polito, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer who helped create the distinct visual character of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, was born Salvador Polito on November 12, 1892, in Palermo, Sicily. While still young he emigrated to the US with his family, which settled in New York City, where he attended public school. He started out as a still photographer, then became a laboratory assistant before becoming an assistant to a movie camera crew. Polito received his formal training in the craft of cinematography during a three-year apprenticeship on a camera crew before graduating to head cameraman, shooting Rip Van Winkle (1914) in 1914.
He worked for a variety of movie companies through the early silent era, including Metro, Triangle, Universal and World. By the time he shot 13 program Westerns starring Harry Carey from 1925 to 1928, he already showed his mastery of black and white, creating crisp images. Polito joined First National Studios in 1927, which was merged with Warner Bros. the following year.
Polito thrived in the studio system that emerged with the vertical integration of the studios in the 1920s. He established himself as a first-rate craftsman who strove to create the finest images by following industry guidelines even as he perfected their application. Warner Bros., under studio boss Jack L. Warner, demanded efficiency from its technicians and would not allow extra shooting to achieve an effect unless the additional expense could be justified by its propensity to make the finished film a success at the box office. Polito became co-chief cinematographer, along with fellow Italian immigrant Tony Gaudio, at Warners.
He worked in a wide variety of genres, and he and Gaudio created what became known as "the Warners look"--a hard, unglamorous image, unsoftened by flattering lighting effects. Influenced by German Expressionism, the Warners "look" crafted by Polito and Gaudio was rooted in chiaroscuro contrasts between light and darkness that also were a metaphor for the world the characters lived in. Polito's cinematography for Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is extremely expressive and adds to the somber tone created by the director. The Warners look in cinematography anticipated the "film noir" style that emerged in the late 1940s, when filmmakers and audiences, in response to the documentaries of World War II and Italian neo-realist cinema, sought to inject realism into American cinema (Polito was not really involved in postwar film noir, though he shot Anatole Litvak's classic noir Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), giving it a hazy look with an undefined framing that serves as a metaphor for the moral ambivalence and sense of anomie that is at the heart of the film).
When Warners moved to a lusher aesthetic in the 1930s, Polito readily adapted. As one of the studio's chief cinematographers, he often shot Warners' most important pictures. He frequently worked with director Michael Curtiz on the A-list pictures starring Errol Flynn, working in both black-and-white and the difficult Technicolor three-strip dye transfer process. His color cinematography on the blockbuster The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is still hailed as one of the greatest examples of Technicolor shooting. For the studio's #1 star, Bette Davis, he created a more glamorous look. Eschewing the hard contrast between white and black that was part of Warners' famous "look", he created classic romantic fantasies, such as Now, Voyager (1942), which featured soft focus close-ups of Davis. As a cinematographer he was flexible and willing to modify his effects to fit the exigencies of the movie's theme. For his work at Warners, he was nominated three times for the Academy Award, twice for best color cinematography.
After shooting the Errol Flynn vehicle Escape Me Never (1947) and The Voice of the Turtle (1947) , Polito moved on to Paramount to shoot "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) for former Warner Bros. producer Hal B. Wallis. He shot only one more film before he retired: Anna Lucasta (1949) at Columbia Pictures.
Sol Polito died on Mary 23, 1960, in Hollywood, California. He was 67 years old.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Set Decorator
Apprenticed under noted cinematographers Christian Matras and Boris Kaufman and shot or co-shot several films directed by his uncle, Jean Renoir. Renoir did the photography for one of his uncle's cinematic apogees, _Une partie de campagne (1936)_ and was the camera operator for the tragic, ebullient master text The Grand Illusion (1937). As a cinematographer, Claude Renoir was responsible for the luminous color work of The River (1951), _Carrosse d'or, Le (1952)_ and Elena and Her Men (1956). He also generated the stark black-and-white compositions of Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent (1947) and the psychedelic 60s colors of Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968). Renoir lensed a stunning array of films, including The Mystery of Picasso (1956), Cleopatra (1963) and Bertrand Blier's Femmes Fatales (1976). After his final DP credit, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Renoir worked as a cameraman on three films as he, sadly, lost his sight. Son of character actor Pierre Renoir.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Special Effects
Frederick Elmes was born on 4 November 1946 in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, USA. He is a cinematographer, known for The Dead Don't Die (2019), The Night Of (2016) and Paterson (2016).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Tak Fujimoto was born on 12 July 1939 in San Diego, California, USA. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Sixth Sense (1999) and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Rodrigo Prieto is a Mexican cinematographer. He is best known for Brokeback Mountain (2005), Babel (2006), Argo (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Silence (2016).
He also worked with Alejandro González Iñárritu on the acclaimed Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Biutiful (2010).
Pietro was nominated for two Academy Award for Best Cinematography, first in Brokeback Mountain and later in Silence.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Producer
One of the most innovative of pioneer cameramen, Lee Garmes started his career on the East Coast with the New York Motion Picture Company, but was soon persuaded by the director Thomas H. Ince to join him in Hollywood. Garmes quickly climbed his way up the ladder, from painter's assistant to prop boy (future director Henry Hathaway shared the same duties at 'Inceville'), to camera assistant. He struck up a singularly fruitful collaboration with director Malcolm St. Clair, with whom he worked on one- and two-reel shorts. Many of these early comedies were shot on a shoe-string budget and necessitated clever improvisation, especially in the usage of lead-sheet reflectors (re-directing sunlight) which substituted for proper lighting. Garmes also introduced incandescent tungsten filament Mazda lights as a significant cost-saving venture. In 1925, now as a fully-fledged director of photography, Garmes went over to Paramount, first under contract from 1925 to 1926. He perfected his craft at First National and Warner Brothers (1927-1930), before returning to Paramount and making a significant contribution to some of the most outstanding black-and-white films made by the studio during the early and mid-1930's. His most recognizable trademark was to naturally light his sets from a northward orientation.
Said to have been influenced by the paintings of Rembrandt, Garmes showed a great flair in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, which enhanced the expressionistic European look of darkly exotic ventures like Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932). Both pictures were directed by Josef von Sternberg and starred one of Paramount's most bankable assets, Marlene Dietrich, flatteringly photographed by Garmes with subdued lighting amid swirling, misty backgrounds. "Shanghai Express" led to an Academy Award and established Garmes as one of the top cinematographers in the business. His career suffered a setback, however, when he was replaced by David O. Selznick months into shooting Gone with the Wind (1939) (Selznick objected to the Garmes technique of soft lighting, preferring the harsher 'picture postcard' colours). Though the first hour of GWTW was almost entirely shot by Garmes (most of it directed by George Cukor, who was also fired), he was not credited for his efforts.
Lee Garmes imbued many more seminal films of the 1940's and 50's with his own particular style, creating the romantic moods of Lydia (1941), the exotic splendour of Alexander Korda's technicolor The Jungle Book (1942) and the semi-documentary realism of William Wyler's Detective Story (1951). He became one of few cinematographers to be given additional responsibilities in directing and production and in 1972 became one of the first advocates for the use of videotape in filmmaking. Garmes was twice recipient of the Eastman Kodak Award. He served as present of the American Society of Cinematographers from 1960 to 1961.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Darius Khondji was born on 21 October 1955 in Tehran, Iran. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for Amour (2012), Se7en (1995) and Delicatessen (1991). He is married to Marianne Khondji. They have three children.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Ping Bin Lee was born in 1954 in Taiwan. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for In the Mood for Love (2000), The Assassin (2015) and Crosscurrent (2016).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Oscar-winning cinematographer Karl Struss was born on November 30, 1886, in New York City. He became a professional photographer after studying photography with Clarence H. White and became part of the group associated with the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz. His photographs, which he characterized as "pictorial" rather than "fashion", were published in leading magazines, including "Harper's Bazaar," "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue."
Struss moved to Los Angeles in 1919 to practice his craft as a still photographer. He subsequently was hired by producer-director Cecil B. DeMille to serve as a cameraman in his second-unit. Along with Charles Rosher, he won the first Oscar ever awarded for cinematography at the first Academy Awards, for photographing Sunrise (1927) for F.W. Murnau. He was nominated for the Academy Award three more times for his cinematography.
In addition to DeMille and Murnau, Struss worked with such greats as Charles Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. After being the director of photography on Mary Pickford's Sparrows (1926), he was the lighting cameraman on her first sound film, Coquette (1929), for which she won a Best Actress Academy Award. He worked with other top stars such as Fredric March, who won an Oscar on the Struss-photographed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), for which Struss was also Oscar-nominated.
Karl Struss was not only one of the first cinematographers to work in color (he shot in two-strip Technicolor on the original screen version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)), he also was a pioneer in three-dimensional cinematography in the 1940s and 1950s.
Karl Struss died on December 15, 1981. He was 95 years old.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Four-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1893, at the age of four, his family moved to the United States, eventually settling in Boston. After schooling, he got his first job in 1907 working as a newsboy and personal runner for William Randolph Hearst's 'Boston American'. He was trained in reporting and as a still photographer and dark room technician. By 1914, he produced his own weekly newsreels for a local Loew's theatre, and, within another year, was employed as a cameraman with the Fox Film Corporation in New York. There, he perfected his craft over the next eleven years, rising from assistant cameraman to full cinematographer with a weekly salary of $175. He then moved over to Paramount's Kaufman Astoria Studios, where he worked under the supervision of the experienced George J. Folsey on several short features.
In 1933, Ruttenberg decided to ply his trade in Hollywood, now that the transition to sound pictures had been successfully made. He had brief spells with RKO and Warners, before putting up his tent at MGM for the greater part of his long and distinguished career (1934-1963). He became an innovator in his use of cranes and dolly devices, often designed to capture scenes in a single take. Another distinguishing aspect of his camerawork was to keep the performers in sharp focus, while softening the background, thus highlighting the actors almost three-dimensionally, while also creating a sense of immediacy. Ruttenberg shot some of MGM's finest black-and-white films of the 30's and 40's, his lighting (which he often took charge of personally, rather than assigning assistants) providing the exact ingredients required to create the right atmosphere in each instance: Fury (1936), Three Comrades (1938), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Random Harvest (1942), to name but a few.
During the 1950's, Ruttenberg proved just as adept at colour photography, winning a Golden Globe award for his work on Brigadoon (1954), and his fourth Academy Award for the musical Gigi (1958). Among his six unsuccessful nominations, he received the last for BUtterfield 8 (1960), creating some of the most enduring images of Elizabeth Taylor at her peak. He free-lanced for a few years after leaving MGM and finally retired in 1968. He was honoured by the American Society of Cinematographers Milestone award.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Milton Krasner entered the film industry as an assistant cameraman in 1917, and while working at the Vitagraph and Biograph studios in New York City was promoted to camera operator. Graduating to lighting cameraman in 1933, he was assigned mostly second features until the mid-'40s, when his excellence in black-and-white photography was finally recognized. Krasner hit his stride in the 1950s at 20th Century-Fox, where he photographed many of the studio's opulent Technicolor epics (Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), Désirée (1954), The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), among others). He won an Academy Award for Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Entering films in 1923 as an assistant cameraman, Burnett Guffey was picked by John Ford to handle second-unit photography on The Iron Horse (1924). After that film, however, Guffey returned to his assistant cameraman position, a job he held until 1928, when he became a camera operator. In that capacity he photographed such major productions as Ford's The Informer (1935), Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Charles Vidor's Cover Girl (1944), among others. Guffey was finally hired as a director of photography by Columbia. Highly regarded by his colleagues for his crisp imaging and superb compositions, Guffey won two Academy Awards, for From Here to Eternity (1953) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967).- Cinematographer
Distinguished veteran cinematographer John F. Seitz had eighteen patents for various photographic processes to his name. These included illuminating devices, processes for making dissolves and the matte shot, which he perfected during filming of Rex Ingram's Trifling Women (1922). Seitz started with Essanay in Chicago, then joined the St. Louis Motion Picture Company as a lab tech in 1909. Within another four years, he had progressed to director of photography. He was signed by Metro in 1920, doing his best work in collaboration with Ingram, most notably on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). Personally selected by William Randolph Hearst, Seitz was also behind the camera for The Patsy (1928), one of the major hits for Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. By this time, he was the highest paid cinematographer in Hollywood.
Seitz's trademark was low key lighting and differentially illuminating different regions of the screen (ie. background, foreground and middle). His colour photography was characterised by a tendency to favor tan or beige as backgound colours, and vivid colours for costumes or props. Seitz's career in the 1930's, spent at 20th Century Fox (1931-36) and MGM (1937-40), was generally unremarkable. However, he enjoyed a massive resurgence at Paramount (1941-52), working on some of the best films made by Preston Sturges (Sullivan's Travels (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)) and Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Blvd. (1950)). Add to that another two excellent films noir, This Gun for Hire (1942) and Lucky Jordan (1942) - both directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Alan Ladd. He was a master at creating atmosphere through ominous shadows and looming close-ups.- Cinematographer
- Special Effects
- Editorial Department
The favorite cinematographer of legendary director Alfred Hitchcock began working at Warner Bros. when he was 19 years old. He climbed his way up from camera operator to assistant camera man and eventually took over the Special Photographic Effects unit at Warners on Stage 5 in 1944. He became an expert in forced perspective techniques which were widely in use at the time as cost-saving measures, or on B-pictures. Burks did special effects work on major productions like Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Unsuspected (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
In 1949, Burks graduated to becoming a fully-fledged director of photography. His striking black & white work on The Fountainhead (1949) was particularly evocative in showcasing the stark, austere architectural lines of the film's chief protagonist, Howard Roark (Gary Cooper). On the strength of this, and his next film, The Glass Menagerie (1950), Hitchcock hired him to shoot his thriller Strangers on a Train (1951). From this developed one of Hollywood's most inspired collaborations, as well as a close personal friendship.
When his contract at Warner Brothers expired in 1953, Burks followed Hitchcock to Paramount and went on to play an integral part in creating the brooding, tension-laden atmosphere of the director's best work between 1954 and 1964. His range varied from the neo-realist, almost semi-documentary black & white look of The Wrong Man (1956) to the intensely warm and beautiful deep focus VistaVision colour photography of Vertigo (1958). His muted tones matching the claustrophobic setting of Rear Window (1954) stood in sharp contrast to the vibrant, full-hued colours used in the expansive outdoor footage of To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959).
The experience Burks had gained in forced perspective miniatures in his early days at Warner Brothers, also stood him in good stead on 'Vertigo' (the mission tower), 'North by Northwest' (the Mount Rushmore scenes) and, later, 'The Birds'. Because of his expertise, Burks was often able to contribute ideas to shooting scenes more effectively. He was also an innovator in the application of both telephoto and wide angle lenses as a means to creating a specific mood. The Hitchcock-Burks partnership ended after Marnie (1964), and, under less-inspired directors (except for A Patch of Blue (1965)), his later work inevitably declined in quality. Robert Burks and his wife, Elysabeth, were tragically killed in a fire at their house in May 1968.
Robert Burks won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Colour Photography for 'To Catch a Thief'. He was also nominated for 'Strangers on a Train', 'Rear Window' and 'A Patch of Blue'.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Takao Saitô was born on 5 March 1929 in Kyoto, Japan. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Ran (1985), Dreams (1990) and Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980). He died on 6 December 2014 in Zama, Kanagawa, Japan.- 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
Jean Rabier was born on 16 March 1927 in Montfort-l'Amaury, Île-de-France, France. He was a cinematographer, known for Elevator to the Gallows (1958), The 400 Blows (1959) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). He died on 15 February 2016 in Port-de-Bouc, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.- Director
- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Ernest Roscoe Dickerson A.S.C., aka. Ernest R. Dickerson, is an American film director and cinematographer. As a cinematographer, he is known for his frequent collaborations with Spike Lee. As a director, he is known for films such as Juice (1992), Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995), Bones (2001) and Never Die Alone (2004). He has also directed several episodes of acclaimed television series such as Once Upon a Time (2011), The Wire (2002), Dexter (2006), and The Walking Dead (2010).- Camera and Electrical Department
- Cinematographer
- Director
John Seale was born on 5 October 1942 in Warwick, Queensland, Australia. He is a cinematographer and director, known for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The English Patient (1996) and Witness (1985). He has been married to Louise Seale since 23 September 1967. They have two children.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Ernest Laszlo, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer best known for his creative collaborations with directors Robert Aldrich and Stanley Kramer, was born on April 23, 1898, in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After emigrating to the US, he worked as a camera operator on Wings (1927). He made his debut as a director of photography on The Pace That Kills (1928). Before hooking up with Kramer, his most notable collaboration was with Aldrich, for whom he shot 11 films, including Vera Cruz (1954), the noir classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Big Knife (1955). Other memorable films he shot include Two Years Before the Mast (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Stalag 17 (1953) and Logan's Run (1976). He also shot M (1951), Joseph Losey's remake of M (1931), which was re-envisioned as an urban film noir set in Los Angeles.
After 30 years as a director of photography, Laszlo was honored with his first Oscar nomination in 1961 for shooting Inherit the Wind (1960) for Stanley Kramer. He was subsequently Oscar-nominated for the cinematography on Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and Ship of Fools (1965), for which he finally won his Oscar. His final film, The Domino Principle (1977), also was shot for Kramer.
From 1972 to '74 Ernest Laszlo served as the president of the American Society of Cinematographers. He died on January 6, 1984.- Director
- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Guy Green is well known to film audiences. Formerly a cinematographer, he was the first British D.P. to receive an Academy Award for his black-and-white photography on David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). He founded the British Society of Cinematographers together with Freddie Young and Jack Cardiff.
Green worked with Lean on several films, and it was this close association that inspired him to give up cinematography at the height of his career to become a director. While directing two early pictures, Triple Deception (1956) and Desert Patrol (1958), Green became associated with actors Richard Attenborough and Michael Craig, and The Angry Silence (1960) was first conceived when the three were involved in filming "Sea Of Sand" in the 140-degree heat of the Libyan desert. The film became a landmark in the careers of all concerned, and brought Green international attention. It was Britain's first entry at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the International Critic's Award.
"The Angry Silence" was followed by The Mark (1961), which was critically applauded both in the US and Europe. Rod Steiger and Stuart Whitman give outstanding performances and Whitman was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. The picture received the Samuel Goldwyn International Award and many other accolades.
Next came Light in the Piazza (1962), Green's first American production for MGM, followed by Diamond Head (1962) and the much acclaimed A Patch of Blue (1965). The screenplay for "Patch Of Blue," which was written by Green, was nominated for a Writer's Guild award and later received five Academy nominations, including Best Actress for newcomer Elizabeth Hartman. Shelley Winters received an Academy Award for her supporting performance as the mother.
Green then directed Luther (1974), the screen version of John Osborne's play, for the prestigious American Film Theater, with Stacy Keach in the leading role. Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough (1975) followed and subsequently he has directed a number of important made-for-television movies.
Born in the west of England, Green had a love of movies at a very young age. His first job was as a projectionist aboard the ocean liner The Majestic, which brought him to America for the first time. He also worked in London as a portrait photographer and as an assistant cameraman for an advertising agency. Eventually he managed to land a job as a camera assistant at Shepperton Studios in London and worked his way up from there.
He met his wife Josephine while they were both working on David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948)/ They have two children, Marilyn and Michael, who both work in the film industry.- Cinematographer
- Director
Ted Tetzlaff was born in 1903 in Los Angeles, the son of racecar driver and movie stuntman Teddy Tetzlaff, Sr. The elder Tetzlaff appeared in a number of silent star Wallace Reid's famous racing movies like The Roaring Road (1919), Double Speed (1920), Excuse My Dust (1920), Too Much Speed (1921) and Across the Continent (1922). Young Tetzlaff was born Dale H. and lived with his mother after her 1915 divorce from Ted, Sr. Ted, Jr. became a well-known and well-respected studio cameraman who worked on over 100 films using the name "Teddy Tetzlaff, Jr."- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Distinguished American cinematographer Ernest Haller started in the industry in 1914 as an actor with Biograph after leaving his first job as a bank clerk. Within one year he discovered his true calling: being on the other side of the camera. By 1920, he had become a full director of photography and would go on to handle prestigious pictures , such as the Samuel Goldwyn-produced Stella Dallas (1925). In 1926, Haller signed with First National and was still there when the studio was absorbed by Warner Brothers in 1930. Despite prolific output, it took him several years to create a reputation, however his breakthrough eventually came with the lavishly produced period drama Jezebel (1938), starring Bette Davis.For this, he received the first of five Academy Award nominations.
It was his work on 'Jezebel' which ultimately prompted David O. Selznick to replace Lee Garmes (with whom he had creative disagreements) with Haller as principal cinematographer for his Technicolour masterpiece, Gone with the Wind (1939). Haller also shot Vivien Leigh's famous first screen test for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. Though his previous work had been almost exclusively in black-and-white, the gamble paid off handsomely, with Haller winning an Academy Award (alongside Ray Rennahan) for Best Colour Cinematography.
Following 'GWTW' , Haller shot some of the best films made at Warner Brothers during the 1940's, his work perfectly suited to the gritty studio look of its product. He was particularly effective with the strong female stars of the company, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis (shooting 14 of her pictures), meticulously balancing make-up and lighting to bringing out their best features. He created an almost expressionistic mood for films like Mildred Pierce (1945) (for which he received another Oscar nomination) and Humoresque (1946). For the remainder of his career, Haller remained at Warners. Even after his contract expired in 1951, he was recalled for special assignments such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), shot in CinemaScope, and the psychological drama What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), reuniting him once more with Davis and Crawford, albeit this time concerned with photographing them in a decidedly unglamorous fashion. He freelanced during the remainder of the 1960's and was semi-retired when asked by James Goldstone to step in as director of photography for the second pilot of Star Trek (1966), "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Ernest Haller was killed in a car crash in October 1970, aged 74.- Cinematographer
- Visual Effects
- Additional Crew
Eugen Schüfftan moved from his motherland, Germany, to France in 1933 to escape the rising Nazi movement. He moved to the US in 1940 and became a member of Local 644, the East Coast cinematographers chapter of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). He invented the Schüfftan Process for optical special effects that was used until it was replaced by the simpler matte method. He received the Academy Award for black and white cinematography in 1962 for The Hustler (1961).
For a variety of reasons, Schufftan did not receive proper screen credit for many films he photographed. Director Edgar G. Ulmer, who worked with Schufftan on several films, said it was because he wasn't in the ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) and therefore wasn't allowed to take screen credit. Ulmer said that on one or two of the films he made with Schufftan he was forced to credit Jockey Arthur Feindel, the camera operator, as the cinematographer because of that.- 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
- Director
- Actor
While attending Stanford University in 1912, Bert Glennon was hired as an assistant cameraman, and, upon graduation, went into the film business full-time. Becoming a director of photography in 1916, Glennon became one of the industry's most respected craftsmen and worked often for such perfectionist directors as John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille. His success as a cinematographer didn't carry over to his attempts at directing, however; the few films he directed from 1928 to 1932 were increasingly mediocre, and he gave up his attempts at directing to resume his distinguished cinematography career, where he stayed until his retirement in 1963.- Cinematographer
- Editorial Department
- Special Effects
Edmond Richard was born on 6 January 1927 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer, known for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Les Misérables (1982) and The Trial (1962). He died on 5 June 2018.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Leon Shamroy, born Leon Shamroyevsky, was an American film cinematographer. He is best known for The Black Swan (1942),Wilson (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), David and Bathsheba (1951), The Robe (1953), Cleopatra (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and Planet of the Apes (1968).
He and Charles Lang share the record for most number of Academy Award nominations for Cinematography. During his five-decade career, he gained eighteen nominations with four wins, sharing the record with Joseph Ruttenberg.
Shamroy died in 1974 at the age of 72.- Cinematographer
- Producer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Affonso Beato was born on 13 July 1941 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a cinematographer and producer, known for All About My Mother (1999), The Queen (2006) and Orfeu (1999).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
William Lubtchansky was born on 26 October 1937 in Vincennes, Val-de-Marne, France. He was a cinematographer and director, known for Regular Lovers (2005), Safari diamants (1966) and La tête du client (1965). He was married to Nicole Lubtchansky. He died on 4 May 2010 in Paris, France.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Cinematographer
- Actor
- Camera and Electrical Department
Pioneering Czech cinematographer Ota (later anglicised to 'Otto') Heller started as a cinema usher and then worked as a projectionist at a cinema in Prague. He first came to prominence as a military reporter and cameraman on the Italian Front during World War I and was subsequently involved in filming the funeral of Emperor Franz Josef. After the war, he joined Pragafilm as full cinematographer and worked on numerous silent films in his own country. From the early 1930's, Heller was increasingly sought-after by German film producers. He settled in the U.K. in 1940 to evade the German annexation of Czechoslovakia and adopted British citizenship five years later.
Heller was much admired for his versatility and imaginative camera work on many diverse subjects (both in B&W and in colour), ranging from the 'noirish' I Became a Criminal (1947) to the gothically-lit Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades (1949); from colourful adventure subjects like The Crimson Pirate (1952) and His Majesty O'Keefe (1954), to the stylised austerity of Richard III (1955); from Ealing's classic The Ladykillers (1955) with its Hitchcockian camera tilts and angles, to the stark realism and drab exteriors of the Cold War in The Ipcress File (1965).