Cinematography

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Cinematography

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER'S TECHNIQUE
THE CINEMATOGRAPHER'S TOOLS
"GOOD" CINEMATOGRAPHY
REAR-PROJECTION AND OTHER CHALLENGES
FURTHER READING

In the earliest days of cinema, before the dominance of the narrative mode, movies were made almost wholly by cameramen. Le Repas de bébé (Feeding the Baby or Baby's Dinner, 1895) by Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) is a stunning example of composition with movement. As early as the second shot of The Great Train Robbery (1903), filmed for Edison by Edwin S. Porter (1869–1941), one can see, in the depiction of the train moving past a water tower where the desperadoes are hiding, the influence of the finely trained cameraman's eye, sensitive to subtle modulations of light and shadow and adept at composing a well-balanced and beautiful cinematographic frame. This is an exquisite example of black-and-white photography of motion, with a sumptuous range of mid-tone grays, a rich and textured black, and pearly highlights in the sunny spots. Later, Porter was teamed with director J. Searle Dawley (1877–1949) at the Edison studio, and at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Billy Bitzer (1872–1944) was teamed with D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), who began directing around 1908. Both Porter and Bitzer claimed that they had alone been responsible for all of the camera work, negative processing, site selection, and actor directing.

After the age of the director had begun, the cinematographer (in the United Kingdom, the "lighting cameraman" and often, in the United States, the "director of photography" or "D.O.P.") came to have exclusive responsibility for the representation of narrative scenes on film. Beyond the actual powering of first the hand-cranked and later the electric camera, this responsibility included designing lighting for each shot; selecting the film stock and camera equipment; operating and maintaining this equipment (later in conjunction with the camera department of the studio), selecting exposure settings and camera movements, and printing the exposed film. When the division of labor at Hollywood studios increased during the 1930s, cinematographers were working with loaders and camera operators, grips and gaffers, juicers, spotmen, and focus pullers. The teaming of cinematographers and directors evident during this era continues to this day, as evinced in such longtime pairings as: cinematographer Bert Glennon (1893–1967) with director John Ford (1894–1973), Joseph Walker (1892–1985) with Frank Capra (1897–1991), Russell Metty (1906–1978) with Douglas Sirk (1900–1987), Robert Burks (1910–1968) with Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), Sven Nykvist (b. 1922) with Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918), Allen Daviau (b. 1942) and then Janusz Kaminski (b. 1959) with Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), and Ernest Dickerson (b. 1951) with Spike Lee (b. 1957). Such teaming provides opportunities for directors to involve themselves intensively with the cinematographer's style and craft; and many directors, including Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis (b. 1926), operated on the set with a thorough knowledge of lenses, filters, camera movements, and lighting. Some directors were themselves once cinematographers, including Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969), Nicholas Roeg (b. 1928), Haskell Wexler (b. 1926), Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968), Ernest Dickerson, and Jan de Bont (b. 1943), for example.

The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC, the three letters that have followed the cinematographer's name in screen credits since Mary Pickford [1893–1979] had them inscribed after Charles Rosher's [1885–1974] name in her films) was formed in 1919 through a union of the Cinema Camera Club (from New York) and the Static Club (from Los Angeles). The British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) was formed in 1949 by Bert Easey and fifty-four colleagues, and the Canadian Society of Cinematographers (CSC) was founded in 1957.

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER'S TECHNIQUE

It is often difficult for technically naive viewers to grasp that although in everyday situations the eye typically adapts to variations in light and produces a credible "image" of reality under most lighting conditions, the camera—even an extremely expensive and elaborate one such as the Mitchell BNC 35mm or the Éclair, Arriflex, or Aaton 16mm—can "see" only what the film stock with which it is loaded is sensitive enough to record within a field that has been adequately lit. Onscreen, even darkness, shadow, gloom, and mist need to be properly lit in order to show up visually as such. Simply withholding light from part of a scene will produce a completely underexposed patch in the negative, not an area that will seem to be rich with the characteristic texture of darkness. The dark sequence in Touch of Evil (1958), for example, wherein Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) is tortured and killed by Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), shows exemplary achievement in cinematography, since even in the gloom of the seedy hotel room where the action is set, cinematographer Russell Metty produces a full and rounded range of mid-tone grays and a gritty, textured objectivity.

Also often taken for granted are the delicate screen compositions with light that can move the eye systematically through the editing. To sit back with the sound off and watch Allen Daviau's bicycle chase sequence in Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), for instance, is to be astonished by the exquisitely framed screen compositions and the use of highlighting and camera movement to move the eye seamlessly from shot to shot. Very often in a more casually photographed film, the soundtrack is utilized to smooth cuts between poorly matched shots. Since the earliest days of narrative film in a rudimentary way, and since the 1930s with more sophistication, one of the functions of film lighting has been to guide viewers in pinpointing the narratively central material and details in a scene. From a uniformly accessible visual field, particular material is selected in this way for dramatic emphasis. For example, in the conclusion of Orson Welles's (1915–1985) celebrated Citizen Kane (1941), a child's sled is picked up from a pile of objects and thrown into a blast furnace. Gregg Toland's (1904–1948) camera zooms into the furnace door to pick up the sled being consumed by the flames. Because of the overall darkness of the surrounding area, and the intensity of the light produced by the flames, special key lighting had to be used on the sled in order for the viewer's eye to discover it as a special object in the already bright visual field.

In addition to planning with the director and the designer of a film before shooting, cinematographers work collaboratively during the principal photography stage. Sets must be built or locations selected with the cinematographer's needs at least partially in mind. For example, a "wild" wall is a part of a set that can be removed easily so that a shot can be taken from that point of view; for Hitchcock's Rope (1948) virtually all the walls of the single penthouse set were wild, since the film was to be shot (by Joseph Valentine [1900–1949] and William V. Skall [1897–1976]) in eleven-minute masters, with continuous camera movement and no discernible cuts. Conversely, Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) prefers to eliminate wild walls, so that the cinematographer is always placed—like the characters—inside the situation where he will have to find a "natural" point of view. Cinematographers do not always work with sets fixed inside buildings or locations; for Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996), for example, Elliot Davis had a specially rigged bus, with light boxes fixed behind the seats and a camera track mounted on the luggage racks.

As well as set architecture, the colors of sets and costumes will affect lighting and film stock selection. Since the concluding ballet sequence of An American in Paris (1951) required bizarre and theatrical transitions with extreme, colored light, and since no work was going to be done optically in the lab, all the transitions had to be effected through set lighting. To get stark and saturated color effects, John Alton (1901–1996) used color film stock with lighting typical of black-and-white movies. In addition, the cinematographer's team requires time to set up for shots. Both the director and assistant director, one of whose tasks it is to plan shooting schedules efficiently, must collaborate closely to ensure that complicated setups are practical from the budgetary point of view.

A team of grips is under the cinematographer's direction, in order to unload pieces of the camera and dolly, set up the photography equipment, and move the camera and dolly during shots: the chief member of this team is called the "key grip" and has principal responsibility for camera movement. A particularly spectacular case of prodigious grip technique is to be found in the party scene of Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), in which Robert Burks shoots from a vantage point on the balcony overlooking the spacious foyer of an estate house, where dozens of well-dressed socialites are mingling. As the doorbell repeatedly sounds and a uniformed butler opens the door to various guests, the camera moves, in one fluid crane shot with perfectly modulated focus, twenty feet down to floor level and forty feet forward to swoop into the face of Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel), the very last person anyone wants to see appearing at this soiree, as he stands stiffly on the doorstep.

Another team, the gaffers, of whom the chief is given the special title, "best boy," handles unpacking, wiring, setting up, filtering, adjusting, and moving all of the lights. A particularly fascinating challenge for gaffers was the "wake-up" scene of Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man (1961). In it Wallace Kelley's camera shows coeds waking up bedroom by bedroom in a huge boardinghouse; then it pulls back to observe them marching out of their rooms, down the hallways to the stairs, and downstairs to the breakfast room; then it pulls farther back to show this happening on many floors simultaneously, then farther back to show the entire structure like a giant dollhouse, then even farther back to show the entire sound stage. All of the areas, from the stage to the individual rooms, had to be lit for optical coherence. The rooms had to have lighting for Technicolor unaffected by the very high lights that would ultimately show the entire set.

The camera operator works under the cinematographer to operate the camera during shots. He or she is assisted by one or more focus pullers, who must measure the lens-to-performer distances the shot will require, establish a schedule of focuses for the shot, and achieve consistent focus as the scene continues. It is solely within the province of the cinematographer and his team to peer through the viewfinder of the camera, although in the United States union regulations forbid cinematographers from actually operating cameras.

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER'S TOOLS

Collaborating with the director in terms of the vision sought for a given scene, the cinematographer will direct the lighting, select from a variety of film stocks, and choose a lens. Lenses range between the very short focus wide-angle type (for instance, 8mm through 30mm) through the mid-range "normal" (50mm), to the very long focus telephoto. The longer the lens, the more the focused image is collapsed into a single plane. In the climactic scene of The Graduate (1967), Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) runs down a suburban sidewalk toward the camera, turning at the last moment to race off-camera into a church to stop a wedding. Shot here with a very long lens, Benjamin seems to float in the frame. Although we see his legs pumping and his face picking up an expression of agonized exhaustion, he does not seem to approach us, as he would if photographed with a normal lens. The aesthetic effect is that, race as he

GREGG TOLAND
b. Charleston, Illinois, 29 May 1904, d. 26 September 1948

Although he shot more than sixty films, including Kidnapped (1938) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) for Darryl F. Zanuck, Wuthering Heights (1939, for which he won an Academy Award^®), The Little Foxes (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and The Bishop's Wife (1947) for Samuel Goldwyn, The Outlaw (1943) for Howard Hughes, and Intermezzo (1939) for David O. Selznick, it is for a single effort, in collaboration with a newcomer to Hollywood, that Gregg Toland's name is most frequently associated with extraordinary achievement in cinematography: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). Toland asked Welles to use him on the picture, since he wanted to learn by working with a man who did not know anything about cinematography.

With deep-focus, high-keyed illumination technique specially adapted for this project, Toland provided Welles with stunningly sharp images. Especially notable are the election speech scene (with its exceptionally high contrast and provocative shooting angles), Kane stumbling past the mirrors at Xanadu (with tautly controlled lighting that produces explosive mirror effects), and the warehouse finale (reprised by Steven Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), shot with great depth of field and a moving camera. With its simultaneous dramatic action in front, middle, and rear planes of focus, Citizen Kane became a landmark of cinematographic vision in Hollywood film. Welles also wanted "lateral depth of focus" and so Toland used wide-angle lenses with very small apertures; all of this required very intense illumination and led to high-contrast images.

Toland entered the motion picture industry as an office boy and became a lighting cameraman before he was twenty. He worked intensively with William Cameron Menzies but avoided being trapped in a studio contract; then he became invaluable to Goldwyn, who because he wanted Toland free for The Bishop's Wife refused to loan him to Howard Hawks for Red River (1949). The extraordinary intensity of Toland's collaborations with John Ford on The Long Voyage Home (1940) and The Grapes of Wrath stemmed from the men's shared alcoholism and Ford's admiration for Toland's ability to work with great decisiveness. On Citizen Kane, Toland was continually offering Welles what he had learned with Ford—unnecessary editing could be avoided by playing scenes, wherever possible, in a single shot.

Just before his death, Toland had perfected an f.64 lens that could provide depth of field to infinity with "perfect" focus. He is memorialized in the American Film Institute's documentary, Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1992).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

might, his chance of coming closer (to us, and to the church) seems slight. When suddenly he turns to run off screen, the viewer is surprised (pleasantly) to discover in the pan that follows him that he made it, after all. Since a few moments later he will in fact succeed in thwarting the wedding of his beloved to another man, this telephoto shot has the effect of sharing with the viewer the agonizing frustration Benjamin feels at this moment, while also preparing the viewer to be relieved of that anxiety.

Short lenses have three effects on motion picture photography. First, shots taken in wide angle require more light than shots taken with a 50mm lens, and the wider the angle (the smaller the focal range) the more additional light is required. Second, in wide-angle photography, the actual camera apparatus must be relatively close to its subject, since space appears to expand outward from the center of the frame. Third, the wide angle produces distortion from the center to the periphery of the frame. A face photographed in wide angle seems plumper, the nose more prominent, the eyes slightly farther apart than one shot in 50mm. Much of Stanley Kubrick's (1928–1999) A Clockwork Orange (1971) is done in wide angle, with the effect that the characters seem caricatured and the action bizarre and circus-like.

A choice of film stock is yet another means whereby a cinematographer can create a filmic effect. Motion picture film is a strip of cellulose acetate coated with an emulsion of halides that are sensitive to light. The light-sensitive emulsion rests on the acetate base in particles relatively small or large: that is, in finer or larger "grain." The finer the grain of the film, the more sensitive it is to light—for color work, this sensitivity registers light in various ranges of the visible spectrum, specifically magenta, yellow, and cyan light (which ultimately produce green, blue, and red in the final picture). The magenta registration is most sensitive to contrast, and through the use of filtration, this color layer can be manipulated separately in printing (through a technique called "color timing") to affect the contrast and, to some degree, the darkness of the image. Fine grain black-and-white film, which came into use for the first time with the French New Wave in the early 1960s, permitted street photography at night and under restricted lighting conditions. For Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick wanted cinematographer John Alcott (1931–1986) to simulate seventeenth-century candlelight, so no electric lighting was used on the shoot at all. Thousands of candles were used for indoor scenes, and maximal use was made of available light for exteriors, all in conjunction with very sensitive color film stock.

The finer the grain of the film, the more light that registers upon it (or the more swiftly light registers), and therefore the greater the available depth of field in the image. Still another mechanism exists for increasing the depth of field—a vital component of cinematic realism, lending to the viewer the belief that a three-dimensional world is being reproduced onscreen. This is the camera's aperture, which can be stopped up or down to permit more or less light, respectively, to enter the camera and strike the surface of the film. Depth perception is aided by stopping the aperture down, and with a very high aperture number (a tiny aperture) the apparent extension of the picture away from the front plane of focus is profound. For David Brisbin's long "face at the end of the road" shots in Gus Van Sant's (b. 1952) My Own Private Idaho (1991), for example, shot during mid-day in unclouded light on an empty highway in the American West, the lens is closed down to a very high f-stop and the viewer can see all the way from the front of the shot to the point where the road meets the horizon in clear, sharp focus. Much of Wait Until Dark (1967), on the other hand—a film depicting the perils of a blind woman trapped in her apartment with malevolent thieves—was shot by Charles Lang (1902–1998) in the f-4 to f-8 range, with little depth of field yet with enough aperture to allow as much light as possible to enter the camera since the scenes are relatively dark. When a film shot is made at f-2 or lower, only the foremost plane of the shot will appear in crisp focus, and everything behind that will be blurry—for example, the pistol that dominates the frame in the finale of Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

Cinematographers must have a broad knowledge of film stocks and development processes. Color stock can be balanced for (blue) daylight or (yellow) tungsten (incandescent) illumination. Further, film stock of any sensitivity can be processed by the laboratory either normally or overexposed at the cinematographer's order. Overexposure, called "pushing," makes the shot look grainier and in higher contrast, as well as saturating the colors, and is especially useful when light is at a minimum. A technique widely used until extremely sensitive film stocks were developed and computer animation took the place of much in-camera special effects was the day-for-night shot, in which a scene meant to take place at night was shot in broad daylight using a combination of pushed exposure, tungsten-based (indoor) color film without compensating filtration (so that the color would shift toward moonlight blue), avoidance of sky in composition, and short focus (since the ability to see depth of field is related to the natural response of squinting in bright daylight). When the cinematographer must shoot in shadows with insufficient light to compensate, he can order the film to be post-flashed, that is, exposed very briefly to light at the laboratory to add exposure to the shot.

Two other factors complicate matters in cinematographic work, action speed (motion) and camera speed. First, objects move in cinema, and the camera can itself move (in dollies, pans, tracks, and tilts). The more motion there is, the less light from any particular source will reach the film. This is especially true in pan shots, in flash pans or whip pans (when the visual field swoops laterally with great speed), or in zoom outs, when peripheral material must be realized optically for the viewer under conditions where very little time is given for seeing it. For moving camera shots, or shots including considerable movement onscreen, cinematographers will aim for a wider aperture and for a film stock that is especially sensitive, as well as for the opportunity to use as much light as possible. Whenever considerable lighting is required, shooting can become both unpleasant and demanding for actors, since the focal requirements in a moving shot require that individuals place themselves in the visual field with great precision, often repeatedly for take after take.

A second matter is the camera speed (not to be confused with the "film speed," which is an index of the film's sensitivity to light, as discussed above). The conventional 24 frames-per-second (fps) speed at which film passes in front of the aperture is susceptible to adjustment by the cameraman. When the film is moved through the camera faster than 24 fps but the resulting footage is projected at a normal 24 fps, the result for the viewer is what is usually termed "slow motion." By contrast, winding the camera down produces in projection a jerky mechanical feeling. In the case of contemporary projection of silent films, such as Mack Sennett's (1884–1960) Keystone Cops chases, the "jerkiness" we often see does not result from the original filmmaker's intentionally winding down the camera but has a different origin. Silent film was shot, typically, at 18 fps (although with hand-cranked cameras, this speed was not absolutely consistent). When sound was introduced in the late 1920s, it became necessary, in order to avoid problems in synchronization, to standardize film projection speed and 24 fps came to be the accepted rate. When we see film shot at 18 fps projected at 24 fps, it seems to be in fast motion and jerky.

In using lighting on the set, the cinematographer moves among many possible choices. Ambient light gives general diffuse illumination to an entire scene. Scrims with gauze or other semitransparent material and colored filters can be attached to the front of lights. Lighting can be carbon based (arc lighting), producing an intense blue daylight quality (through the use of lamps called brutes and molarcs [or moles]); or incandescent, producing a yellow indoor-quality lighting (through the use of various-sized Fresnel lamps). Very tiny key-lights can be used to give extra illumination to very small portions of an image—for instance, the cheekbones or eyes of the star, as with Bela Lugosi (1882–1956) in Dracula (1931). Greta Garbo (1905–1990) insisted on working with William Daniels (1901–1970), who was especially adept at modulating key lighting to accentuate her cheekbones and sculpt the tonalities of her face. Backlighting gives a sense of roundness to objects and people. Clothes lights fill in the bodies of actors whose faces are keylit. "Kickers" give an angled backlit fill. Robert Burks, working for Hitchcock, softened the focus on female stars by stretching a gauze or nylon stocking over the lens (a technique that had been introduced by Hendrik Sartov [1885–1970] around 1919, when he photographed Lillian Gish [1893–1993]) and then piercing a tiny hole in it with a lit cigarette (or by coating the lens with Vaseline). Fill light is used from beneath the star, typically on the side of the head or face, to round out the head and body and lift the star's level of illumination slightly higher than anyone else in the scene—thus directing attention specifically in that person's direction. In more modern photography, fill lighting is most frequently accomplished by reflection with mylar.

The cinematographers of the New Wave, such as Henri Decaë (1915–1987), Sacha Vierny (1919–2001), Raoul Coutard (1924–1993), and Néstor Almendros (1930–1992), frequently used reflection techniques, sometimes even lighting by bouncing light with mirrors. When direct studio lighting is reflected off a brilliant surface back onto a subject, the reflected light is softer than the direct light, produces no shadows, and is ideal for giving a gentle filling effect to the scene. The reflector is held by a gaffer under the camera and below the object or person to be lit. The films of Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) are especially noteworthy for the softness, suppleness, and sweetness of the lighting. His Pauline à la plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1983) is a remarkable example of intensive reflected (or bounced) light being used to fill in the available light of the natural exteriors. With reflected light, the skins of the characters, virtually always in bathing suits in this film, take on a soft fruity color.

NÉSTOR ALMENDROS
b. Barcelona, Spain, 30 October 1930, d. New York, New York, 4 March 1992

Eventually to become the cinematographer of more than sixty films, including works by Barbet Schroeder, Jean Eustache, Jean-Claude Brialy, Maurice Pialat, Monte Hellman, Marguerite Duras, Alan J. Pakula, and Moshe Mizrahi, Néstor Almendros moved to Cuba after World War II, attending Havana University for a brief time. He traveled to Rome, enrolling in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a school he found too academic for his tastes, then taught Spanish at Vassar College before returning to Cuba after Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959. He was drawn to Paris by the French New Wave and began work there on La Collectionneuse (The Collector, Eric Rohmer, 1967).

He worked repeatedly with two directors, shooting Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's, 1969), Le genou de Claire (Claire's Knee, 1970), L'Amour l'après-midi (Chloe in the Afternoon, 1972), The Marquise of O (1976), Perceval le Gallois (1978), and Pauline à la plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1983) with Rohmer; and Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board, 1970), Les Deux anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls and the Continent, 1971), L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (The Story of Adèle H., 1975), L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977), La Chambre verte (The Green Room, 1978), L'Amour en fuite (Love on the Run, 1979), Le Dernier métro (The Last Metro, 1980), and Confidentially Yours (1982) with François Truffaut. For Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1976), he won an Academy Award^®; and he was nominated for Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) and The Blue Lagoon (Randal Kleiser, 1980). Thanks to his color images, frequently shot at night with actors wearing black-and-white costumes and lit so as to produce artificial moonlight, Still of the Night (Benton, 1982) remains one of the most chilling thrillers since Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), and Almendros's sensual imagery in Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons" segment of New York Stories (1989) makes it a masterpiece.

Convinced that the use of technical devices could adversely affect cinematography, Almendros became an early pioneer of impressionistic reflected light as an antidote to the harsh effects of cinema noir. Using reflective cards or foam sheets, linen, and mirroring material (for example, the plastic fabric Gryflon), he achieved startling, soft painterly color. For example, in sequences of Days of Heaven, he used firelight without additional illumination. Painters' works often inspired his approach to a film: Paul Gauguin for Claire's Knee, Frederic Remington for Goin' South (Jack Nicholson, 1978), and Piero della Francesca for Kramer vs. Kramer.

His autobiography, A Man with a Camera, is not only a witty study of contemporary cinema rich with intriguing comments (such as his reflection that the western is a kind of American commedia dell'arte), but also a treasure trove of insights about the cinematographer's art and condition.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Le genou (Claire's Knee, 1970), The Marquise of O (1976),Days of Heaven (1976), La Chambre verte (The Green Room, 1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The Blue Lagoon (1980), Still of the Night (1982), Pauline à la plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1983), "Life Lessons" segment in New York Stories (1989)

"GOOD" CINEMATOGRAPHY

While an intrinsic part of the viewer's evaluation of a film is often an assessment of the cinematography—"Good cinematography!"—it is actually very difficult to tell when a cinematographer has made an astounding accomplishment in his or her work. This is so largely because cinematographic results generally look wonderful to the untrained eye. In most situations, the professional cinematographer and gaffers, using a full range of lighting equipment, dollies and cranes, and camera mounts, can make a beautiful image with ease. In short, a pretty shot is not necessarily "good cinematography" in and of itself. Furthermore, film actors are trained to model nicely before a lens—and with precise repetition—and the wide range of available stunt persons, dancers, and movement specialists of all kinds makes it possible with relative ease to execute a fluid, focused, well-composed, harmonious, and professionally efficient picture that shows off exciting, dramatically engaging subject matter.

A full appreciation of cinematography requires some knowledge of the circumstances in which a difficult shot is made. One of many celebrated sequences in the history of film practice—all of them certainly handsome on the screen but also remarkable for their very existence—is the redwood forest visit in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Here, shooting on location in the Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County and Big Basin Redwood State Park near Santa Cruz, California, a second unit team including William N. Williams, Wallace Kelley, and Irmin Roberts was faced with the stunning problem of redwood trees so old, and therefore so tall, that their massed upper branches literally blocked the sky. Available light was therefore out of the question. A large generator unit had to be brought in, and the blue-colored carbon arc lighting that would simulate daylight had to come from this portable power source, with the lights being hidden behind some of the trees. However, in order to realize the modulated greens and browns, as well as the subtle penetrating shadows of the sequence, immense quantities of light were needed. Also produced by arc light were the long diagonal shafts of "sunlight," shining down through the trees. In order to protect the trees, the lights could not be turned on for exceedingly long periods of time.

Sometimes a shot is an achievement because of the extraordinary concentration of material or ingenuity required to make it. For the lengthy highway chase sequences of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) and Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), entire stretches of closed-off highway had to be illuminated with hidden arc lamps. Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941) required a glowing glass of milk, which had to be lit from within with a battery-operated mini-lamp. For scenes near the Seine in An American in Paris, John Alton put lights inside a water tank to create the "reflections from other lights suspended above." For the exceptionally difficult Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), John A. Alonzo (1934–2001) had to shoot "real"-scene cinematography that could perfectly match the special effects material, so that a unified visual field could contain a fluid story involving material unrealizable under everyday circumstances. For an example of extremely obtrusive matching, where footage from one location fails to blend believably with footage from another in a shot/countershot edit, see the "wild animal" inserts in W. S. Van Dyke's (1889–1943) Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), where blurry and relatively old wild animal footage is matched against crisply focused shots of Tarzan, apparently watching those animals, taken in the studio.

Cinematographic problems are virtually always idiosyncratic to a particular film and director's intent. Sometimes what is required in cinematography is a harsh sense of realism, a lack of poise and control, and even an occasional out-of-focus moment. For Body and Soul (1947) cinematographer James Wong Howe (1899–1976) donned a pair of roller skates and took a hand-held camera into a boxing ring, his grip grasping him by the waist from behind and guiding him around while he swerved into and out of the boxing action. Michael Chapman's (b. 1935) photography for Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980) makes reference to this, as does Salvatore Totino's (b. 1964) for Cinderella Man (Ron Howard, 2005). For Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) William A. Fraker (b. 1923) had to photograph empty space with supple, eerie light, so that viewers would believe they were staring at an invisible Chevy Chase. In The Day of the Locust (1975), Conrad Hall (1926–2003) used diffusion filtering to give a hazy, unreal effect to the sound stages and locations in Los Angeles where the film's unreal Hollywood is set. In Fahrenheit 451 (1966) by François Truffaut's (1932–1984), Nicholas Roeg used harsh lighting to bleach the environment and intensify the coloration of the firemen sequences, then contrasting diffused light and grainier stock in the concluding utopian sequence with the book people in the forest while the first snows of winter fall. László Kovács (b. 1933) shot numerous films in the 1970s (including Five Easy Pieces [1970] and New York, New York [1977]), the later with its trademark jazzy, large-grain, poetic, softly lit style.

Similarly accomplished yet insufficiently heralded is the work of, among many others, John Alcott in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), Lucien Ballard (1908–1988) in Prince Valiant (1954) and The Wild Bunch (1969), Michael Ballhaus (b. 1935) in GoodFellas (1990) and What About Bob? (1991), Andrzej Bartkowiak (b. 1950) in Prince of the City (1981) with its super-macro-close-up of Carmine Caridi committing suicide and Q&A (1990), Stanley Cortez (1908–1997) in The Night of the Hunter (1955), and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Gabriel Figueroa (1907–1997) in Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1950), and The Night of the Iguana, Lee Garmes (1898–1978) in Shanghai Express (1932), Haskell Wexler (b. 1926) in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and Gordon Willis (b. 1931) in The Godfather (1972) and Zelig (1983). Similarly great figures of European and Asian cinema include such masters as Henri Alekan (b. 1909) in L'Atalante (1934), Yuharu Atsuta (1905–1993) in Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), Coutard in Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), Decaë in The Strange Ones (Les Enfants terribles, 1950]), Pasqualino De Santis (1927–1996) in Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974), Freddie Francis (b. 1917) in Room at the Top (1959) and Cape Fear (1991), Karl Freund (1890–1969) in Metropolis (1927), Robert Krasker (1913–1981) in The Third Man (1949), Asaichi Nakai (1901–1988) in Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai, 1954), Nykvist in Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976), Carlo Di Palma (1925–2004) in Blowup, 1966), Gianni Di Venanzo (1920–1966) in 8½ (1963), and Fritz Arno Wagner (1891–1958) in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933).

Of notable importance in cinematographic history are Ray Rennahan (1896–1980), who shot the first simultaneously exposed three-strip Technicolor production, Becky Sharp (1935); Leon Shamroy (1901–1974) for The Robe (1953), the first film shot in CinemaScope; Loyal Griggs (1906–1978) for White Christmas (1954), the first film shot in VistaVision; Harry Squire for the celebrated This Is Cinerama (1952); Tony Palmer for Frank Zappa's 200 Motels (1971), an early experiment with video transfer blown up to 16mm for theatrical projection; and Garrett Brown, for the Steadicam system first used on Rocky (1976).

Photographing the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s was a particularly demanding task, since big production numbers were the most complicated stagings ever filmed by a camera in Hollywood. Demanding extravagant investments of energy from the singers and dancers, these shots could not be repeated over and over if they did not work. Almost always, the big dance number required considerable rehearsal, complicated camera moves, brilliant lighting, and very high fidelity color reproduction (therefore, stable relations between aperture, film stock, and lighting). The cameraman had to frame interesting shots while adhering to the stipulation of stars' contracts: Fred Astaire (1899–1987), for example, required that his entire body be visible throughout any dance routine: that body was always in motion and had to be perfectly lit as well. In the "Dancing in the Dark" routine from The Band Wagon (1953), Harry Jackson (1896–1953) manages a lighting design that lifts Astaire and Cyd Charisse (b. 1921) out of the everyday, while the never obtrusive camera dances with them, and at the same time the scene, a nook in Central Park, lingers in a perfectly balanced ambiguous, real-yet-not-real state. The color timing of a musical, affected in the printing stage, could easily ruin a very expensive sequence, if the color values fell off; and the light could very easily prove to be insufficient when a number of dancers were moving quickly before the lens, or obtrusive if not perfectly placed to catch all of the moves. In On the Town (1949) Harold Rosson (1895–1988) had to achieve color balance and sufficient lighting in location shots made where both lighting and shooting were challenged by tight space, for example, at the top of the Empire State Building.

The camera itself, and therefore the cinematographer's pivotal position on the movie set, has radically changed since the invention of sound in 1927. At that time, to minimize camera noise, the camera and the cameraman were enclosed in a soundproof booth on the sound stage (the "bungalow"), and later the camera was "blimped" using an envelope of sound-absorbing material. After 1939, with the full development of the three-strip Technicolor process, the camera was enormous and cumbersome, carrying three large film packs and shooting a trio of black-and-white "records" simultaneously through a single lens (under tiring and exhausting high illumination). With the French New Wave, inroads were made not only into higher speed film, but also toward the handheld 16mm cameras, which could make possible an exodus from the studio. By the late 1970s, the Steadicam system was in place. This camera was strapped to a complex, gyroscopically equipped harness worn by an athletic cameraman who could race through a scene, obtaining images of great stability and focus from, as it were, inside the action. A magnificent example of Steadicam usage is Pierre-William Glenn's (b. 1943) work in the market chase sequence of La Mort en direct (Death Watch, Bertrand Tavernier, 1980). Similarly, Panavision's competing system, the Panaglide, was used to great effect by Almendros in Days of Heaven (1978).

REAR-PROJECTION AND OTHER CHALLENGES

Few problems confront cinematography more vexingly than the rear-projection plate. The plate, a strip of film projected onto a screen behind actors in a soundstage (alternately called a stereo when it contains nothing but a landscape), is shot by a special effects team, almost always in advance of principal cinematography. During the 1950s at Paramount, where the rear-projection process was worked out most intensively by Farciot Edouart (1895–1980), special cinematographic techniques were developed for making the plates. In more modern film-making, companies that specialize in plate photography are hired to accomplish specific shots or sequences for a production. All motion in the final narrative scene where the plate is to be used has to be replicated backwards and inverted in the plate for in the actual process of studio composite photography, the projection screen remains rigidly fixed in a position perpendicular to the sound-stage camera. Because neither the plate nor the screen onto which it is projected can be moved in relation to this perpendicularity, all the "motion" and "angle" in the rear-projected image has to be shot into the plate by the rear-projection photography team. This work is often done months in advance of the studio shot into which the plate is to be integrated. The lighting has to replicate the desired "outside" scene, yet match perfectly with the soundstage lighting that will fill in the front portion of the image, and actors in the plate have to be in proper focus for the background positions they will ultimately occupy in the finished shot.

Yet more problematic in the early days of rear projection was producing a projection of sufficient brilliance that it could be believably projected in a soundstage as a "real" background. Early rear-projection plates are noticeably dark and disconnected from the front action. Rear-projection screens had to be developed with maximal translucence and minimal fall-off of illumination from the hot spot created by the projection. In addition, distortion in the plate projection had to be reduced, the screen and projection system had to provide for very sharp focus, and the soundstage camera had to be aligned in perfect synchronization with the projecting device. Both the soundstage camera and the rear-projecting device had to operate in perfect synchrony at 24 fps, so that no fringing or haloing occurred in the background plate (as would occur if one of the apertures was open while the other was closed). In order to make the plates sufficiently bright, Edouart invented in 1933 a triple-head projector, in which three perfectly registered identical background plates were projected simultaneously using a gold mirror system in a water-cooled machine with an intense beam—all of this synchronized with the front camera through an interlocking electrical motor system that ran camera and projector together as one unit. The results are visible in the Marrakech marketplace sequences of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), where 123 degree Fahrenheit midday Moroccan sunlight is faithfully replicated behind James Stewart and Doris Day as they perform on a Paramount soundstage. To further accentuate the realism of Paramount's background plates in the 1950s, they were typically shot in the VistaVision process, which made special use of 35mm film in order to capture an image almost twice the normal size, yet with exceptionally fine grain. The cinematography of this film, by Robert Burks, elegantly matching Edouart's background plates throughout, is "good cinematography" indeed.

In the twenty-first century, composite shots can be handled on the soundstage through front projection background images, frequently on slides. This process is enabled by highly reflective 3M Scotchlite screens and a mirror system of projection that allows the projected image to be aligned with the camera's focal angle.

Beginning in the 1970s, with the advent of new, smaller cameras and lighting units, as well as more flexible camera mounts and cranes, it became possible for cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond (b. 1930) to produce in American film artistic visual effects that would effectively simulate the European art film that had been capturing attention in American theaters since the 1950s. Zsigmond found a way to produce a simultaneous zoom and pan, which, marking his work in such films as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Sugarland Express (1974), The Last Waltz (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Blow Out (1981) played a significant role in establishing the reputations of a cohort of Hollywood auteurs including, respectively, Robert Altman (b. 1925), John Boorman (b. 1933), Mark Rydell (b. 1934), Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), Martin Scorsese (b. 1942), Michael Cimino (b. 1943), and Brian De Palma (b. 1940).

It is often necessary for cinematographers to devise unique methods for making narratively crucial shots that are unrepeatable for technical reasons. For Professione: Reporter (The Passenger, 1975) by Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912), it was required that the film end with a lengthy sequence shot involving extraordinary camera movement: through the length of a hotel room in which a man is sleeping, through the grating at his window, out into the plaza outside—where numerous activities are taking place—then around the plaza in a pan of more than 180 degrees (now revealing that the grating at the window is still in position), back to the window, through which we can now see that the sleeping man is dead. Luciano Tovoli's (b. 1936) camera was placed on a specially constructed ceiling-mounted track, moved forward by grips toward the window; a team outside slowly pulled the two halves of the window grille apart as the camera remained stationary (thus creating the illusion that it was approaching the window). Then the grips continued to move it forward until the outside team hooked it to a cable hung from a construction crane hidden off-camera. From there it could be manipulated around the plaza. But during the shooting a severe storm wind was blowing, so that maintaining fluid motion and clear focus was immensely challenging.

For the same director's Zabriskie Point (1970), a lavish mountaintop house in the California desert was to explode in one character's imagination. To produce the explosion, the director had a second residence built identical to the house that was being used for the location. Seventeen 35mm cameras were set up, many of them overcranked, so that at the moment of the detonation seventeen different angles could be covered, many in slow motion. The cinematographer, Alfio Contini (b. 1927), used a walkie-talkie system to direct the work of his seventeen camera operators. In the screen sequence, the house is seen to blow up again and again and again and again, from every imaginable angle, from a distance and in closeup.

Contemporary cinema is making new cinematographic demands. Very fast film stocks are used with computer-controlled camera mounts and remote-control focus systems, making it possible for the cinematographer to be at a greater distance from the camera. Shooting Francis Ford Coppola's (b. 1939) One from the Heart (1982) from a trailer off-set, for example, Vittorio Storaro (b. 1940) could make use of an offshoot of the video assist system invented in the early 1960s by Jerry Lewis in order to obtain excellent control of lighting and camera movement while at the same time intensively economizing on printing expense (since it was not necessary to wait until the screening of dailies in order to determine the best shots). Also, with more lightweight, more mobile, and more intensive lighting systems, it was possible to systematically produce the effect of being inside the action of a fast-paced dramatic event: this is typified in the large-grain contraband-video-style opening sequence by Matthew F. Leonetti (b. 1941) for Strange Days (1995).

To shoot live-action footage so that it will blend with computer-animated effects is often a challenge in itself. For Minority Report (2002) Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kaminski managed the problem by over-exposing the live footage so that when projected onscreen it is overly bright and hazy. The special effects seem to float out of a dream reality. The early requirement of cinema for restricted space in which the actors and camera crew could gain precise control of behavior and lighting is virtually obviated by the technical development of small and lightweight camera units, high-powered but portable lighting, and high-speed film stocks. Increasingly, cinematographers are experimenting with high-definition video, a format which is so light sensitive that it is possible to pick up richly colored details of wallpaper from twenty-five or thirty feet away with no direct lighting at all.