‘Cameraman’ and the art, science and work of cinematography

Cinematography: The art, science and work
of photography in making films.

We’re surrounded by cinematography. In a YouTube world of instantly accessible mini-movies — as crude as a kitten captured with an iPhone or as refined as the accidental aerial photography of a larcenous seagull — filmed and recorded images are everywhere, ever-proliferating, captured and posted and forwarded at shutter-click speed. In fact, cinematography has become such a ubiquitous and democratized part of common life that’s it’s easy to forget it’s not just the “science and work” of film photography, as Webster’s would have it, but also an art. ¶ Happily, “Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff” has arrived to remind us just what an expressive art form cinematography can be. The captivating,

enlightening and thoroughly absorbing documentary, by Scottish filmmaker Craig McCall, chronicles the life of a man whose name may be unfamiliar but whose work as a camera operator and director of photography, through a career that spanned 90 — yes, 90 — years, indelibly shaped the look of modern cinema, even as he pushed its boundaries to their most experimental limits.

Cardiff began life as a child star, the son of British music hall performers. Working his way up from a “clapper boy” on cinema’s earliest films, he finally landed behind the camera, where his love of painting found an outlet on celluloid. In the 1930s, when Technicolor brought dazzling new possibilities to what was once just black and white, the company chose Cardiff to be the first British cameraman trained in using its new cameras. And Cardiff rose to the challenge, working with the directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to push Technicolor’s super-saturated palette (those reds!) to its most expressive, even lurid, extremes.

In “Cameraman,” which McCall filmed before Cardiff’s death in 2009, the cinematographer recalls how he brought Vermeer’s principles of shadow and light and J.M.W. Turner’s control of tonal values to bear on films as diverse as Powell and Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” and Richard Fleischer’s “The Vikings.” For most filmgoers, Cardiff’s most famous work — which also constitutes the apex of his collaboration with Powell and Pressburger — was the 1948 psychological melodrama “The Red Shoes,” a fever dream of a film in which color, movement, camera effects and vertiginous staging combine to create a by turns beguiling and grotesque portrait of creative obsession.

Says director Martin Scorsese in “Cameraman”: Watching a Jack Cardiff film “was like being bathed in color. It was palpable. The color itself became the emotion of the picture.”

Over the years, with the introduction of lighter cameras and more elastic artistic principles, the heightened emotions and highly pitched color schemes of Cardiff’s Powell and Pressburger films fell out of fashion, giving way to more naturalistic, spontaneous styles. But even without using self-conscious flourishes, Cardiff could still match his visual style to the emotional tone of whatever movie he was filming — including the all-out aggression of “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” on which he served as director of photography.