Original at
Glasgow University
Jack Cardiff
Jack Cardiff was born in 1914 into the British music hall environment. His
parents were travelling performers and he spent his childhood travelling
from town to town. Unable to attend a single school for more than a few
weeks at a time Cardiff's education came to him ad hoc. However, he developed
a lasting interest in painting while a teenager and this early exposure
to and interest in the use of colour and texture would be a profound influence
on his choice of career. By eighteen Cardiff obtained work in Britain's
film studios and was an assistant on silent features at Elstree.
By the mid-thirties he was an respected camera operator at Denham Studios.
When the American Technocolor Company set up in England Cardiff was recruited
as their first technician and so operated the giant three strip camera on
the UK's first colour film Wings of the Morning (1937). He then became
intimately connected with colour photography in England, shooting the travellogue
series World Window (with Chris Challis as his assistant). Cardiff
shot the travelogues as lighting cameraman, back in Britain he could only
obtain work as Technicolor technician or as an operator apart from a couple
of weeks on films instructing principal cameramen in how to light for colour.
However his break came when he shot some second unit footage for the Archers
production The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Unsupervised by Powell
or Pressburger, Cardiff lit a highly awkward set and obtained more than
satisfactory results, thus catching Powell's eye. This led to his first
feature film as principal lighting cameraman at the end of the war on
A Matter of Life and Death.
This was a technical challange from the start, being not only highly dependent
on a subtle but all pervading use of colour, but because sections of the
film, which was divided between settings in heaven and on earth, were to
be shot in black and white. Cardiff suggested they shoot not in black and
white for the heaven sequences, but continue to shoot the thechnicolour
stock, lighting the set for colour, but processing the colour stock as black
and white, draining it of colour which gives the image a 'pearly' quality
- precisely what the producers were after. Praise for the colour sequences
was generous but nothing like as rapturous as that which greeted his next
Archers film, Black Narcissus.
Set in the Himalayas a group of Anglican nuns attempt to found a nunnery
in a former harem, but the atmosphere of the palace and the surrounding
mountain country prove to heady for the nuns who eventually abandon the
area after it has driven wedges between them and their vocation. Shot entirely
at Pinewood studios in London the Himalayan setting was acheived through
glass paintings and a backdrop painted on a wall around the palace set,
built at forty-five degrees so as to keep the sun on it all day. In The
British Cinematographer Duncan Petrie wrote of the film, "Cardiff's work
throughout is among his best: a generally crisp clear quality of light for
the Himalayan setting, interspersed with some low key sequences and the
use of coloured lights to enhance mood. The camera angles are also interesting
and expressive, augmenting the growing sense of hysteria in the convent".
Cardiff won an Academy Award for the photography, Herb Lightman, of American
Cinematographer, wrote that his cinematography illustrated "hitherto unrealised
possibilities for the kinetic use of colour on the screen." He is likely
talking in particular about the development Cardiff made with Powell and
Pressburger using colour to signify emotion to an extent previously unheralded.
In one sequence Sister Ruth, consumed by emotion and lust confronts the
man, David Farrar, whom she imagines is attracted to her. His rejection
proves too much and as emotion overwhelms her she faints. To signify this
heightened state, Cardiff shoots their faces in extreme close-up and when
Kathleen Byron, as sister Ruth faints the camera has taken her point of
view and as she begins to faint the screen is suffused with red, bleeding
in from all sides.
Cardiff's final film for the Archers was the ballet movie The Red Shoes
. The film contains a seventeen minute ballet at its centre, which is
designed to be. not a reproduction of a stage performance but seen as the
dancer, Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and her lover the composer Julian, (Marius
Goring) are expereincing it, psychologically. This allowed Cardiff, in close
collaboration with with the designer Hein Heckroth, composer Brian Easdale
and Powell, to experiment with a varitey of optical effects: "I went to
town and shot all kinds of interesting ideas, including various speeds.
I shot from a six foot rostrum where a ballet dancer jumps off onto a black
target - I shot him at high speed with a very wide angle lens so you see
him going down. A lot of these were very good but Michael decided that the
sequence would be limited to 15 minutes [sic] and that we would have to
work to bars of music. But we did manage to do some tricks. When Massine
leaps on to the stage he seems to float on air. When he jumped on we went
from 24fps to 96, and we had to change exposure at the same time, so when
he jumped he seemed to hover. It worked beautifully."
Cardiff's work with the Archers was pioneering in its use of colour and
his input was a large part of what made their success internationally and
differentiated them from the far less flamboyant British film industry of
the time.
