Sumbmitted by
Bob Keser
Jack Cardiff: Cinema's Vermeer
By Bill Desowitz
New York Times, Sunday March 25th (Oscar Night)
It's fitting that when the Academy Awards are bestowed tonight, Jack
Cardiff will receive the first honorary Oscar ever given to a
cinematographer for artistic achievement rather than technical
merit. This 86-year-old Briton has always relied more on art than
technology, and he likes to tell how the rapt hours he had spent in
museums as a child served to propel his career later when he least
expected it.
It was 1936 and he was a rising young camera operator working with
Marlene Dietrich on Knight Without Armor. He was called at home
one evening and told to return at once to Denham Studios in London:
Technicolor was starting a local operation and wanted to meet with
all the camera operators before selecting one to be taught its
exclusive color system.
Awaiting his turn, he watched his colleagues emerge from their
interviews bemoaning the difficulty of the technical questions.
Well, Mr. Cardiff began his session by confessing his own ignorance
of film technology - and there was stunned silence. He then
proceeded to engage the interviewers in an analysis of lighting in
painting, describing in passionate detail how his favorite old
masters - Rembrandt, Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch - played with
light to capture the subtleties of human emotion.
The Technicolor officials went along for a little while. Mr.
Cardiff was even asked which side of the face Rembrandt preferred
to light; he confidently replied that it was the left. Chatting
about chiaroscuro, he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, "Magic
Hour", took him back to the revelatory visits he had made to art
museums when his parents, who were music hall performers, played
London. But the arty conversation was cut short and Mr. Cardiff
dismissed. He figured he didn't have a chance.
Later, to his utter surprise, he learned he had been selected.
After an invaluable apprenticeship photographing everything from
coronation ceremonies to wars, and working as a cameraman on
British films like The Four Feathers (1939), he had mastered the
glorious Technicolor system and also become known as the company's
enfant terrible.
Once, while making a travelog atop Mount Vesuvius, Mr. Cardiff
wasn't content with the oozing flow of dull red lava. To make it
more dramatic, he slowed down the film to make the flow appear
faster and tweaked the color to make it a fiery orange. Such
manipulation was frowned on at Technicolor, but Mr. Cardiff got
away with it because he was the company's best color specialist.
In 1945 the great director Michael Powell - a bold visual stylist
himself - asked Mr. Cardiff to be the cinematographer on A Matter
of Life and Death. The film, Mr. Cardiff's first feature as
cinematographer, was to be a fantasy about a downed World War II
pilot who must persuade a heavenly court to allow him to survive.
Mr. Cardiff rendered its scenes of everyday English life as a
Technicolor heaven on earth, and he created a compellingly
celestial hereafter in cool, luminous tones of black and white.
Released in this country as Stairway to Heaven, the film
established Mr. Cardiff as a master of painting with light. His
next collaboration with Powell, the luridly emotional melodrama
Black Narcissus, won Mr. Cardiff the 1947 Oscar for
cinematography.
The pair outdid themselves the next year, with the romantic ballet
classic The Red Shoes. And in the ensuing decades, Mr. Cardiff
photographed visually arresting movies for many other directors in
England and Hollywood, including John Huston, who took him along on
an arduous shoot in the Congo for The African Queen (1951). In
the 50's he began a parallel career as a director, and his 1960
adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, starring Trevor
Howard and Dean Stockwell, was well received.
But it is as a cinematographer that he has had his greatest
impact, and he still talks about his craft as if he were
auditioning for Technicolor. "The most interesting lesson in
painting is clean-looking light and dramatic emphasis, whether it
stands out in a countryside or in a bowl of fruit," he said
recently by telephone from his home in Kent, England. "Economy and
simplicity - that was Caravaggio. Drama and organization - that was
Turner. This is what I think about when lighting a scene."
It all sounds so simple, so innocent. Which brings to mind that
enchanting moment in John Boulting's 1951 film The Magic Box when
the 19th-century British inventor William Friese-Greene (Robert
Donat) summons a bobby (Laurence Olivier) from the street to
witness the birth of cinema. Mr. Cardiff depicts the flickering
light and ephemeral imagery from the world's first film projector
as if they were heaven sent. And when Olivier peers behind the
screen in wonder, we are all reduced to wide-eyed children along
with him.
Indeed, to experience Mr. Cardiff's cinematography is to glimpse
the transcendent. With painterly precision and an iridescent
imagination, he enlists any source of light, any trick of
reflection, to extract emotional depth from the faces of the
passionate dreamers, obsessive loners and tormented lovers who
people his films. And not one of his films is more spiritually
infused than Black Narcissus. An eerie psychological thriller
about a convent in the Himalayas, the film hinges on the conflict
between two nuns, one repressed (Deborah Kerr), the other
overwrought (Kathleen Byron).
Memory and madness, the exotic and the erotic - the film's themes
are choreographed to a mystical, musical rhythm that finds
expression in Mr. Cardiff's cinematography. Using oatmeal-colored
tones and chaste-looking light, Mr. Cardiff evokes Vermeer in the
early scenes of somber introspection. At the film's climax, as the
charged atmosphere of the mountains drives Ms. Byron's character
into a frenzy of sexual desire, the palette suddenly shifts into
the wild hues of Expressionism. Dressed in crimson, wearing red
lipstick and looking possessed, the nun surrenders completely to
the wind and otherworldly surroundings and charges her colleague in
the bell tower.
Mr. Cardiff used a fog filter to enhance the surreal tragedy of
this final struggle and, inspired by the work of van Gogh, filled
the shadows with a cool green to clash with the overpowering red.
In those days, Technicolor never permitted the use of devices to
cloud the film, and the lab was going to junk this uncanny scene
until Powell intervened. Mr. Cardiff's work has never been more
haunting.
But his greatest artistic triumph is probably the 15-minute ballet
sequence in The Red Shoes, a film for which he should have won a
second Oscar. (What a swindle that was. Mr. Cardiff contends he was
deprived even of a nomination because his American colleagues felt
they would be disgraced if a foreigner were to win twice in a row.)
With its plethora of color, light and movement, the ballet
sequence is positively phantasmal - a surreal carnival by Marc
Chagall or a dancer's orgy by Edgar Degas that takes us into the
mind of a dancer (Moira Shearer) as she performs a ballet that
parallels her own life story. The real and the imaginary merge as
she is torn between love and art.
To display the artifice of both the dance and the cinema, Mr.
Cardiff used every available gimmick. In one instance, he rigged a
special motor so that the camera could alter the speed of a dance,
slowing a leap at its highest point to make it appear that the
dancer was lingering in midair before descending. During the
magical moment when Ms. Shearer dances with a newspaper that morphs
into a man, Mr. Cardiff changed the speed from 24 frames a second
to four frames, so the man could melt back into a newspaper while
whirling.
His work is all a matter of making beauty more palpable and
sensual by heightening reality. Which includes bringing out the
best in such screen goddesses as Ingrid Bergman (in Alfred
Hitchcock's 1949 Under Capricorn), Sophia Loren (in Legend of
the Lost in 1957), Ava Gardner (in Pandora and the Flying
Dutchman in 1951 and The Barefoot Contessa in 1954) and Marilyn
Monroe (in The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957).
In the case of Gardner, Mr. Cardiff captured both her lustful
spirit and sad aloofness. In Dutchman, which retells the legend
of the immortal seaman and his lover, Gardner first appears singing
about despair while playing the piano in a dreary nightclub.
Copying Rembrandt, Mr. Cardiff lighted her face ever so slightly,
giving it an aspect both iconic and tragic.
As for Monroe, the cinematographer saw her as a tremulous cherub
in the company of her co-star, the commanding Olivier, and he
photographed her with the soft warmth Renoir usedfor women and
children.
Mr. Cardiff isn't through yet. He embarks next month on what he
says will be his final film, Sabina Anima. It's based on the life
of the woman who inspired Carl Jung and indirectly came between him
and Sigmund Freud. Mr. Cardiff is already thinking about the
strange light he will use to capture all the psychological
ramifications of the story. Somewhere in London, no doubt, there's
a painting that will help him figure it out.
