Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (Craig McCall, 2010) I love films about cinematography and there are damned few of them; I tend to come away with a new appreciation of light and vision, and the world looks fresh and new, bright and awash with color. It happens so rarely when I watch films where the world seems different post-movie—the films of Orson Welles or Nicholas Roeg do that to me...and films about cinematography.*

When I saw Cameraman... pop up on the Netflix queue, I jabbed the Play button immediately. The work of Jack Cardiff (the subject of the film) spanned a career of 70 years and the palettes of black and white through to color and technicolor—there's a difference—(and from the silver screen to the painter's canvas, sometimes employing both). A cinematographer for much of his career, he also directed in the 60's and 70's and returned to cinematography later. But he worked with the camera from the era of Things to Come to photographing Rambo: First Blood Part II, and worked with directors as diverse as Michael Powell, Laurence Olivier, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Hathaway, John Houston, the Boulting Brothers, William Knightley, Richard Fleischer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, King Vidor, Mike Newell, John Irvin and Joshua Logan. Cardiff raised the level of everything he worked on and directors knew he had the eye of a painter and the craftsmanship of an engineer.  He was truly a renaissance man. 

Documentarian Craig McCall shows it all and knows how to get great quotes from the man and anecdotes about the various personalities he worked with, the directors he worked for and the subjects he photographed, literally a man in the middle who knew how to make both sides look their best. Some of the surviving directors give testimony, as well as Martin Scorsese, Powell's editor-wife Thelma Schoonmaker, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas (a rare post-stroke interview), John Mills, as well as Moira Shearer, Kim Hunter and Kathleen Byron.

In showing the history of this one man, it is also a fascinating overview of the entire art and history of the cinema as well, and how the well-composed image is as timeless as beauty itself. This is gorgeous to look at, and very educational and highly, highly recommended.

* One of my favorites is Visions of Light, which was produced with the ASC Union and has a broad spectrum of subject matter and timeline, as does Camerman.  You can't do a film about lighting movies without mentioning Dietrich, and I'll always remember that 45 degree angle trick.

So, there's a link to buy Visions of Light, but YouTube has two versions of it: one in its original format with cut-away's to interviews and some disturbing format transitions, and a remastered meticulously recreated version that gives prominence to the cinematography

Visions of Light [HD Remaster] (1992–2020) from Mulberry St Studios on Vimeo.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes (The Archers, 1948) A film considered by many toilers in the field (including Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese) to be the most beautiful film ever made. It's also one of the most ingenious and ambitious (typical of of the writer-director-producer team of Powell and Pressburger), combining Hans Christian Andersen's story of a compulsively dancing set of ballet slippers (told in dance form) that takes over the soul of a woman, and couching it in a modern re-telling of the story, where magic is replaced by ambition, and the story parallels the real-life story of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his relationship with a British ballet dancer, Diana Gould. Fantasy becomes psychology, and the Fates stay the same; that's a pretty bold statement on the power of myth and myth-making, both in the worlds of fairy-tales and The Arts. And it's the kind of Deep Thought that Powell and Pressburger brought to the conception of their films.  Modern audiences may find them overwrought (and TOO "British?"), but that's missing the forest for the trees. Let's agree to call it hyper-theatricality.  The Archers made exquisite films of subtlety and sophistication, and imaginatively bridged the fine cinematic line between reality and fantasy...and sanity and madness.*

The story is an expansion of Andersen's tale of a woman who loves to dance, is given a pair of magical shoes that fulfills her desires...only too well...finally dancing her to her doom. Here, Vicky Page (the vivid...there's no other way to say it...Moira Shearer) is a dancer of great ambitions, but circumstances bring her into the orbit of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who, impressed by her devotion to "The Dance" brings her into his company. 

Given the chance to be a prima ballerina, she is also torn by her love for young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), who composes her signature ballet ("The Red Shoes", natch') for her, specifically. The pressures of touring, and the constant strains both physical and emotional, spurred on by the controlling Lermontov, conflict with her love for Julian, but it's a metaphor, as much as The Red Shoes is, she is conflicted between her love of dancing and her love for the man. 

And then, there are the images:

They are startling.  Each frame could be hung on the wall of a gallery. With the deep tones of a black-and-white film, but in eye-popping, arresting Technicolor, composed with equal attention to composition and detail. Each advances the story-line, but moves deeper into the very psychology of the actors on stage.

But, they're moving in three-dimensions, and each edit to another shot is a new revelation that startles and pleases the eye.** This is incredible, sumptuous film-making using the combined skills of art and photo-chemistry. Every time I hear someone extolling the virtues of today's digital bleaching and leeching of color, I know they haven't seen this film and its full-to-dripping palette.

Choices that hurt the brain: In the middle of a performance, reality and fantasy merge in the conflicted heart of dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). The stress in the face is manifested by the dancer's physical exertions by beads of sweat and welling tears.

In one of the most startling images/special effects in The Red Shoes Vicky, in performance, imagines an image of her composer-lover, which she rushes to and falls through, a dream-like nightmarish image of the traps of love.

Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), a dark figure in the shadow of the wings

Helen's conflict in a single image

The body of a dancer must be that of an athlete's. Strong, focused, and tough, as tough as the soles of their feet...as calloused as their toes. But what can come of that pirouetting figure, spinning, when it is in mortal conflict between a romantic heart and an artistic soul for possession of the self? Which ever way the music turns, love conquers all. That is the heart of The Red Shoes, and like the cautionary folk-tale that inspired it, that does not necessarily mean that everything ends "happily ever after."

One of those movies you should see before you kick, balletically or not.

* I can't help but think that Darren Aronofsky's Natalie Portman ballerina psycho-drama Black Swan (which we'll look at tomorrow) has also been massively influenced by this film, as well (although, given the trailer's theme of "You Must Find Your Passion," it sounds a bit more like "Red Shoe Diaries"), but one hopes Aronofsky's dark sensibilities (and dabblings in theory, both mathematical and sociological) will be the dominant underpinnings.

** Yeah, yeah, I know. The previous sentences are as generic as they could be; that is what film-making SHOULD be, after all. Unfortunately, as the better the technology has become, the fundamentals of film-making as ticked off in those sentences seem to be lacking in most product. The Red Shoes is a shining (one might even say, glowing) example of taking the art to a new level.

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, actually Karlheinz Böhm) is never without his camera—a camera of some kind, still or film. A shy young man, he works as a "focus-puller", hoping to become a film-maker. In his other job, he takes pin-up shots of models to be sold "under the counter" in plain brown envelopes. Photography is his passion, his aspiration, his raison d'etre. But, it is also a means to end.

For his hobby is terrorizing and killing women.

Mark is one of those people who, during a newscast of a lurid incident, it is always remarked "he seemed like such a nice young man—kept to himself." The intensity is never mentioned, though, or the creepiness. But, just  the fact that Mark ALWAYS has a camera with him should raise an alert.

It certainly should tip off Dora (Brenda Bruce), a prostitute Mark follows one night. Or maybe it shouldn't. He hides his movie camera under his coat (hmm..I sense a metaphor-based film thesis in the works) and we see what happens from the point of view of the view-finder, as he encounters on the street, follows her to her flat, and then murders her, filming it, then skulking off to his house, where he develops the film and watches it, transfixed...or turned on...or what? It's difficult to say exactly what is going on with this monster, but since we're watching the film...we're accessories. 

Peeping Tom (as the title suggests) is about voyeurism at it's cruel dark little heart. Mark "likes to watch." Not participate, really, but watch. To record and see it over and over again. He's a vicious killer, a sociopath, but as long as the camera is between him and his victims, there's a filter there, responsibility-once-removed, and all for the sake of "art," his footage is to be part of a documentary he is making—or at least recording—paralleling his experiences as a child as his father (played by director Powell) runs psychological experiments on him, while a documenting camera records the events. It is suggested (filmicly) that Mark is merely doing what he knows and is familiar with in his growing up. But, if so, where did he learn to kill?

And—like Mark—we watch, complicit in his actions. It adds another dimension to the experience of the movie. Perhaps it's a feeling of generated guilt that we're watching what he's watching—compounded by Mark's compulsion and utter lack of guilt—which gives us the universal experience of feeling out of control in the passive experience of watching a movie. You feel helpless when your instincts are challenged. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's ever watched Hitchcock's voyeuristic classic, Rear Window.

And (it seems) you can't discuss Peeping Tom without also mentioning Hitchcock, whose film, Psycho, was released just two months after Powell's film.* Michael Powell had worked closely with Hitchcock during the director's "British"period, working as a still photographer on his shoots and the two were somewhat close throughout their careers. That they should simultaneously direct the most lurid films of their careers has more to do with the loosening of restraints in subject matter for film at the time than anything else. For Powell, whose career—as part of "The Archers" in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger—was a prestigious one, the subject matter of Peeping Tom was a departure from, say, The Red Shoes** or A Matter of Life and Death, although, it isn't too far afield from the hysteria of, say, Black Narcissus. But, the nuanced approach, the vital color palette, should be familiar to anyone familiar with the films produced by "The Archers."

Even as the movie makes us implicit voyeurs, we are also innocent bystanders, shocked by the new and the unexpected, looking for some sense of normalcy amidst all the creepiness. Peeping Tom provides this downstairs from Mark's austere flat—far more elaborate is his film room—where he rents out the ground floor of his family home to Helen (Anna Massey—who would be a victim in Hitchcock's Frenzy ten years later) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley) whom she cares for. Helen is empathetic towards the damaged, so she is drawn to mark for his shyness, his past—he shows her his father's home movies of his psychological experiments—and because she knows that he spies on her.

He might be drawn to her, too—or it's just because she shows him attention, which he's not accustomed to. Ego is a facet for both killers and film-makers, and perhaps she satisfies that need. Or she's just another victim for his secret hobby.

There's an added element to the murders that are noteworthy. Peeping Tom is full of reflections and refractions both in the film and the viewer's reaction to it. But, Mark's murder weapon is his own camera—one of the tripod's legs contains a sword with which he slays his victims—it serves double duty as both weapon and recorder. But the camera also holds a mirror to the victim, so they can see their own death, which own enhances the terror that Mark wants to record.

Peeping Tom is the complex daddy of the slasher films of the 1970's—which scaled the concept down to just a voyeuristic POV, unknowable killers and shock-cuts—but, even with the artistic sensibilities of Powell in play, it's still a creep-fest, that compels one to take a shower afterwards—that is, if Psycho isn't also on the double-bill.

* Peeping Tom received a critical thrashing in the press when it was released. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock did not have press previews of Psycho when it was released, instead emphasizing a "not-to-be-revealed" mystery in the film in its marketing to the public.

** The inclusion of the star of The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, led to some controversy , as well.