By Roger Ebert
It is commonplace to observe that a film has good
cinematography, but far less common to discuss what is meant by that.
Sometimes all it means is that the pictures are pretty, and for many
people, I think, "cinematography" somehow connects with vast outdoor
vistas - the sand dunes in "Lawrence of Arabia," or the Texas plains
in "Days of Heaven." But great cinematography can also consist of the
look in an eye, the tense space between two people, or the shadows in
the corner of a cramped room.
"Visions of Light," which has been booked into the Music Box
to celebrate the theater's 10th anniversary as Chicago's shrine of
art and repertory cinema, is a documentary that will likely cause
everyone who sees it to look at movies a little differently in the
future. It is a film about cinematography, consisting of a great many
great shots and sequences, commented on by the men (and a few women)
who photographed them.
The only way to criticize a movie, JeanLuc Godard famously said,
is to make another movie. Certainly the best way to criticize
cinematography is to show it. Here we begin with some of the earliest
shots in which the artistry of motion picture photography began to
pull away from the mere fact that it could record light and movement
on film.
At the very first, of course, filmmakers simply pointed their
cameras at things, and then audiences gasped when they could see
them. But then the lure of style began to seduce them.
Cinematographers such as Billy Bitzer, working with D. W. Griffith,
began to move the camera in for closeups, and intercut shots to
create an emotional rhythm, and move the camera itself - and soon
cinematography was born.
In Britain, the cinematographer was originally known as the
"lighting cameraman," and indeed light - the way it falls on the
subject, the way it is present or absent - is at the heart of the
craft. I remember the late James Wong Howe telling an audience at the
Chicago Film Festival how he battled with the technical advisers from
Technicolor when he was shooting "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,"
which was only the third or fourth film made in the process. They
advised him to pour on light, lots of it, even in the scene where Tom
and Becky are lost in the cave. He cut the light by threequarters,
and made the scene feel real. They complained that you couldn't even
see most of the cave. Exactly.
In "Visions of Light," many great cinematographers talk about
their relationships with directors, with shots, and with the light.
It is always hard to say exactly where a director's contribution ends
and the cinematographer's begins, but it is always true that it's the
cinematographer's responsibility to realize the director's vision -
and sometimes, they hint here, to supply it.
Sometimes their skill consists merely of taking advantage of a
happy chance. One of the most beautiful and effective shots shown in
this film is from Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood," photographed by
Conrad Hall in 1967. On the night he is to be hanged from the
gallows, the murderer played by Robert Blake looks out through a
window peppered with rain. Looking through his viewfinder, Hall
discovered that the light through the window caught the shadows of
raindrops as they trickled down the glass, and projected them against
Blake's face, creating the illusion of ghostly tears. "He told me not
to move, and not to cry," Blake remembered. The shot cries for him.
There are many other shots here, from Gregg Toland's deep focus
work in "Citizen Kane" through to Haskell Wexler's work on "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf," which might have been retitled by Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, "Who's Afraid of Haskell Wexler," since
they let him photograph them with a distinctly unflattering realism,
and the shots so suited the mood of the piece that it became one of
their great collaborations.
Faithful readers will not be surprised to learn that the black
and white cinematography, of course, is more beautiful than the
color. Black and white, I believe, contains the naked soul of the
cinema. Color photography merely supplies its clothes. In a segment
devoted to Stanley Cortez's great cinematography on Charles
Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), the younger
cinematographer Allen Daviau talks about the reluctance with which
the great cameramen left B&W, with its greater poetry and mystery,
for the prosaic reality of color. Certainly the shot shown from the
film - Lillian Gish sitting grimly on a porch with a rifle, while
Robert Mitchum loiters on a sidewalk - recalls the film's almost
surrealistic sense of horror. There is another shot in the film where
Mitchum's shadow from a street lamp is cast, stark and terrifying, on
a child's bedroom ceiling. The whole style bespeaks B&W.
The cinematographers quoted here all speak of the greater
difficulty of lighting black and white, but of its greater rewards.
Of all of the crimes that television has committed against the
movies, its lamebrained enforcement of the color rule is the worst.
It came about because in the late 1960s, when most people began to
have color sets, it was naively believed that they wanted to see only
color movies on television. As anyone who has ever watched "It's a
Wonderful Life" or "Casablanca" on TV can testify, B&W actually looks
better on TV than color does. (The first network to return to B&W
footage in a newscast will be surprised to find that its ratings
jump.)
"Visions of Light" is the kind of movie that will affect the way
you look at movies. It calls your attention to what is being shown on
the screen, when you are perhaps more used to following what is
happening in the story.
Look, here, at a scene from "Rosemary's Baby." The character
played by Ruth Gordon is seen at the end of a corridor, on the
telephone. Cinematographer William Fraker remembers that the
director, Roman Polanski, asked him to move the camera so that
audiences could see only Gordon's back; the rest of her body was
concealed by a door. So sinister was the call and so great the
audience's curiosity, Fraker remembers, that when the shot played,
everyone in the theater unconsciously shifted to one side, trying to
see around that door.
VISIONS OF LIGHT: THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY (STAR) (STAR) (STAR) 1/2 A documentary directed by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels. Written by McCarthy. Running Time: 90 minutes. Opens today at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport.