Monthly Archive for October, 2010

Jack Cardiff’s Magic Life: Part Three

October 25, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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Jack Cardiff (under the camera) and Geoffrey Unsworth (operating).

“Would you like to photograph my next picture?” This seemingly casual question was how director Michael Powell offered the film A Matter of Life and Death to thirty-year-old Jack Cardiff. Well known as an expert operator with the still new three-strip Technicolor camera, Cardiff was shooting some insert material for the recent Archers, Powell/Pressburger production of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The production was not to begin filming for six months. In the meantime, Cardiff went off to Egypt where he was hired for second unit work on Caesar and Cleopatra, a three-strip Technicolor feature photographed by Freddie Young, Robert Krasker and Jack Hildyard. Cardiff writes in his memoir Magic Hour, “I was not brimming over with happiness.” The wait for Powell seemed endless as it only can be for an artist on the threshold of a career, for this was to be the very first dramatic feature that Cardiff photographed as principal cinematographer.

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Jack Cardiff’s Magic Life: Part Two

October 18, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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The young Cardiff at the unblimped Technicolor three-strip camera.

As twenty-two year old Denham Studios camera operator Jack Cardiff sat waiting his turn to be interviewed by representatives of the American film lab, Technicolor, his anxiety level rose.  A procession of older, more experienced operators had emerged from the inner office, one by one, dazed and disoriented by the technical questions tossed at them: law of inverse squares, lux, lumens, and lamberts—a formidable litany of lighting terms. When Cardiff’s turn came he jumped right in and told them he was definitely NOT their man, as he knew almost nothing about the technical aspects of lighting. “In fact,” he writes in his memoir Magic Hour, “I was a mathematical dunce.”

He began to explain that what he knew of light came from his study of painting, especially the Old Masters and the English pre-Impressionist, J. M. W. Turner.

J.M.W. Turner, “Wreckers Coast of Northumberland,” ca. 1836, Yale Center for British Art.

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Jack Cardiff’s Magic Life: Part One

October 11, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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His entire life was magical, not just the ephemeral few moments of waning light at day’s end that is the title of his book, Magic Hour.

He never photographed a feature film in black and white, but his credits in movies begin at the end of the silent era, a decade before Technicolor 3-strip. His acting career began at age four when he wandered onstage during his parent’s performance, but after his teen years he was to remain behind the movie camera. Decades later, by then an established cinematographer, and asked by a director what he thought of ballet, Cardiff replied, “Not much. It’s so precious. All those sissies prancing about.” But shortly after that declaration, he was to photograph what many consider the greatest ballet film of all time. He had a commanding knowledge and love of painting, but he is renowned as one of the greatest “painters of light” not on canvas, but on 35mm film. By all accounts, he was a great oral storyteller with a prodigious memory, but his autobiography is one of the most well written memoirs of a life in cinema.

These are just a few of the many contrasts in the life and career of master cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff, whose life behind the camera spanned 80 of his 94 years. He was born a month after the outbreak of WWI, and died mere months after the inauguration of President Obama. He was witness to the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, but he worked as an artist through it all.

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First Year Blogging: A Salmagundi—Part Two

October 4, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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During June 2010 there were 65 million tweets posted each day, an average of 750 per second. This is small potatoes compared to the 3,085 per second on June 17, just after the LA Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in game seven of the 2010 NBA Finals. We are all knee-deep and rising in an era where a 140-character message can make national news within seconds after it is posted by Justin Bieber or Sarah Palin.

The already short attention span of a nation of incipient ADDs seems to be under ever-new media pressure to tap into our escalating impatience. When I began these weekly essays over a year ago, it was in part a self-administered antidote, my own escape from the relentless and ephemeral clamoring for attention that our media-driven world demands. We bounce casually all day long from topic to topic with the click of a mouse, dispensing judgments and encomiums in a keyboard shorthand that one day will require deciphering (if anyone then cares) by linguists. My own eclectic interests pull me from one subject to the next. But by forcing myself to choose a single topic to write about each week—  to sit, think, research, and write these musings, it allows me to place new experience into a greater context, to ground it, make it part of my life, rather than just deposit another fleeting impression, soon to be shelved aside by yet another impression. In writing these pieces I have found myself becoming deeply attached to the men and women, living and dead, who have created the art about which I write.

We Americans, more than most people, live inside our work. Our very identity seems entwined with our work, perhaps for filmmakers even more than most. The hours demanded of us exceeds that of any normal profession; but one of the ancillary rewards we have is the total immersion into the real life or fictional drama that filmmaking affords us. It is something akin to this immersive sensation that I receive each week as I release these essays into cyberspace.

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