Robert Burks, ASC and Alfred Hitchcock Director Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899. After working as a title artist, art director and assistant director in Britain, he became a director, gaining widespread recognition in 1926 with his fifth film, The Lodger, a Tale of the London Fog. By the mid-1930s he was world-famous as "The Master of Suspense," after helming such tension-filled melodramas as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Secret Agent. With much fanfare, David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to the U.S., where his first American film, Rebecca, won the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1939. Most of his movies over the next 36 years were made in America. He wanted — and got — the finest cinematographers available.
The first cinematographer to be associated with Hitchcock for a long period of time was Jack Cox, who was employed by British International Pictures when Hitchcock arrived there in 1927. Cox photographed Hitchcock's last five silent films, ending with Blackmail in 1929. (This was followed by a synchronized version of Blackmail, which is regarded as England's first sound-on-film talkie). A dozen additional Hitchcock/Cox collaborations followed. In England, Hitchcock also worked with such cameramen as Baron Vintigmilia, Curt Courant, Bernard Knowles, Harry Stradling, ASC and Glen MacWilliams, ASC.
Hitchcock's cinematographers in America were all from the top rank, beginning with George Barnes, ASC, who shot Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945). Harry Stradling (Sr.), ASC, Joseph Valentine, ASC, Glen MacWilliams, ASC, Lee Garmes, ASC and Ted Tetzlaff, ASC each worked with the master director more than once. After returning to England for two pictures respctively shot by BSC fellows Jack Cardiff and Wilkie Cooper, Hitchcock returned to the U.S. in 1950 to make Strangers on a Train, a black-and-white gooseflesh yarn, for Warner Bros. He soon met the director of photography assigned to the picture: Robert Burks, ASC.
Burks was a youthful-looking 40 years old, and had been a cinematographer in Warners' special effects department for years. Born in Los Angeles, he had found a job in the Warner Bros. lab when he was 19 and had a chance to observe some of the top cinematographers at work in the industry's largest special effects facility on Stage 5. He soon was made an assistant cameraman and worked with a half-dozen top special cinematographers. He became a director of photography in 1939.
In recommending Burks for promotion, Byron Haskin, ASC stated that "his work is thoroughly excellent in every respect... [He is] honest, straightforward, resourceful and, in the true sense, a gentleman." Burks emerged as a full-time production cinematographer in 1948. In The Fountainhead and The Glass Menagarie he had utilized the somewhat Germanic visual style that Hitchcock liked.
Burks proved to be the perfect cinematographer for Hitchcock, who also had an encyclopedic knowledge of special effects and often wrote scenes that would create the opportunity to indulge in unusual camera imagery.
Strangers earned Burks Hitchcock's respect, as well as an Academy Award nomination. One legendary scene in which Robert Walker strangles Laura Elliott is shown as a distorted reflection in the victim's fallen glasses. Burks's long-time associate, H. F. Koenekamp, ASC, came aboard to help with some startling scenes in which a merry-go-round flies out of control.
During the ensuing 14 years, Burks photographed 11 more of Hitchcock's best-known essays in suspense. On all of these projects, his operative cameraman was Leonard J. South, ASC. Both men became close friends of the Hitchcock family. The other Hitchcock-Burks collaborations are I Confess (1953), Dial M For Murder (1954, 3-D, Warner Color) Rear Window, (1954, Technicolor), To Catch a Thief (1955, VistaVision, Technicolor), The Trouble With Harry (1955, VistaVision, Technicolor), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, VistaVision, Technicolor), The Wrong Man (1957), Vertigo (1958, VistaVision, Technicolor), North by Northwest (1958, VistaVision, Technicolor), The Birds (1963, Technicolor), and Marnie (1964, Technicolor).
I Confess, filmed in practical settings in Quebec, was a departure for Hitchcock, who preferred to work in the studio whenever possible. Parts of The Man Who Knew Too Much were photographed in Marrakesh and London. Dial M For Murder was among the last pictures made in Natural Vision, the best 3-D process of that time, and was free of the gimmickry that marred most 3-D productions. The scene in which Grace Kelly stabbed Anthony Dawson with her scissors proved to be highly effective. Burks provided outstanding VistaVision photography for five Hitchcock productions from 1955 to 1958.
For one stunning shot in Vertigo, Hitchcock wanted to capture James Stewart's terror as he looked down the inside of a tall church tower by changing perspective during the scene. The heretofore unheard-of feat was accomplished by building a scale model that would lie on its side, and then combining a lens zoom forward while the camera was dollied back. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint had to climb all over a soundstage replica of the Mount Rushmore sculptures. The Birds, in which our feathered friends try to take over the world, was surely the wildest picture of all.
The collaboration ended on May 13, 1968, when Burks and his wife, Elysabeth, died in a fire at their home. Hitchcock and South were devastated. South photographed Family Plot (1976), the last Hitchcock picture. The director died on April 29, 1980. In 51 years as a director, he completed 53 features.
Burks received Academy Award nominations for the black-and-white images of Strangers on a Train and for the color photography of Rear Window. (Color and black-and-white pictures were judged separately at that time.) He later won an Oscar for the color photography of To Catch a Thief, a magnificent example of VistaVision technique. In 25 years as a director of photography, Burks made 55 features.
Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for directing, even though he was probably the world's most famous director and he was nominated five times. He did receive the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968 for "a consistently high quality of motion picture production," as well as a Life Achievement Award from the AFI and an honorary doctorate from USC. France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a Commander of Arts and Letters and a Knight of the Legion of Honor of the Cinematheque Francais. In 1980, the year of his death, he was knighted by the Queen of England. — G. T.
Sven Nykvist, ASC and Ingmar Bergman Spanning three decades, the collaboration between director Ingmar Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist ranks as one of the greatest teamings in cinematic history. The two men's names are irrevocably linked in the minds of the world's film scholars, who credit the Swedish duo with expanding (or, more accurately, exploding) the parameters of the medium. The magnitude of their achievements cannot be understated; the pair's work together helped to redefine motion pictures as an art form, opening up limitless vistas of visual creativity, intellectual insight and raw emotional impact.
Bergman began his artistic career in Swedish theater circles, and made his debut as a motion picture director with the 1945 feature Crisis. Nykvist, a native of Stockholm who had studied at the city's Municipal School for Photographers, first worked with Bergman in 1953 on Sawdust and Tinsel (a.k.a. The Naked Night), sharing cinematographic duties with Gšran Strindberg and Hilding Bladh (who had trained both Nykvist and Strindberg). Nykvist's partnership with the great director began in earnest on the classic 1959 film The Virgin Spring, and subsequently produced such masterworks as Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), The Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1970), Cries and Whispers (1972), The Magic Flute (1973), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Face to Face (1976), Autumn Sonata (1978), The Serpent's Egg (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1983). The cinematographer earned Academy Awards for both Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.
A consummate film artist, Bergman held high standards for his cameramen. As he noted in the seminal text Bergman on Bergman, "For me, two things about a cameraman are fundamental. The first is that he shall be technically absolutely perfect, and at the same time first-class on lighting. The second [is] that he must be first-class at operating his own camera. I don't want any camera operators on my films. The cameraman and I come to an agreement about what is to be included in the image. We also go through everything to do with lighting and atmosphere in advance. And then the cameraman does everything in the way we've agreed on."
Bergman went on to note that his collaboration with Nykvist rose from the ashes of his long partnership with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who shot many of the director's acclaimed early films, including Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1956) and Wild Strawberries (1957). Bergman's comments on this break are telling, revealing that talent alone cannot always ensure a durable bond: "Little by little, Gunnar Fischer's ideas and mine parted company, and this meant that the solidarity, the feeling of personal contact and interplay between us, which was so necessary to me, became slack — largely, perhaps, because I became more and more domineering, more and more tyrannical, and more and more aware that I was humiliating him. Sven Nykvist is a much tougher personality. I've never had any reason to be nasty to him."
Further analyzing his relationship with Nykvist, Bergman noted that the two eventually reached an almost telepathic state of synchronicity. "We've developed a private language, so to speak. We hardly need to say a word. Before the filming begins we go through the film very carefully, to see how we imagine the lighting, check the lighting conditions, and then solve all lighting problems together.
"The light in the images is something I hardly think can ever be attributed to just one of us," the director added. "Perhaps I can put it like this: the impulse comes from me, and the enormously careful, subtle and technically clever execution is all Sven Nykvist's work."
Nykvist, for his part, has consistently credited Bergman with opening his eyes to the full emotional range of lighting. As he told American Cinematographer in 1972, "I owe a great debt to Ingmar, for he gave me my passion for light. Without him I would have remained just another technical cameraman with no great awareness of the infinite possibilities of lighting. Today, I hate purely technical camerawork. I have a great sense that every picture I work on is different and demands a different approach. And I believe that the audience, supposedly indifferent to lighting subtleties, and responsive only to acting and story, will appreciate our work. People must do more than see a motion picture. They must have a feeling for it, and my experience has told me that they appreciate and are held spellbound by a certain mood that is created for them by the proper utilization of light. That is the key to it all. That is what photography is all about."
Throughout their careers, both Bergman and Nykvist have consistently championed the virtues of simplicity. In Bergman on Bergman, the director told his interviewers that he admired his cameraman's ability to see past the logistical aspects of film production and pinpoint the narrative core of a story. "More often than not, it's the people who know nothing or very little who use the most elaborate apparatus," he said. "It's their ignorance that complicates the whole procedure. Take a cameraman like Sven Nykvist, a technically clever cameraman, one of the cleverest in the world. All he needs to work is three lamps and a little greaseproof paper. One part of knowing what to do is simply the ability to eliminate a mass of irrelevant technical complications, to be able to peel away a mass of superficial apparatus."
Indeed, after being named as the recipient of the ASC's International Award in 1996, Nykvist recalled the stripped-down pleasures of his early work with Bergman, who in those days was making films for $100,000 with crews of 8 to 10 people and a handful of actors. "That was a very nice way to work," the cameraman related. "Everyone did everything. Everyone helped everyone else. It was like a family."
In his 1972 interview with AC, Nykvist confirmed that the intervening years of experience hadn't changed his fundamental principles on the set. "I see a great many films and I have come to the conclusion that a large number of pictures today are overlit. Technical perfection in terms of camera and lenses seems to have been matched by a desire to fill the screen with lots of perfectly placed and calculated light. I just don't go along with this, and I have Ingmar Bergman to thank for letting me experiment with a kind of cinematography which, by utilizing true light where possible, seems to me to do greater justice to the medium.
"Of course, Bergman is unique," Nykvist conceded. "I have had the privilege of working with him since 1953 and, through him, have learned to better understand the ultimate possibilities of cinematography. Because he had worked in the theatre, he was intensely interested in light and its uses and how it can be applied to creating a given atmosphere. Bergman has been making pictures for many years, and he knows everything about the camera as a technical instrument. He has a mind and an imagination that takes in not only the limits of poetic imagery, but — equally — the scientific aspects of filmmaking. He has done away with Ônice' photography and has shown us how to find truth in camera movement and in lighting."
—Stephen Pizzello
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