Tonight's FNatM is by chingchongchinaman.
This past April 22, the great British cinematographer Jack Cardiff died, age 94. His cinematographer credits include a rather curious range of films, such as:
(a) Under Capricorn (1949)
(b) The African Queen (1951)
(c) The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
(d) War and Peace (1956)
(e) The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
(f) Death on the Nile (1978)
(g) Conan the Destroyer (1984)
(h) Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
The films that really put him on the map, however, were his trio of credits for the UK filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known as "The Archers"):
(1) A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
(2) Black Narcissus (1947)
(3) The Red Shoes (1948)
More below the flip....
Before continuing, though, one interesting tidbit from the British Film Institute bio of him (which hasn't been updated, obviously) is that his birth name was John G.J. Gram, which curiously, none of the obituaries that I found mention:
(1) New York Times
(2) The Independent
(3) Telegraph
(4) The Guardian
(5) The Times
"Cardiff" was apparently his father's stage name, but later on, he legalized the name for himself. You can partake of a portrait gallery view of Cardiff's life and career from this link from The Guardian.
I knew of Cardiff from reading Michael Powell's autobiography (Volume 1), A Life in Movies, in college. What I didn't know was that A Matter of Life and Death was Cardiff's first film where he was credited as the cinematographer. Even so, Cardiff wasn't just any first-time cinematographer, as Powell recalled in his book:
"Jack had been Technicolor's brightest technician and their star demonstration cameraman for years. Like the other brilliant cameramen sponsored by Technicolor, he had been right through the plant, studying first the theory, and then the practice of the Technicolor dye-process colour system."
Citation: Michael Powell, A Life in Movies. Alfred A. Knopf, p. 498 (1987)
Just to give some idea of the talent he brought to it, from the obituary from The Independent:
"Powell's first perverse idea for A Matter of Life and Death was to subvert audience expectations by shooting the sequences set on earth in colour and those set in heaven in black-and-white. But it was Cardiff who suggested shooting the heavenly scenes on Technicolor stock which, when processed as though it were black-and-white, gave them an eery [sic], shimmering quality. For a celebrated early shot near the beginning, when the mist clears on a beach, Cardiff simply breathed on the camera lens, steaming it up for a couple of seconds."
You can see the opening sequence below:
The story is about a RAF pilot (David Niven) who is about to go down in flames, as his plane has been attacked. His last conversation is with an American WAC radio operator (Kim Hunter), and the two fall in love over the conversation. Niven bails out of the plane, and.....doesn't....quite...snuff..it. The rest of the film takes place pretty much in his head, where he imagines that he stands before a heavenly tribunal that decides whether he must die and enter the "Other World", or live in happiness with Kim Hunter.
Powell told the story of Cardiff's idea of shooting the entire film in Technicolor, rather than splicing black & white film with Technicolor, thus:
'Now Jack Cardiff, the technician seconded to us by Technicolor, intervened.
"Why black and white? Why not monochrome? Technicolor can do that. Technicolor can do the whole job! We could shoot the Other World not in black and white, but in three-strip Technicolor, and print it without the dyes. That's the only way you can get the effect you want: colour fading from a rose and the colour flooding back into it without cutting away. Monochrome, not black and white!"
"What will three-strip without the three primary colours look like?" we all wanted to know.
"Sort of pearly", said Jack vaguely.
I looked at Alfred [Junge, the production designer on the film]. "Did you hear, Alfred? Open wide them pearly gates!"'
Citation: Powell, ibid.
For the American release, the film was retitled Stairway to Heaven. Powell himself counted this film as his own favorite of his "Archers" productions with Pressburger. There's a good Turner Classics Movies commentary on the film here.
In Black Narcissus, adapted from Rumer Godden's novel about a mission of nuns in the Himalayas, one thing to keep in mind is that the entire film was shot in the UK. The filmmakers never went to India for any of the footage. All the panoramic mountain footage was painted sets, and garden footage was shot at the Leonardslee gardens in Sussex. You can sample a bit of the film on the very small screen here. But for a more intimate sense of how Cardiff captured color for effect, go to this clip, starting at 2:05, as Sister Clodagh, the leader of the mission (Deborah Kerr) confronts the increasingly out-of-control Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Watch especially the use of a certain color in the clip from 3:37 to 3:51.
(Sidebar that has nothing to do with Cardiff: Deborah Kerr and Michael Powell had been in a relationship in the early 1940s. Powell and Kathleen Byron were having an affair during the filming of Black Narcissus, while both of them were married to other people. Think about it.
Second sidebar: if you've ever seen Martin Scorsese's Kundun, the scenes in the digitally generated Tibet are basically his homage to Black Narcissus.)
Another tribute to how well Cardiff made those projected sets look like the Himalayas is from Jean Simmons, who "crossed cultures" in the role of the Hindi girl Kanchi, who seduces the "Young General" (Sabu), who is nominally at the convent to be educated:
"I came on set and saw these plastic mounds and wondered what the hell it was. Then the cinematographer said come and look through the camera. I looked and it was the Himalayas - quite extraordinary!"
Cardiff's work on Black Narcissus won him his only "regular" Oscar (apart from his honorary 2001 Oscar). Peter Bradshaw summed up Cardiff's achievement thus:
"Particularly, perhaps, Black Narcissus, in which the Himalayas were plausibly, fascinatingly fabricated in Britain: an entire created world, a pre-CGI simulacrum of reality, was conjured up in a movie studio at least partly as a result of Cardiff's painterly control of light and colour.
The richness of that palette: the flowers, the sky, Deborah Kerr's discreet maquillage - all contrasting, stunningly, with the deathly pallor on the face of Kathleen Byron's Sister Ruth as she finally abandons herself to hysteria, despair and revenge on those fictional heights. Without the 'look' of that film, the story would have meant far less, and that look had just enough exquisite unreality to draw attention to the genius of the man who had crafted it."
From there, on to the most famous of these three P&P films, The Red Shoes, the ultimate ballet movie for its time, quite possibly all time. If you know the film, it needs no introduction. Admittedly, a fair bit of the dialogue and the plot are melodramatic and "arty", to put it mildly. In essence, it's the ultimate backstage musical, if set in the world of "high art". But as the Time Out film guide once said, The Red Shoes is:
".....in texture, like nothing the British cinema had ever seen."
In those post-war years of austerity, the sheer visual life of the color and, yes, texture of it are such a contrast to what most of you might imagine of British movies of the time, either very proper literary drama ("Masterpiece Theatre" before PBS even came into existence) or Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness.
A new print of The Red Shoes, with the restoration spearheaded by Martin Scorsese, recently was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Charlotte Higgins of The Guardian blogged about it here:
"Its director of photography, the late Jack Cardiff, was a stickler for colour – he even, according to the man sitting next to me at the screening, mixed his own house paint.
The colours of the restored Red Shoes absolutely leap from the screen. Moira Shearer is all icy skin, palely freckled. And then there is her hair, that miraculous sheet of red-gold fire. As she walks towards the Royal Opera House in an early scene, that vivid shade is visually echoed by a bunch of amber chrysanthemums from the flower market briefly seen at the front of the shot. Then, dramatically backlit during the extended, surrealistic scene in which she dances the ballet The Red Shoes, it suddenly flames a shocking scarlet.
There are a couple of scenes on the railway station at Monte Carlo, and the restoration shows us just how carefully they were made – a woman in a crimson coat here, a burst of purest blue delphiniums there."
Even though the videos are clearly not of the restored version, you can get a sense of Cardiff's work from the full ballet of "The Red Shoes" in the film, Part 1 and Part 2. The DVD release that Charlotte Higgins mentioned is reviewed here.
Other clips from YouTube of Cardiff's handiwork are visible as follows:
Bonus: Cardiff also directed a few films, but he was much less celebrated for that than his cinematography achievements, because most of his directorial projects weren't that good. The following is a clip from what is generally regarded as his best film as a director, the 1960 film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers:
So it's Friday night, and the (film) forum below is yours, to talk about movies you've seen recently, maybe the vintage films above if you've seen them, or great cinematography if the mood strikes you....