The Art of the Cinematographer

by Leonard Maltin

  Preface to the DOVER EDITION

  In the seven years since this book first appeared, cameramen have continued to enjoy the same curious blend of public interest and apathy that has been their lot since the beginning of motion pictures. Two major film magazines have devoted special issues to cinematographers. several museums have paid tribute to classic achievements by cameramen, and certain figures—Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond. Haskell Wexler, and Conrad Hall—have achieved wide recognition for their outstanding work.

  But there have been no other books on the subject, and from a historical point of view there has been little further exploration of the cameraman’s role in shaping our film heritage. Most articles published in film magazines deal with a specific current picture and nothing more.

  Some new names have attained prominence, notably second-generation cameramen Bruce Surtees and Harry Stradling Jr., while some pioneers have passed on—James Wong Howe, Leon Shamroy. and two of this book’s interviewees, Arthur Miller and Hal Mohr.

  But the business remains the same: cinematographers are called upon to produce the widest possible variety of looks, moods, and settings. Whatever cycles Hollywood may concoct, a cameraman must be prepared to film anything from a disaster epic to a Western. He must draw upon the newest technical innovations to keep his work fresh and contemporary. But he must also draw upon the collective experience of his colleagues over nearly eighty years of filmmaking; no cameraman can face all these challenges by himself.

  The story this book has to tell is one of men who were artists, technicians, pioneers, and personalities. It does not date or lose its validity with the passage of time, and for this reason the book appears virtually as it did when first published in 1971. The text itself has not been changed. but I have updated the filmographies and the listing of Academy Award nominees and winners, and have added a gallery of behind-the-scenes photographs which I hope will enhance the reader’s enjoyment of the text. The picture captions are now indexed as well as the text.

  As for me, I remain just as fascinated by these men and their achievements as I was when I first set out to write this volume. Cameramen are a beguiling breed, and they have given so much to our film legacy. I can’t wait to see what’s coming up in the next eighty years!

  LEONARD MALTIN

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Film Fan Monthly, Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures. Walt Disney Productions, 20th Century-Fox, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Pictures, Lou Valentino, Jerry Vermilye, Herman G. Weinberg. Arthur Miller, Lucien Ballard, David Chierichetti, Alan Barbour, Doug McClelland, Susan Dalton, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research. Richard Koszarski, and John Kobal.

  Copyright 1971 by Leonard Maltin.

  Copyright © 1978 by Leonard Maltin.

  All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

  Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.

  This Dover edition, first published in 1978, is a corrected and enlarged edition of the work originally published in 1971 as a Signet Book by The New American Library, Inc., New York, under the title Behind the Camera: The Cinematographer ’s Art. See the Preface to the Dover Edition for specific details on the new features in the present volume.

  9780486154749

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-56838

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Dover Publications. Inc.

  31 East 2nd Street

  Mineola. N.Y. 11501

  Preface to the FIRST EDITION

  This book is not intended as a thorough study of the cinematographer’s contribution to American film; such an endeavor would fill several volumes. Rather, this is more of an overview of American films, stressing the role of the cameraman. The introductory essay attempts to survey this field in a general manner, focusing on various highlights and lingering to take note of outstanding work along the way.

  But the core of the book is the interviews themselves, for these five men represent a distinctive cross-section of cameramen over the years. Their comments are based on experience and are surprisingly candid; because of this, they provide rare insight into both their own careers and the world in which they worked.

  This book could not have been written without the kindness and generosity of David Chierichetti, who was instrumental in getting this project off the ground, and who participated in the interviews; the late Arthur Miller, whose dedication to the field was an inspiration and whose help to the author will not soon be forgotten; the interviewees themselves, who all were exceedingly kind—Hal Mohr, Hal Rosson, Lucien Ballard, and Conrad Hall; and William K. Everson, Herman G. Weinberg, Tom Jones (Walt Disney Productions), Tom Grey (Universal Pictures), William S. Kenly (Paramount Pictures), Gary Shapiro (Columbia Pictures), Hal Sherman and Alan Rogers (20th Century Fox), George Stevens, Jon Davison, Lou Valentino, and Jerry Vermilye.

  When I embarked upon this project, I knew very little about cinematography. I immersed myself in the subject, and largely through the efforts of the people named above, I learned a great deal. Doing this book has been a revelation for me. I hope that the reader may share in this feeling in the pages ahead.

  LEONARD MALTIN

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface to the DOVER EDITION

  Copyright Page

  Preface to the FIRST EDITION

  INTRODUCTION: A Survey of Hollywood Cinematography

  FIVE INTERVIEWS: Introductory

  Interview with ARTHUR MILLER

  Interview with HAL MOHR

  Interview with HAL ROSSON

  Interview with LUCIEN BALLARD

  Interview with CONRAD HALL

  ACADEMY AWARDS FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY 1927-1977

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION: A Survey of Hollywood Cinematography

  Since film itself is only seventy-odd years old, it can be easily understood that film study and criticism are still in an embryonic stage. There is widespread feeling that the 1970s will be the Film Decade and, if so, perhaps we will find ourselves finally coming to terms with various aspects of film which have been either ignored or poorly treated thus far.

  It was not until the 1960s that, generally speaking, the director came into his own, outside of the industry itself and the relatively small coterie of film buffs. The “auteur theory,” which originated in France, spread to America, endorsed by critic Andrew Sarris. In brief, the theory says that the films of a true auteur (that is to say, a good director) all bear his indelible signature in their style, theme, etc. Suddenly, such long-ignored men as Allan Dwan, Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and Budd Boetticher found themselves revered alongside such acknowledged masters as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks. Identifying films by their titles or stars became passé, and phrases like “It’s an early de Toth” or “a minor Siegel” came into usage.

  The auteur theory had opponents as well as adherents, but the results of its popularity hurt everyone. Many film critics and writers became so immersed in the work of the director that they dismissed the contributions of everyone else connecting with filmmaking. It is no insult to any director to acknowledge the assistance he received from his cast, writer, editor, composer, and staff of technicians. Yet this unjust view of filmmaking continued to dominate film literature for several years.

  Now, as we enter the enlightened ’70s, however, a welcome breeze of rationality is drifting into film study. Some of the auteur theorists are mellowing and beginning to admit that other people were involved in their favorite films; more time is being devoted to other people behind the scenes. Best of all, recog
nition is finally coming to the cinematographer.

  Surely everyone knows that somebody has been shooting all those pictures we’ve seen, yet how many people can name two cameramen in the history of motion pictures? Even film buffs have been shamefully neglectful of these men, with fame coming to just a handful—James Wong Howe, Karl Freund, Billy Bitzer.

  Yet what more obvious person to admire and study than the man who is actually putting what we see on film? As the novice begins to find out more about cameramen, he realizes just how vital this craftsman is to the making of a film—that there is more to his job than merely looking through a viewfinder and shooting what he sees.

  Here we begin to tread on dangerous ground. For in learning about the cameraman it is quite possible to start shutting out his associates in discussing a given film. Indeed, the cameraman can become an auteur in our minds, and we can easily make the same mistake with him that many made with the director.

  An argument for the cameraman-as-auteur can find strong support, even in the interviews contained in this book. One can read Arthur Miller’s comments about working with Henry King, or Lucien Ballard on Henry Hathaway, and conclude that it is really the cameraman who is exercising a personal style in filmmaking, not the director.

  But what about Josef von Sternberg, who actually shot some of his own films in collaboration with a cameraman? Or John Ford, who never looked through a viewfinder (according to Miller), but was able to leave his personal mark on every one of his films?

  No, it is too easy to make blanket statements about who was more important, and chastise one man because another was responsible for a certain scene or effect in a given film. The answer is clear: filmmaking has always been, and always will be, a collaboration . . . a merging of talents, with each man doing his job to the best of his ability. And in certain cases, one of the team will outshine the others, or one will have to compromise in order to satisfy a colleague.

  With this thought in mind, we can now examine the work of great cameramen, focusing on their particular contributions and putting aside, for the time being, the work of their collaborators. But please remember that the others are there and that without them the cameraman might have nothing to photograph.

  When the motion picture camera invention was perfected, in the 1890s, it required one man to operate it, to point the lens at whatever he wanted to shoot, and to turn the crank that advanced the film, frame by frame, and expose the strip of celluloid. More likely than not, this same man then took the roll of film into a darkroom and developed it. It is highly probable that the men who first performed this feat were the same men who perfected the camera itself. Thus, they were the first cameramen.

  Having invented this machine, however, men like Thomas Edison were eager to move on to other fields, and did not spend their time shooting additional film. That chore was passed on to others, but even for these operators, film was still an invention, a gadget with which to experiment. Early films were primarily devoted to recording events (a train passing by, a man and woman kissing, a gentleman sneezing) and experimenting with trick devices.

  Not until the turn of the century did stories first appear on film. One of the major figures in this transition in America was Edwin S. Porter, a young man who had held a variety of odd jobs, but whose affinity for machines and electrical equipment led him to the Edison Company. He worked closely with the new projection equipment, and after installing projectors and traveling with a tent show that featured movies as its highlight, he began to photograph his own films. At first he worked free-lance, selling much of his product to the Edison Company, which needed films to supply its various kinetoscope parlors and theaters. In 1899, Porter became a full-time employee of Edison’s, turning out an impressive amount of film every week for public consumption.

  One of the major influences on Porter was the work of a Frenchman named Georges Méliès. Méliès, a magician and theatrical entrepreneur, was one of the first to be attracted to film’s possibilities and around the turn of the century he started making what remain today some of the most imaginative films of all time. His unique understanding of the “tricks” film could accomplish, combined with his imagination and sense of humor, produced a long series of dazzling motion pictures, where the unreal became real before your very eyes.

  Porter acknowledged his admiration for Méliès, and for several years concentrated his energies on making his own special-effects films, with varying degrees of success. The aphorism about “nothing new under the sun” is especially valid in the world of film, when one sees how many devices thought to be revolutionary in recent years were actually first implemented in the first decade of the century. Color, sound, 3D, double exposure, split screen, animation . . . all of them were attempted by Porter, Méliès, and other motion picture pioneers.

  Porter is also credited with being the first man to use films to tell a story, and this is the turning point in our chronicle. In such films as THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, Porter used the motion picture not as a recorder of events but as a communicator, dramatizing a story and telling it in cinematic rather than theatrical terms. A gradual but vitally necessary process was that which separated the motion picture from the theatrical method of presenting a story as on a stage, with the action somehow removed from the audience. Porter helped to involve the movie audience by frequent changes of scene, and what is reputedly the first instance of parallel action in a film; that is to say, showing two successive events which, in the story, are happening at the same time. As elementary as this sounds today, it was an important step at the time.

  But for all Porter did—and his accomplishments cannot be denied—he never evolved into an artist. The mechanics of filmmaking always meant more to him than anything else. Arthur Miller recalls being told by an associate of Porter’s, Hugh Ford, that “if Ed Porter could have decided on one job that he wanted to do, whatever it was, be it writer, director, producer, cameraman, he’d have been the best in that particular job.”

  Miller continues, “His fault was that he couldn’t light in one job. The first picture I ever photographed alone was for him. He had built—see, he took part in building the sets, too—four-inch-high boards off the side of the set, and he had some tar paper, which he had coated with tar, and some water in there. The edge of it ran off the edge of the set. It was a sort of a back yard of a villa. Lights had come in then; we began to use spots on special occasion made by the Kliegl people. I had learned enough to know that to get a reflection in the water I’d have to look at the sun and get it low enough, go on the other side, and I’d get the reflection. Same theory here. So I got a spotlight, put it on an angle to the camera near this pond that he had built, and I got the reflection in this water. He knew I knew my business, as good as it was in those days, which wasn’t very good, but he’d come up and ask me, ‘Have you got the pressure plate closed? Are you sure you’ve got this. . . ?’ He didn’t trust anybody; he had to oversee the whole thing. I was up on a parallel, maybe three feet high, shooting this thing, and he was off perhaps two feet from the angle of the camera. He kept glancing over and he didn’t see any reflection in the water. Naturally, from where he was standing he wouldn’t; he had to get in line with the camera. So when the scene was over, he said, ‘Did you get the reflection in the water?’ He had a guy off on the side with a stick, making ripples in the water. I said yes. He said, ‘Well, I didn’t see it.’ I said, ‘But you have to see it right from the camera.’ He said, ‘Well, you go over there and wiggle the stick, let me look through the camera.’ So I wiggled the stick, he looked through the camera, and he saw that from this angle you’d see it. Well, we took the scene again, and he went over, took the stick, and did the wiggling. The actors just went on performing the way they pleased, with no direction. They just did it. He didn’t realize that motion pictures had developed into specialties: directors were developing who did nothing but direct; cameramen did nothing but photograph; some laboratory men had come into the business who did nothing but develop fi
lm. Everybody was beginning to specialize. But he couldn’t take it—he had to be all over the place.”

  Around the same time, another ambitious young man did decide to specialize. His name was G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, a former electrician who started shooting film in the 1890s; among his early triumphs were footage of William McKinley receiving the Presidential nomination in Canton, Ohio, in 1896, and the Jeffries–Sharkey championship bout in 1899. For the latter occasion, Bitzer installed four hundred arc lamps above the boxing ring! As general know-how man at the Biograph company, Bitzer did a little bit of everything, but his prime interest was in the camera.

  When a young actor named D. W. Griffith turned to directing and secured a position at Biograph in 1908, the first one to assist him was Bitzer. Out of this first collaboration grew one of the legendary twosomes in motion picture history. Bitzer remained Griffith’s cameraman for the next sixteen years; so close was their relationship and so much was their product a result of genuine teamwork that even today one rarely discusses one man without mentioning the other. Indeed, it is difficult to judge, if one is inclined to do so, exactly who was responsible for what. It is really a moot question. When Griffith came to Biograph, he was an actor, and not an especially good one at that. Bitzer, on the other hand, was already a veteran of the movie world. Yet both men learned and grew artistically during their association. Bitzer later recalled, “All through the following sixteen years that I was at his side he was not above taking advice, yes, even asking for suggestions or ideas. He always said to me, ‘Four eyes are better than two.’ ”

  Bitzer and Griffith are credited with such innovations as the close-up, soft focus photography, the iris, the fade-out, and back-lighting. It is possible that they, or Bitzer himself, did devise some of these filmmaking tools, but in dealing with an era when every day brought innovations, the discovery is of secondary importance. What matters is how Bitzer and Griffith used these tools in their impressive short films as well as such classic features as THE BIRTH OF A NATION, INTOLERANCE, and BROKEN BLOSSOMS. They were never employed as gimmicks but as artistic aids in telling a story.