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"Best Cinematography"
is an Oscar that probably means very little to the average citizen
who watches the annual Academy Award broadcast to find out who
got Best Actor and Best Film. It means a lot more to industry
insiders who know the value of the work, and is a winning buzz-subject
for outsiders who want to sound knowledgeable.
But most of us could name only
a handful of greats off the top of our head: Toland, Nykvist,
Willis, Wexler. Visions of Light, a co-production of
the American Film Institute and NHK, the Japan Broadcasting
Corporation, attempts to heighten the general viewer’s understanding
of cinematographers and their work. It offers more light than
substance, perhaps, but is a lovely 95 minutes nonetheless.
The box advertises "more
than 125 movies," but if such were really the case, and
they were apportioned an equal amount of time, you’d get no
more than 45 seconds of each film in 95 minutes, without
any onscreen appearances by the commentators. Instead, I counted
about 83 films actually identified and discussed—from Birth
of a Nation and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Goodfellas
and Blue Velvet—as well as interview footage of roughly
two dozen cinematographers (from Nestor Almendros and Vilmos
Zsigmond to Willis and Ernest Dickerson, Spike Lee’s cameraman)
and the odd editor or two. The extra 40 movies consist of passing
clips of early silents, Garbo, Dietrich, E.T., Blade
Runner, 2001, etc., which flash by but are not really
discussed.
The film’s precis could be divided
into roughly six parts: the silent era and German Expressionism;
black and white, sound, and the studio system; the language
of noir; color, wide screen, and the New Wave; the New York
style; and "me and my movie." In other words, the
historic discussion is reasonably coherent, but by the time
Visions of Light gets to the 1960s and beyond, the interviewees
are reduced to talking about how they did a particularly spectacular
shot in one of their own films (and some of them are pretty
spectacular!).
A minor quibble is that the film
never explains precisely what a cinematographer does.
Even those of us who have seen a lot of movies couldn’t say,
exactly; it has something to do with the camera and something
to do with lighting. Several interviewees in the movie refer
to "DPs," but is Director of Photography interchangeable
with Cinematographer or not?
We get to see a lot of evidence
of what cinematographers have done, but until late in the film
very little discussion of how, and even less of why. (Alan Daviau
jauntily admits that cinematographers, acting on instinct, sometimes
don’t know why they’re doing something until they see the final
film all put together.) The makers of Visions of Light
could have spared two minutes, tops, to let us know just what
a cinematographer does and does not do, or might do, given the
producer and director.
It’s a minor irritant when a
comment in voiceover is unidentified. What’s worse is to see
something startling and not be told where it’s from. Right after
the discussion of the 1930s "studio look"—the gloss
of Paramount, the harder edges of Warner Brothers, the glamour
associated with MGM—there’s a dynamite sequence of a man seated
next to a flapper and singing "in the shadows when I come
and sing…" and then they kiss. A white rose in her hand
gets tossed toward the camera, splashes and ripples, distorting
the couple in mid-embrace, and you realize that all along, you’ve
been watching them in an amazingly sharp reflection, and the
camera must have been shooting upside down to make them look
right side up. What’s that from?!
Another mistake was that whoever
packaged the video threw the same lovely music that is used
to open and close Visions of Light into a pre-film ad
for the AFI. (It’s Saint-Saens’ ethereal "The Aquarium"
from The Carnival of the Animals, probably most familiar to
moviegoers after Terence Malick used it in the closing scenes
of Days of Heaven.) Thus, we hear it during the ad, and
it comes around again, immediately, in the film that follows,
and once again at its close. This kind of overexposure damages
the music’s effectiveness.
But the film does have the positive
effect of driving us back to the great films, of making us want
to see them again (or catch the ones we’ve missed): Toland’s
deep shots in Citizen Kane; the luminous Dietrich (William
H. Daniels always gave her 110 to 115 foot-candles of light
so she would pop out of the otherwise 100-foot-candle-lit set,
Charles B. Lang tells us); Conrad Hall’s amazing In Cold
Blood shot of the light "crying" down Robert Blake’s
face through a rainy window as he speaks unemotionally about
his father the night before his execution; the underlit and
underexposed Godfathers of "The Prince of Darkness,"
Gordon Willis; Almendros’s use of natural light during "the
magic hour" (after sundown) in Days of Heaven; the
astounding palettes of Victor Storaro (his discussions of light
and color choices in Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor,
respectively, are marvelous); and Michael Ballhaus’s ingenious,
simultaneously tracking-back and zooming-in shot of De Niro
and Liotta in a café booth in Goodfellas, when
Liotta realizes De Niro is sending him to his death. The two
look utterly stationary as the background through the window
behind them shifts wildly, as a visual metaphor for the Liotta
character’s realization that his world has changed utterly.
No surprise that the credits
thank Lucas and Spielberg, whose films get prominent play in
the film, but Akira Kurosawa turns up as well. Why? There’s
no sign of any of his movies, or any Asian-made pictures (except
Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, of course, which doesn’t
count). I figure he must have helped his old buddies (they produced
his Kagemusha, and everybody knows how much Star Wars
owes to Kurosawa’s 1957 mock epic, The Hidden Fortress)
in negotiations with NHK.
David
Loftus
[email protected]
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David Loftus, Writer
- AllWatchers.com
Credits
Terry Lawler, Yoshiki Nishimura—Executive
Producers
Todd McCarthy—Writer/Interviewer/Director
Stuart Samuels—Producer/Director
Arnold Glassman—Editor/Director/Co-Producer
Nancy Schreiber—Director of Photography
1992, 95 minutes
Awards
1993 Best Documentary, Boston
Society of Film Critics
1994 Best Documentary, National Society of Film Critics (USA)
1993 Best Documentary, New York Film Critics Circle
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