Cinematography

CINEMATOGRAPHY

BEHIND THE SILVER SCREEN

BEHIND THE SILVER SCREEN

When we take a larger view of a film’s life from development through exhibition, we find a variety of artists, technicians, and craftspeople in front of and behind the camera. Writers write. Actors, who are costumed and made-up, speak the words and perform the actions described in the script. Art directors and set designers develop the look of the film. The cinematographer decides upon a lighting scheme. Dialogue, sound effects, and music are recorded, mixed, and edited by sound engineers. The images, final sound mix, and special visual effects are assembled by editors to form a final cut. Moviemaking is the product of the efforts of these men and women, yet few film histories focus much on their labor.

Behind the Silver Screen calls attention to the work of filmmaking. When complete, the series will comprise ten volumes, one each on ten significant tasks in front of or behind the camera, on the set or in the postproduction studio. The goal is to examine closely the various collaborative aspects of film production, one at a time and one per volume, and then to offer a chronology that allows the editors and contributors to explore the changes in each of these endeavors during six eras in film history: the silent screen (1895–1927), classical Hollywood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the Auteur Renaissance (1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the Modern Entertainment

Marketplace (2000–present). Behind the Silver Screen promises a look at who does what in the making of a movie; it promises a history of filmmaking, not just a history of films.

Jon Lewis, Series Editor

1. ACTING (Claudia Springer, ed.)

2. ANIMATION (Scott Curtis, ed.)

3. CINEMATOGRAPHY (Patrick Keating, ed.)

4. COSTUME, MAKEUP, AND HAIR (Adrienne McLean, ed.)

5. DIRECTING (Virginia Wright Wexman, ed.)

6. EDITING AND SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS (Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, eds.)

7. PRODUCING (Jon Lewis, ed.)

8. SCREENWRITING (Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter, eds.)

9. ART DIRECTION AND PRODUCTION DESIGN (Lucy Fischer, ed.)

10. SOUND: DIALOGUE, MUSIC, AND EFFECTS (Kathryn Kalinak, ed.)

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Edited by Patrick Keating

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Dedicated to two inspiring teachers, David Bordwell and Lea Jacobs

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cinematography / edited by Patrick Keating.

pages cm. — (Behind the silver screen ; 3)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-6350-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6349-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6351-0 (e-book : alk. paper)

1. Cinematography—History. 2. Digital cinematography—History. I. Keating, Patrick, 1970–

TR848.C53 2014

778.5'3'09—dc23

2013037742

This collection copyright © 2014 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright © 2014 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Patrick Keating

1. THE SILENT SCREEN, 1894–1927

Patrick Keating

2. CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD, 1928–1946

Chris Cagle

3. POSTWAR HOLLYWOOD, 1947–1967

Lisa Dombrowski

4. THE AUTEUR RENAISSANCE, 1968–1980

Bradley Schauer

5. THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, 1981–1999

Paul Ramaeker

6. THE MODERN ENTERTAINMENT MARKETPLACE, 2000–Present

Christopher Lucas

Academy Awards for Cinematography

Notes

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my first and foremost thanks to Rutgers University Press, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and series editor Jon Lewis for inviting me to edit this volume. Jon has been a patient and encouraging editor, and it has been my privilege to work with him. I also extend my deep appreciation to Leslie Mitchner and the team at Rutgers University Press for all that they did, with their kind and capable hands, to shepherd the Behind the Silver Screen series.

I have enormous admiration and gratitude for the authors collected here—all of whom I am honored to consider friends both on and off the page. Thank you for your deep thinking and timely revisions, and for giving me cause to revisit so many wonderful movies.

Closer to home, I wish to acknowledge the support I received for this project from my institution, Trinity University; grants from Academic Affairs and the Department of Communication enabled the inclusion of color illustrations in this volume. Research funds from Trinity University enabled me to travel to Los Angeles and review documents in the Margaret Herrick Library.

I’ve been fortunate to have many excellent teachers in my life, including David Bordwell, Lea Jacobs, Judy Irola, and Woody Omens, all of whom have taught me much about cinematography. My warmest thanks go to my wife, Lisa—for reading chapters and keeping me fueled with positivity. I’m so lucky that we get to spend our lives sitting shoulder-to-shoulder watching movies together.

ABBREVIATIONS

The main text uses the following abbreviations:

ASC   American Society of Cinematographers

d.p.   Director of Photography, another term for cinematographer

The endnotes use the following abbreviations:

AC   American Cinematographer, the ASC’s trade journal, still in print

MPW   The Moving Picture World, a trade journal from the silent period

CINEMATOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Patrick Keating

The craft of cinematography brings together a range of distinct but complementary tasks, such as the planning of the lighting, the composition of the film frame, the orchestration of the camera movement, and the manipulation of the negative in the laboratory. Through these tasks, the cinematographer, in close collaboration with the director and other crew members, adds structure and nuance to a film’s visual style. For decades, cinematographers have insisted on the artistic nature of their craft. Back in 1931, James Wong Howe wrote, With the early films, lighting merely meant getting enough light upon the actors to permit photography; today it means laying a visual, emotional foundation upon which the director and his players must build.¹ Decades later, Vittorio Storaro proposed an even bolder definition: Photography means light-writing, cinematography means writing with light in movement. Cinematographers are authors of photography, not directors of photography. We are not merely using technology to tell someone else’s thought, because we are also using our own emotion, our culture, and our inner being.² For both cinematographers, cinematography is an expressive art, whether the goal is to express the shifting moods of the story, as in Howe, or to express a more personal set of concerns, as in Storaro. This admittedly romantic definition of cinematography must be contextualized, qualified by our awareness that this is after all an industrial craft, made within a system based on hierarchy, mass-production, and the commercial imperative. Keeping both sides of cinematography in mind, this book will tell the story of cinematography in American cinema, explaining how this complex art and craft changed across the decades—a process that began with minimal crews hand-cranking the camera under the midday sun and continues into the present day with a wide array of technical advances and an industry-wide conversion to digital imagery.

As we turn our attention to the men and women responsible for these images, we encounter several historiographic challenges. One of the issues facing any historian of cinematography is the fact that cinematographers themselves have been telling the history of their craft for decades. This is no doubt true of most Hollywood crafts, from editing to costume design, but the point seems especially salient for cinematography. The group’s honorary organization, the American Society of Cinematographers, has been publishing a magazine, American Cinematographer, since 1920, using the magazine and other publications to shape a public narrative of the craft’s rise, its transformation over time, and its persistence in the face of technological and institutional change. Starting in the 1970s, an assortment of published interviews, featuring both veterans from the studio period and more contemporary figures, provided an additional forum for the members of the craft to tell their own history.

This preexisting self-curated history provides enormous benefits to the scholarly historian seeking to understand the field, and yet those benefits also bring risks. On the one hand, the trade journals and the interviews provide an enormous wealth of material for the historian to consider, regarding specific technologies, collaborations with directors, artful solutions to particular storytelling problems, and more philosophical accounts of guiding aesthetic ideals. All six of the essays in this book rely extensively on these invaluable sources. On the other hand, the historian must remember that the ASC is hardly an unbiased source; its excellent magazine occasionally passes over important developments, and it usually frames existing debates in ways favorable to its mission. As is usual in any form of history, all primary evidence must be interpreted in order to be understood.

To put this another way, the historian of cinematography must go beyond simply summarizing the pages of the trade journals and offer some broader explanatory framework to help us understand how the field of cinematography developed and changed, both onscreen and off. Fortunately, there exist several exemplary works of film scholarship to help guide this process, even if cinematography has not received as much attention as other fields, most notably directing. By reviewing a few of these previous works, we can get a better sense of the larger ongoing questions that have guided research into the history of cinematography: in particular, the question of technology, the question of authorship, and the question of classicism.

The Question of Technology

One challenge facing the historian of cinematography is the problem of technology. To what extent does technology drive stylistic change? It seems plausible to suppose that many stylistic shifts can be explained most efficiently by pointing to proximate changes in technology. The arc light helps explain the presence of hard shadows in films from the 1920s. To understand the rise of deep-focus cinematography in the 1940s, we might point to faster film stocks. The availability of the Steadicam provides a ready explanation for certain elaborate camera movements in the 1980s. Indeed, it is difficult to see how one might explain these stylistic developments, or related trends, without pointing to technology at some point in the account.

On the other hand, there are good reasons to be wary of technological determinism. For one thing, it should be clear that the causal relationship between technology and style can go both ways. Just as a new technology might spark cinematographers to explore a new style, the stylistic preoccupations of cinematographers might push the industry to invest in certain technological research likely to have market potential. More importantly, we must balance the accounting of technological change with the awareness that technology is never the only determining factor in stylistic history, since the history of technology must itself be located within a broader institutional and social context. Any technology can be charged with multiple, sometimes contradictory, cultural meanings.

Cinematographers themselves have often proposed a toolkit model of technological change. In an oft-quoted 1942 response to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Charles Clarke criticized Kane’s cinematographer Gregg Toland for using deep-focus too often, instead proposing that deep-focus should be seen as something which rounds out our assortment of artistic tools, so that we have a better way of meeting the dramatic requirements of any story-situation.³ This attitude toward technological transformation—embracing a new technique as progress only so long as it extends the number of tools a cinematographer can use to match the style to the story—would recur again and again over the years, from CinemaScope to the digital intermediate. However, when cinematographers are forced to accept a new technology as a requirement and not one option among many, they often push back.

One of the most indispensable works in the study of cinematography is Barry Salt’s Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. As the title suggests, Salt puts the relationship between technology and style at the center of his concerns. Drawing on a careful examination of trade journals like American Cinematographer and the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Salt details all the relevant changes in technology from the 1890s to the present, from camera designs to laboratory practices, while offering an equally rigorous account of statistically measurable changes in film style. Though Salt’s volume sometimes is criticized as a work of technological determinism, Salt explicitly denies that technology drives stylistic change; instead, he emphasizes the determining power of filmmakers’ intentions, praising the filmmakers who innovate the most influential styles.⁴

By contrast, in Production Culture, John T. Caldwell focuses less on the look of the films than on the culture of the workers who make them—workers who have developed complex ways of theorizing their own practice, including their use of technology. Film technologies take on significant connotations within this culture, supported by the discourse of the practitioners who use them. For instance, cranes, high-powered lamps, and Panavision lenses might connote big-screen production value, and the concomitant sense that crew members are there to allow these expensive machines to do their work, while a handheld low-resolution DV camera shooting in available light might carry very different connotations: the sense that the crew is using its machines to keep up with an unfolding documentary-like reality.⁵ This is not just a matter of what a film style might mean onscreen, but also a matter of how the technologies sustain cultural ideas about value, artistry, and the agency of film workers. Rejecting the instrumental view that technologies like cameras and lamps are simply tools that filmmakers use to make pictures, he insists that Hollywood’s own production culture works to theorize those technologies, giving them meanings that in turn shape production practices.

The Question of Authorship

All three of these examples—Clarke, Salt, and Caldwell—raise questions of authorship, another longstanding issue in the historiography of cinematography. Though some cinematographers might bristle at the idea that the director is the sole auteur of the film, most cinematographers are comfortable describing their job as assisting the director in the realization of his or her vision. In the pages of American Cinematographer, one can find a range of ideas about authorship. For instance, one issue in 1991 offered some brief profiles of cinematographers who had recently made the switch to directing. Cinematographer-turned-director Ernest Dickerson said, I’d like to tell my stories but I’d like to help other directors tell their stories as well, thereby granting the director the status as primary author.⁶ But a year later, the same magazine profiled Dickerson again after he had resumed his role as cinematographer one more time, on Spike Lee’s epic Malcolm X (1992). Here, the article emphasizes collaboration, crediting the film’s complex three-part color scheme (shifting from vivid colors to monochrome to muted realism) to the work of Dickerson and production designer Wynn Thomas, guided by Lee’s influence as both director and co-screenwriter.⁷ Such an emphasis on collaboration positions the cinematographer as one of several creative interpreters of the story.

Though few film historians endorse the auteur theory in its pure form, it is still the case that many works of film scholarship are strongly oriented toward the director. One of the purposes of a volume such as this is to help correct this imbalance by calling attention to the contributions of other crafts. And yet such a revisionist approach might posit a range of responses along a continuum. One option here would be to elevate certain cinematographers to the role of auteur, perhaps by pointing to the distinctive and influential styles of major figures like Toland or Storaro. Another approach would be to question the idea of the auteur on a more fundamental level. In an early (1973) critique of the auteur theory, Graham Petrie wrote, It is no longer going to be enough to assume that the director’s contribution is automatically of major significance; equally, it will be necessary to avoid the dangers of replacing one culture hero by another and launching into ‘The Cameraman as Superstar’ and solemn studies of the personal vision of Sol Polito or James Wong Howe.⁸ Instead, Petrie proposes other categories (such as scene-stealers and harmonizers) that might include cinematographers with recognizable styles. By the 1980s, the influence of the auteur theory already had waned considerably in academic film studies, and many scholars of the industry adopted as a working assumption the idea that film authorship was inevitably collaborative, especially in a mass-production system like Hollywood. Such scholars often supported this hypothesis with archival research into how specific films got made. Here, Robert Carringer’s in-depth study of the making of Citizen Kane provides an exemplary model, using archival evidence to explain how director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland, associate art director Perry Ferguson, optical printer Linwood Dunn, and many others worked together to craft the film’s extraordinary images.⁹

Carringer’s approach is based on the close study of an individual film. At the other end of the scale, a scholar might examine a large cluster of films. For instance, a fascinating recent study by a team of Cornell psychologists has found that Hollywood cinematography has grown recognizably darker from 1935 to the present.¹⁰ The pattern appeared in a sample of 160 films, across a range of decades, with a measurable linearity. This argument does attribute some agency to cinematographers: the authors note that the director, cinematographer, and editor have the most power to shape a film’s visual style, and that this relatively small community of filmmakers has gradually changed their craft, constantly refining their methods of holding the audience’s attention. Yet the pattern itself has emerged with a consistency that no individual filmmaker intended, since no filmmaker was even aware of the long-term subtle progression at this level of detail, even if some may have had a conscious personal preference for darker images. As this example suggests, one need not study particular authors to develop fine-grained observations about stylistic change.

The Question of the Classical Style

The most influential analysis of Hollywood cinema as a group style is The Classical Hollywood Cinema, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. While many of the 100-plus films selected for this study share visible commonalities, it should be noted right away that the authors do not claim that all Hollywood films look the same. Quite the contrary, Thompson’s careful account of the techniques of the soft style in the 1920s and Bordwell’s discussion of deep-focus cinematography in the 1940s both detail important shifts in the visual texture of Hollywood films. It is by moving up a level of abstraction that one can find the factors constituting a group style. Hollywood filmmakers, they argue, were committed to an ideal of clear narration, using the tools of film style to make the story (in particular, the goal-driven actions of the characters) comprehensible to large audiences. To that end, Hollywood cinematographers often worked hard to make their techniques as unobtrusive as possible. This ideal remained a guiding principle from the early years of the feature film to the end of the studio system and beyond.¹¹ When considering how to adopt a new technology, from the soft-focus lens to CinemaScope, the cinematographer’s first question was, How can I use this device to tell the story?

Trade journals and interviews provide ample evidence that many filmmakers continue to espouse classical principles. The respected cinematographer Roger Deakins once said, It’s about the script and the story. The best cinematography, I’m afraid, is the photography which doesn’t get any mention.¹² And yet it seems clear that the films of today differ greatly from the films of seventy years ago. As one way of addressing this intermingling of continuity and change, Bordwell has proposed that contemporary Hollywood cinema follows principles of intensified continuity, using faster editing rates and increased camera movement to amplify a film’s visceral impact, without abandoning the commitment to broadly comprehensible storytelling. In this way, the classical principles remain relevant, even if Hollywood has modified its aesthetic in significant ways.¹³

However, many scholars would argue that this proposal does not go far enough, failing to account for the increasing role of spectacle in a Hollywood cinema increasingly dominated by blockbusters for global audiences, sequels, and action spectaculars that seem stitched together for the primary purpose of launching a theme park ride. For instance, Scott Bukatman has argued that the apparent persistence of classical technique only serves to mask the otherwise obvious decline of narrative in the New Hollywood: While Hollywood cinema continued to revel in the sensational, sensual realm of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic effects, the devaluation of narrative was hidden within a desperate overvaluation of overly explicit storytelling; a denial of its own undeniable supersession.¹⁴ Others make the related argument that style itself has become spectacle, with an appeal that goes well beyond storytelling.¹⁵

Indeed, one might push this skepticism even farther, wondering just how classical films were, even in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. My own previous work has offered some proposals along this line. While reaffirming the value of the classical model, I also consider how cinematographers defined storytelling very broadly, placing special emphasis on the use of expressive lighting to suit the mood of the story, and I argue that even this broader conception of classical storytelling cannot fully account for the value that the system placed on other functions, most notably glamour lighting, which studios insisted cinematographers practice independent of narrative motivation.¹⁶ Other scholars point to particular genres or cycles that appear to break from the clarity of Hollywood norms. In a landmark essay on film noir, originally published in 1974, Janey Place and Lowell Peterson showed how noir cinematography systematically departed from Hollywood conventions, favoring off-balance frames, hard-to-read compositions, and unglamorous lighting schemes.¹⁷ These stylistic traits remain significant, given how influential the neo-noir style has been on Hollywood lighting since at least the 1980s. Most generally, this scholarly debate forces us to consider carefully the relationship between cinematography and storytelling. How can visual style serve the story, and how might cinematography push beyond the limits of classical norms?

Chapter Preview

Of course, this brief survey cannot do justice to the wide range of ideas developed in cinematography scholarship in the field of film and media studies, but it has served to highlight some of the key issues that this book’s six chapters discuss. All six contributors wrestle with these questions—technology, authorship, and the persistence or decline of classical norms—though they do not always come to the same conclusions.

My own chapter examines cinematography in the silent era, from the 1890s to the late 1920s. Following Tom Gunning, I draw a distinction between the cinema of attractions, which directly appeals to the spectator’s attention through a series of exciting moments of spectacle, and the subsequent cinema of narrative integration, which subordinates those sensory appeals to the logic of an unfolding story.¹⁸ Many important cinematographic devices, from the close-up to the pan, appeared in former period, which thrived until around 1907. The cinema of attractions puts the cinema itself on display, including the devices of cinematography, offering special effects, electric lighting, and the spectacle of movement as attractions to be enjoyed for their own sake. Significantly, the attraction does not go away during the cinema of narrative integration; its energy persists in many forms, from the glamorous close-ups of classical Hollywood stars to the spectacular digital effects of today. The rest of my chapter argues that narrative integration was one of three interlocking processes that shaped Hollywood cinematography in the silent period and beyond, the other two being industrialization and aestheticization. Just as Hollywood grew into an evermore efficient mass-production system, Hollywood cinematographers developed a public identity as artists, using their pictorial skills to shape the moods of the stories being told. These three processes—narrative integration, industrialization, and aestheticization—could complement one another, but they could also produce tensions, tensions that would shape the theory and practice of Hollywood cinematography for years to come.

In chapter 2, Chris Cagle examines the studio period, from the transition to sound to 1946. While acknowledging that this was a period of stability overall, he points to several layers of innovation and difference operating within the steady studio context. Moving from the general to the specific, those layers can be found at the industry-wide level, at the level of the studio, and at the level of the individual cinematographer. At the industry level, photography grew sharper, focus deeper, and the lighting darker over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. Though we might point to certain films as the culminations of these changes, and to other films as notable exceptions to the trends, both arguments must rest on a prior recognition that the industry as a whole was exploring new stylistic ideas. Within this industry-wide context, we can locate the specific house styles of the studios. After interrogating and clarifying the notion of studio style as a theoretical concept, Cagle proceeds to examine three case studies: the polished style of MGM in the 1930s, the more realistic approach to glamour of Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, and the prestige realist style of Twentieth Century–Fox throughout the 1940s. A final level of specificity considers the style of the individual cinematographer. Though almost all cinematographers were skilled professionals in full command of industry and studio norms, a handful of cinematographers brought distinctive visual sensibilities to their projects. As examples, Cagle considers the realism of James Wong Howe, the romanticism of George Barnes, the modernism of Rudolph Maté, and the artful