Viewing List

[RossWilson]

How about creating a recommended viewing list of personal recommendations of cinematographers films, stating with the cinematographers name, then the film, then a short intriguing personal why to watch sentence, e.g.:

 

Lucien Ballard - The Killing - Looks like it was filmed on steal not celluloid

 

Don't just make a huge list of your personal favourites, just a few real good recommendations from various genres as and when you feel like it.

[Max Jacoby]

Shouldn't this read:

 

Lucien Ballard - The Killing - Looks like it was filmed by Stanley Kubrick

 

:-)

 

Max Jacoby

[David Mullen ASC]

Spielberg once said that he and Allen Daviau watched "Alien" before they did "E.T." because it was a textbook on lighting textures. I agree with that. The same thing could be said about "Blade Runner" and most Ridley Scott films in general ("Duellists", "1492", etc.)

 

Science Fiction

"Alien" (Derek Van Lint)

"Blade Runner" (Jordan Cronenweth)

"2001" (Geoffrey Unsworth) / cold, crisp, elegent 65mm

 

Fantasy

"Excalibur" (Alex Thomson) / great use of diffusion

"Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings" (Andrew Lesnie) / owes a lot to "Excalibur"

"Midsummer Night's Dream" (Hal Mohr) / an early example of a diffused "fairy tale " look

 

Western

"Heaven's Gate" (Vilmos Zsigmond) / epic scope shots but desaturated period look

"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (Vilmos Zsigmond) / not as epic but softer, gritty look

"My Darling Clementine" (Joe MacDonald) / great John Ford compositions, hot & dusty look

"Once Upon A Time in the West" (Tonino Delli Colli) / great Sergio Leone compositions

 

Comedy

"Dr. Strangelove" (Gil Taylor) / the way black comedies should be shot.... in b&w

"Local Hero" (Chris Menges) / poetic naturalism

"Annie Hall" (Gordon Willis) / precision in framing and natural lighting

"Hard Day's Night" (Gil Taylor) / light on its feet

 

Period

"Black Narcissus" (Jack Cardiff) / great 3-strip Technicolor photography

"Moulin Rouge" (Ozzie Morris) / also 3-strip, great recreation of painter's style

"Snow Falling on Cedars" (Robert Richardson) / beautiful wintery desaturated look in scope

"The Fugitive" (Gabriel Figueroa) / amazing John Ford compositions and moody "religious" lighting

"Reds", "Agatha", "1900" (Vittorio Storaro) / like Ridely Scott's films, every texture of light used

"Road to Perdition (Conrad Hall) / again, lighting textures are amazing, but in surprising ways / plus semi-Noir look / desaturated wintery look

"Last Emperor" (Vittorio Storaro) / best of his symbolic lighting schemes

"The Conformist" (Vittorio Storaro) / perfect marriage of story, style

"Red Beard" (Asakazu Nakai & Takeo Saito) / great Kurosawa b&w widescreen compositions

"Lawrence of Arabia" (Freddie Young) / great use of 65mm for landscapes

"Barry Lyndon" (John Alcott) / creation of paintings of period / filming by real candlelight

"Night of the Hunter" (Stanley Cortez) / like a b&w etching / German Expressionism meets Grant Wood

 

Drama

"The Godfather", "Klute", "All the President's Men" (Gordon Willis) / moody but not overly stylized / powerful yet subtle framing that draws you in

"In Cold Blood" (Conrad Hall) & "Hud" (James Wong Howe) / great b&w widescreen dramas / stark evocation of location used

"High & Low" (Azakazu Nakai) / more great b&w widescreen compositions

"Citizen Kane" (Greg Toland) / what can one say in one sentence?

 

Action

"Seven Samurai" (Asakazu Nakai) / great 1.37 Academy composition

"Yojimbo" (Kazuo Miyagawa) / same as above except in widescreen

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" (Douglas Slocombe) / movement & framing in widescreen / semi old fashioned hard lighting style meets National Geographic

"Road Warrior" (Dean Semler) / perfect choice of scope for action

"Die Hard" (Jan DeBont) / like anamorphic lens flares? This is your movie...

 

Horror

"The Shining" (John Alcott) / cold Kubrick framing works great here

"The Innocents" (Freddie Francis) / great use of b&w widescreen / moody lighting / truly disturbing shots of ghosts but framed at a distance

 

Film Noir

"Out of the Past" (Nick Musuraca) / b&w style to burn

"Leave Her to Heaven" (Leon Shamroy) / unusual use sunny, color-gelled 3-strip Technicolor photography & lighting for a dark story

"Touch of Evil" (Russell Metty) / Welles wide-angle compositions, seedy border town look and smell

[Bill DiPietra]

Spielberg once said that he and Allen Daviau watched "Alien" before they did "E.T." because it was a textbook on lighting textures. I agree with that. The same thing could be said about "Blade Runner" and most Ridley Scott films in general ("Duellists", "1492", etc.)

An NYU cinematography instructor obviously felt the same way. He showed "Alien" with the sound off and we saw the lighting evolution in that film.

 

Ridley is one of the few filmmakers who has been very consistent throughout his career.

[Paul Marschall]

I saw Alien when it was re-released over Holloween and LOVED it. I was blown away by the photography and even more stunned when I didn't recognize the DP. Looking him up on the IMDB shows he has very few credits. What gives? Who is this guy and how did he disappear?

 

Paul

 

ps- not sure if I like all these clickable smiles. I only see two grumpy ones-- Phil doesn't have much to choose from.

[Mitch Gross]

A cinematographer can work for years on high end commercials and never be listed in a visible credit anywhere. This can be a very successful individual in the industry who works all the time and is paid vast sums, yet sinse he/she does no feature film or episodic television work remains unknown to the public at large.

[Paul Marschall]

I wish AC and ICG would cover more of those DPs and fewer of the "celebrity" DP's that dominate their articles. I guess the star sytem doesn't work for just actors.

 

Paul

[Bill Totolo]

Nice to see "Out of the Past" mentioned in your Noir section, David. I just saw a screening a few weeks ago at the Skirball Center, presented by Lawrence Kasdan.

 

Some of my favorite lines, I need to paraphrase a bit:

"Would you get outta here, I gotta sleep here"

"...you're like a leaf that gets blown down the street from gutter to gutter."

"Oh yeah, Kathie's back in the fold"

 

I would have like to see you mention the old nior classic, "Mildred Pierce".

 

BTW, how about some of those psuedo Noir films of the 80's? About time for another revival.

[David Mullen ASC]

I was just listing the first things that came to my head -- but love the cinematography of "Mildred Pierce".

 

It was shot by Ernest Haller, who at the end of his career shot "The Cage", the original pilot for "Star Trek". It was during pilot season and Gene Roddenberry couldn't find an available DP so the union started calling people on the retired list. He said they sent him this "old guy" and Roddenberry asked him if he had ever shot anything big or complicated -- and the guy said "well, there was this little film called 'Gone with the Wind'..."

 

Other great black & white works include: Casablanca (Arthur Edeson), Rebecca (George Barnes), Jane Eyre (George Barnes), Wuthering Heights (Greg Toland), How Green Was My Valley (Arthur Miller).

[Filip Plesha]

On Alien...Ridley was mostly doing the job of a cinematographer..he was even the main camera operator.I think Derek was more in charge of technical part of lighting while Ridley was giving concepts and ideas of how to light the scene.

 

Derek even admited in an interview that he was mostly in charge of

picking up some second camera shots as he stated "when ridley's camera was not in his shot" :D

 

Ridley also neglected the actors a lot and focused entierly on

the look and texture of the film.So practicly what you see on screen

is mostly his stuff,Derek was kind of an visual assistent to Ridley.

 

this is really the kind of filmmaking i prefer...

the other side is Woody Allan style where you have

a brigtly lit room..lit like a theater stage with

loooots of dialog.

It is like the cinematographer only needs light so that audience

can see the talking people and the set properly.

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't know... I think the Woody Allen films shot by Gordon Willis and Sven Nykvist are really well-lit and composed. Just look at "Interiors" for example, or "Stardust Memories". Great cinematography.

[Filip Plesha]

I wasn't really refering to the specific visual style of those films,

i was more refering to Allens more drama-oriented directing.

Ridley is a man that wants eye-candy film frames at the end of the production,

and he wants his actors to be independent and work mostly alone,

while directors like Woody concentrate entierly on drama and acting

and leave the visuals to other people.

I'm not saying that those films have a bad cinematography,i'm

saying it is much less visionary and more functional,and plays a smaller role,it is secondary not story-telling.

[David Mullen ASC]

I disagree in the case of "Interiors" and "Stardust Memories", which Woody Allen worked very hard to make look like a Bergman film (the first) and a Fellini film (the second) -- that was his idea, not Gordon Willis'. Allen was definitely a visual stylist on those projects, as well as "Manhatten" or even "Love & Death" (which parodies early Soviet cinematic techniques.) Just because they weren't as show-offy as a Ridley Scott film doesn't mean that they weren't carefully worked out in terms of their visual design by the director working with his artistic collaborators. The Woody Allen of today is perhaps more visually laid-back and hands-off but that doesn't decribe his most famous films of the 1970's which are failry stylized by design and not just because the cameramen were doing whatever they wanted to do without supervision.

 

Nor do I think that Ridley Scott is as hands-off and uninvolved in terms of working with actors as you suggest.

 

The fact that Scott understands the TECHNICALITIES of cinematography and art direction more than Woody Allen does not mean that Scott's films are more "visionary" -- it simply means that Scott understands technical issues more than Allen. In terms of visual design, both directors are stylists but one director's films demand a different type of style than the other.

[Filip Plesha]

Ok,well i didn't examin Allen films in detail,so maybe i should never used them as an example...it is just that as rarely as i have seen them they seemed

like that to me..i should never speak about something without a deeper analysis of it. I pull that back.

 

but as for the word "visionary" i ment the cinematography,not the films themself,

in term of the actual film directing,i do find Allen to be a visionary

 

and as for Ridley..

i don't mean that he never works with actors,

i was discussing the case of Alien...

there he casted the actors as good as he could find

so that they can be independent...

and then the movie was shot with a lot of improvisations in dialog.

Allso actors spoke about the project saying that they

were mostly on their own and that he wanted them to

be as natural as posible and were free to improvize..

 

there were even some fights between the characters that

were improvized and were not in the script.

most notably a short strugle between Siguorney and Yaphet.

 

Ridley was most of the time just standing behind his camera and shooting

continuously to cach some aditional improvized material.

 

So basicly i didn't mean that Ridely was "hands-off"

or that he was insensitive to them or something...

i just wanted to say that he wanted them to be independent and

gived them very little directions in terms of acting because

of two reasons:

he would have time for the visual part of the production

and he wanted the whole film to be as a documentary (natural acting,improvising,

lots of hand held camera with long takes)

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, that's part of Scott's style. Oddly enough, for someone who is known as a stylist, Scott is also fairly interested in realism, or at least, at realistic tone to the lighting and the acting. He lights settings more than just the face, and often lets the actors end up in the darkest parts of the room. More of a British approach to cinematography in a way, to light the room, not the actors. David Watkin is the most obvious example of this approach.

 

It's hard to imagine Ridley Scott doing something very unnatural, high-key and glossy like "Down With Love" in the style of a Doris Day film. Even a fantasy film like "Legend" often looks source-lit. It's a style that's sometimes called "romantic realism" in the sense that the light is motivated usually from a natural source but held at some implausibly "perfect" moment when the natural light is at its most beautiful.

 

To me, Ridley Scott is all about textures; he seems to luxuriate in the surface details of different metals, cloth, skin, etc. Just look at the scene in "Alien" when Ripley sets the reactor to blow-up. You get these inserts of oily metal bolts being unscrewed by sweaty hands and fingers, clean polished steel with shiny brass cylinders, and sweat, sweat, sweat -- the organic and the inorganic (metallic) in the same frame.

[Filip Plesha]

What i like most about his films,specially the Bladerunner and Alien

is that the whole frame feels so pleasant to the eye...

 

He know how to light certain materials and shapes so that they feel pleasant...

Some people might try to make a smooth and pleasant image by using

only soft lighting,but not Ridley,he even acomplishes that with high contrast

light.

in the whole frame light and shadow seem to be on the prefect place

so your eyes never have problem accepting the image...

There are no parts of the frame that stick out and stab you in the eye..

The whole image be it high contrast stuff or soft stuff just has a great

composition and lighting that feels very natural..

all the lines in the image are composited perfectly....

and it is like every material on the set is examined carefully to bring out the best

of it in terms of color,translusence etc..

But of course he does all that intuitivley,he has a magic eye.

 

And yea,textures...

I remember looking at some production photos from alien,and thos esets

don't look as half as good as they did on the actual footage,on the day

the were shot,it's because of the lighting,Ridley brought out the best of

all those walls and their textures...specially in darker shots where you have

mostly light coming from other rooms,it is very beautifull but as you said

very realistic and naturalistic,nothing fancy.

 

I remember Terry Rawlings saying how hard was for him to edit the film

because every shot was eye candy and you didn't want to cut anything out.

 

Too bad they did a lousy job restoring it last year with a spirit datacine.

[Ignacio Aguilar]

On Alien...Ridley was mostly doing the job of a cinematographer..he was even the main camera operator.I think Derek was more in charge of technical part of lighting while Ridley was giving concepts and ideas of how to light the scene.

 

Derek even admited in an interview that he was mostly in charge of

picking up some second camera shots as he stated "when ridley's camera was not in his shot" 

 

Ridley also neglected the actors a lot and focused entierly on

the look and texture of the film.So practicly what you see on screen

is mostly his stuff,Derek was kind of an visual assistent to Ridley.

 

Vanlint also shot Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, 1981). Very good anamorphic cinematography, in my opinion. He has done a lot of commercials, too.

 

By the way, IMDB states that John Mathieson is the DP in Ridley's new film, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. It would be his fourth film with Scott (Gladiator, Hannibal, Matchstick Men), a total record!

[AStar]

Baraka

 

Unforgiven

 

Blade Runner

 

Elizabeth

 

LOTR series

 

Big Libowski

 

Dark City

 

Blare Witch - for the best use of no or limited light on a scene. The flashlight stuff was great.

 

Japan Animation - they seem to capture in the animation cinematic styles that are easy to see what the key elements are that make it a good frame.

[Jeff Tanner]

Great list of films so far! I'll add these:

 

"The Natural" - Caleb Deschanel - Absolutely gorgeous film.

"True Romance" - Jeffrey Kimball - The lighting fits the story perfectly.

"The Man Who Wasn't There" - Roger Deakins

"Shawshank Redemption" - Roger Deakins - Another film that has the cinematography as a character.