Alan Hume Autobio- A Life Through the Lens

November 7, 2004

I picked this up yesterday and have already read the whole thing!

Hume is one of the heroes I have grown up with, and has always had a really unassuming approach to choosing projects, which reflects his ability to go on anything from projects as artistically diverse as Return of The Jedi and Runaway Train to DTV like Eve of Destruction and TV's Acapulco H.E.A.T.! Hume makes a point that he'll take a project on the basis of whether he'll have fun on set socially with his collaborators- it could be TV movies/miniseries or an A-list Hollywood feature, but it's the genuine personal connections that always attract him.

Starting from his beginnings working as a clapper/focus boy for David Lean on Classic's such as Oliver Twist (shot by Guy Green), through his stint as matte camera for Peter Ellenshaw's Disney Matte dept of Denham studios through to operating and lighting all of the poverty row Carry On, Hammer, Amicus and American International Pictures films and then into the world of modern blockbusters- it's a chronilogical ordering for Hume's life retelling.

I personally have always loved Hume's projects for his ability to make "modest budgets" seem much bigger through inventive use of light and creative camera work, be it overexposing a Pinewood studios set to simulate Eastern sunlight on an Eastern themed Carry On film to reactive lighting that sold John Dykstras electrical effects on the massive budget Lifeforce. Hume's actual lighting is VERY old fashioned (direct fill, glamour soft light on the ladies), his camera tracking is always dollies or handheld but rarely steadicam (Watcher in the woods seems to be the only example) and he always rated his stock by what was written on the can- it's the way however that he uses these old school disciplines to make anything look good without any juddgemental self awareness that deserves praise.

Just because Hume's lighting style maybe old fashioned doesn't mean he can't achieve a jack of all trades variety of feel for each picture either- A Fish Called Wanda, 20K Leagues under the Sea (TV movie 1997), Shirley Valentine, Dr. Terror's House of Horror, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, Confessions of a Popstar, Carry On Cleo, Supergirl, Warlords of Atlantis- can you think of a group of films more visually unlike each other?

A fun read, if Hume is a little too modest in his own commentary of his own extrordinary body of work.

PS: Hume's first film with Richard Marquand happened because they needed a replacement DP to fill the shoes of the guy who had just stormed out- guess who that was?: DICK BUSH, again!

Christian Appelt · November 7, 2004

Thanks for the hint, I found it at our local library. BTW, there is a second cinematographer's autobiography, just without the article:

LIFE THROUGH A LENS: MEMOIRS OF A CINEMATOGRAPHER

by Osmond Borradaile

The name didn't click with me, but I looked it up and he was the DOP of some classics:

ELEPHANT BOY (1937)

SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC (1948)

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949)

November 7, 2004

Canadian DP Osmond Borradaile is best known for his second unit location work on the Korda classics shot by Georges Perinal- Four Feathers and Thief of Baghdad especially- you have to remember that on most of those shoots the second unit handled all of the location work, which was kept to a minimum regarding principal actors, and all of the rest was obviously studio/backlot work handled by the main unit.

Whilst Jack Cardiff inherited the technicolour disciplines from Perinal, location lensing on shows like Black Narcissus (and I mean everything from what the constructed environments to the real Horsham commonland doubling for an Indian passing at the end) owe everything to Borradaile.

Scott of the Antarctic was actually shot by Jack Cardiff after (most unusually) Geoffrey Unsworth had gone and unsuccessfully captured real mountain second unit footage reshot later by Borradaile which Cardiff then had to match to light with the principles in the studio.

David Mullen ASC · November 8, 2004

I can recommend the Borradaile book; it was a different era with a certain amount of exotic glamour, travelling to distant locations with these huge Technicolor cameras, not to mention the intrusion of WW2, etc. I certainly feel like a wimp compared to those cameramen...

November 8, 2004

Hume's biography traces his roots as begnning as a clapper boy at Denham for Georges Perinal during the London Films heyday of the early 40s- fascinating to find out how comparitively easy it was to do clapper for Perinal as your first film! :blink:

I'd love to hear your opinions on Hume's body of work, especially shows that have stood out for you!

Has anyone seen Lifeforce? I am a big fan of the look of that picture- very low key but completely saturated. The no-fill stuff at the end walking around the ruins of the lab and driving to the Cathedral "single source illuminated" by towers of flame are just spectacular. The reactive lighting (fine tuned with John Dykstra) just makes all those slowshutter laser VFX come alive. HUGE divide between the way a Hollywood blockbuster was shot with such a cinematic vision then compared with most of the blockbusters today that are rivalled by most of the TV drama work out there.

Christian Appelt · November 14, 2004

LIFEFORCE is one of my favourite SciFi films, very dark and brooding, and Mathilda May had to be the best looking alien life form I ever saw. :rolleyes:

Now I have read both LIFE/LENS books, and while I found the Boradaille book fascinating (they sent him to India, Africa or wherever, let him shoot the location stuff with doubles, then they'd tailor the studio footage to fit it - what an amount of responsibility for a DP!).

Hume's book sure is great reading for anyone who knows British productions of the 1950s/1960s more intimately, and film series like CARRY ON which gets a lot of coverage in the book is hard to understand "on the Continent".

The person who edited Mr Hume's narrative did a very bad job in checking technical details, the text is full of serious technical mistakes.

Alan Hume seems to be a very nice and gentle person, but his politeness and discreet censoring of names reminded my of that old joke about gravestone inscriptions: "I wonder where the bad guys have been buried..." <_<

Edited November 14, 2004 by Christian Appelt