Cinematographers in spotlight
After shooting and editing the film that many have hailed as the greatest ever made, first-time director Orson Welles made an interesting decision.
In “Citizen Kane,” he shared the all-important screen with the director’s credit — the point in credits, usually at the end, where the director’s name would stand alone — with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland. In a sense, Welles was admitting that the groundbreaking, eye-popping visuals that would go on to influence generations of filmmakers were a product of co-authorship.
Unlike today, when cinematographers get their own stand-alone credit (usually before the screenplay, production and direction credits), films of the 1940s mostly credited these visual artists on a screenshot that included some 10 or so technical artists. Cinematographer names would be in the same small type as that of set decorators, makeup artists and sound engineers.
So Welles’ gesture was generous, but certainly just. Films, we often forget, are collaborative achievements, complicating the “auteur” theory of directors as creative gods.
In this spirit, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive is celebrating these unsung visual artists in an intriguing series, “The Art of Cinematography,” which runs through Dec. 29. The days after Thanksgiving, though, make up the key weekend of the series.
In “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 24; also 2 p.m. Dec. 10), “Citizen Kane” (5:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 25), “The Tarnished Angels” (8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 25), and “The Seventh Seal” (5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 26), the series is celebrating Rudolph Maté, Toland, Irving Glassberg and Gunnar Fischer — not so much Carl Dreyer, Welles, Douglas Sirk or Ingmar Bergman.
The Polish-born Maté was instrumental to the development of Dreyer, the Danish master of bleakness, shooting his first two great films, “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and “Vampyr.” In “Joan,” Maté photographs the seething crowds from a low angle against a white sky, making them seem so dark and small; a contrast to the extreme close-ups of one of the great faces — Renée Jeanne Falconetti, who as Joan turned in one of the great performances in cinema history in her only film role.
Maté went on to provide visual intensity for Alfred Hitchcock (“Foreign Correspondent”) and Charles Vidor (“Gilda”) and, as a director himself, for the noir classic “D.O.A.” and an early science-fiction masterpiece, “When Worlds Collide,” in which he worked with famed matte painter and designer Chesley Bonestell — a San Francisco native — to create a new world despite severe budget limitations.
Bergman’s most celebrated collaboration with a director of photography was with Sven Nykvist, who became the Swedish master director’s regular cinematographer with “The Virgin Spring” in 1960. But it was Fischer who helped Bergman hone his look and style as the director developed in the 1940s and ’50s.
When Bergman broke out as an international art house force in the 1950s, Fischer was there, shooting “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “Wild Strawberries,” “The Magician” and, of course, “The Seventh Seal.”
Set during the Crusades, the plot famously involves a knight (Max von Sydow) playing a game of chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot). It may have been set during medieval times, but the film based partly on the Book of Revelation has its roots in modern, Cold War times.
Bergman’s film was about the search for God amid the constant threat of dread and death, and Fischer based some of the visual look on photographs of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as barren desert nuclear test sites.
This weekend’s portion of the series, which will later showcase the work of cinematographers for Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais and Akira Kurosawa, among others, contains one misstep and one very inspired choice.
I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing “The Tarnished Angels,” and Glassberg does a fine job, especially with the aerial sequences, but it is Sirk’s collaboration with Russell Metty on garish Technicolor classics such as “All That Heaven Allows” and “Magnificent Obsession” for which the filmmaker is best known.
And that brings us to the 2006 documentary “Manufactured Landscapes” (3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 26), one of the most gorgeous documentaries of this century. Director Jennifer Baichwal works with photographer Edward Burtynsky to create an oddly beautiful look at industrial landscapes, many of them polluted and toxic. Industrialization has remade the world — there’s a good side to that and a bad side — and the film makes us realize that industrialization is irretrievably a part of our global DNA, like it or not. It’s almost a
natural part of our Earth. “Manufactured Landscapes” screens right before “The Seventh Seal,” so create your own double feature of bleakness. They’re such totally different films, from different eras and different cultures, but their pairing makes a bizarre, inspired kind of sense.