American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 48) A Cinematic Passport Top: On location for the industrial film Three Installations, Lassally lines up a shot as Desmond Davis assists. Bottom: Lassally describes some waist-deep mud to Three Installations director Lindsay Anderson. craftsmen. For example, I was clapper boy on This Was a Woman for a very talented German cameraman, Gunther Krampf. He had an extremely meticulous method of working, which in those days wasn’t all that uncommon given that there were 26 or 28 weeks of production. Some of the lessons I learned are still useful today, and others have become old-fashioned.” Riverside eventually went out of business, and Lassally went to work in a 16mm film library. During his free time, he joined film societies, where he befriended Derek York. He and York decided to make a short 48 February 2008 film, Smith, Our Friend, about squatters in London, a topic in the news at the time. “During the making of that film, I noticed that the primitive lighting dictated by the very cramped conditions helped to give the scenes more realism,” says Lassally. “That was an important discovery for me.” Smith, Our Friend was well received at the annual screening of the Federation of Film Societies, and that led to another film, Saturday Night, which was made during 1949 and 1950. Although audiences never saw Saturday Night, a producer who watched some of the rushes offered Lassally his first job as a lighting cameraman. The project was a government trailer, the equivalent of a public-service commercial. By the early 1950s, Lassally was shooting documentaries and short fictional films for Richardson, Anderson and Reisz, directors with whom he would eventually collaborate on features. In 1954, at the age of 27, he earned his first credit as a director of photography on Another Sky. Most of his early feature work was abroad, outside the major studios, and often involved very small crews. Almost from the start, feature and documentary work were intermingled. “I valued the cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques that combination provided,” he says. “My own philosophy tended to keep me outside the mainstream of British and American feature productions, a course that I regretted occasionally but fleetingly. On balance, the creative opportunities seem to me to have always been greater on the fringes.” The cross-fertilization between features and documentaries was crucial to the evolution of Free Cinema, an attempt by a small group of socially aware artists to counter mainstream films that they believed ignored the real world. The goal of the Free Cinema movement, which was formally introduced with a program of short films at the National Film Theatre in February 1956, was to produce short, low-budget documentaries about ordinary, working-class people. Tapping Italian Neorealism and the work of British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings (Listen to Britain) for artistic and ideological inspiration, the Free Cinema filmmakers took their cameras into the streets and often worked with relatively unknown actors and actresses; at the time, British films were predominantly adaptations of literary classics and were mainly stagebound. Free Cinema’s manifesto, which was crafted by Anderson, read in part: “As filmmakers, we believe
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