American Cinematographer - February 2015 - 12

While roaming around the electronic wasteland the other night, I paused on Turner Classic
Movies and rediscovered a trio of films I hadn't thought about for quite some time: Scarecrow (shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC), Slither (photographed by Laszlo Kovacs, ASC), and
The Last Detail (cinematography by Michael Chapman, ASC). Not having seen any of them
since their first release, I was committed to a nearly six-hour-long marathon that took me
way beyond my normal bedtime - and I was happy to do it. Each movie in the group was
released in 1973 and serves as a reminder of just what a fantastic period that was for
feature filmmaking.
It's interesting how our memories work. Listen to a song from a distant part of your life
and you're suddenly transported back to the time you connect it with. Long-buried
emotions, thoughts and sensations are once again made real; under the right circumstances, the effect can be incredibly moving. I experienced the same reaction here, triggered
by the incredibly tasteful and well-realized imagery pouring out before me. I found myself
recalling my early teenage years, when movies like these were popular across all demographics - a period when going to the single-plex was as much a regular part of life as
attending school and playing sports. Though fully cognizant of how much blood has gone
under the bridge since then, I reveled in the reminiscence. And instead of simply absorbing
them as the entertainment they once represented, I realized that these somewhat-forgotten films were part of the fabric of my life.
Every decade across the history of motion pictures has generated a recognizable texture that we associate as that era's
"signature look." Of course, much of this is a function of the technology that was in use at the time - the particular emulsions, lenses, lab practices and so on. The 1970s stand out in a special way, but the decade's distinctiveness exceeds the peculiarities of grain structure and a smoother contrast curve (made all the more appealing, by the way, in comparison to many
of today's digital presentations).
A new generation of cinematographers, led by such ASC giants as John Alonzo, Bill Butler, William A. Fraker, Conrad
Hall, Adam Holender, Victor J. Kemper, Richard Kline, Richard Moore, Owen Roizman, Haskell Wexler and Gordon Willis -
as well as the aforementioned Chapman, Kovacs and Zsigmond - rewrote the rules of what was acceptable at the bigleague level. Suddenly, in natural and unobtrusive ways, cinematography came to resemble life as people saw it around them:
bright when it needed to be bright and dark when it needed to be dark. But the genius of these artists was most evident in
scenes and sequences during which they used their light to underscore dramatic context regardless of what reality might
have dictated. The TCM triple play mentioned earlier bore this out and once again proved that it's not the tools but the human
touch that matters most in our work. More than a few times during that delightful evening, I found myself asking the question we all like to hear - one that even in the ascendance of video village often continues to make our collaborators think
we're magicians. "How the hell did he light that?"
A few other structural items at work in these films also contribute to what we perceive as the genius of the 1970s
school of cinematography. Compared to what we're used to now, they employ a minimalist approach that completely surrenders camera-consciousness to story. They also show a preponderance of long takes in which composition and staging help
establish a more studied editorial pace. And there is an overwhelming reliance on location shooting, a concept which to that
time had never been imagined on such a scale.
As if all that wasn't enough, what really put things over the top for me was something that appeared every 20 minutes
in the upper right frame of the letterboxed presentation of Scarecrow. In a further kick of nostalgia, these changeover marks
told me I was watching a scan of a fourth-generation copy of a 41-year-old story that had been originated on film.
And you know what? It looked fantastic!

Richard P. Crudo
ASC President
12

February 2015

American Cinematographer

Photo by Douglas Kirkland.

President's Desk

American Cinematographer - February 2015

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