American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 72

In Memoriam Jack Cardiff, BSC, 1914-2009 way to Heaven, 1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), The Black Rose (1950), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and The African Queen (1951) as proof that the magic was in the process, and yet all of those pictures were photographed by the same person: Jack Cardiff, BSC. Cardiff, a onetime ASC member and, more recently, an Officer in the Order of the British Empire (even the Queen recognized that he had a bit to do with the brilliance of “Glorious Technicolor”), died on April 22 at home in Cambridgeshire, England. He was in his 94th year, and not long out of harness. His last project as a cinematographer was the 2007 documentary The Other Side of the Screen. In a way, his career had come full circle; his earliest credits as a lighting cameraman were travelogues and industrial documentaries in the 1930s. It would not be fair to say Cardiff was a reluctant cinematographer — he pursued his career with a passion — but his motives for joining the camera department did not spring from artistic pretensions. “I started as a child actor in 1918, when I was 4 years old,” he told AC in 2006. “By the time I was 14, I was working as a tea boy on The Informer [1929], one of the last British silent films — a part-talkie, actually. I heard the boys in the camera department went abroad a lot, and I thought that sounded great, so I got into the camera department as a number boy. Of course, for the next two years, I only managed to get to the Isle of Wight, just across the water, for one afternoon.” Cardiff moved up the ranks and eventually operated the camera on Britain’s first three-strip Technicolor production, Wings of the Morning (1937). “I was working as a kind of operator and junior cameraman, and I would occasionally do odd inserts for features,” he told AC. “A German, Count von Keller, came to Technicolor with his wife … they’d been traveling around with a 16mm camera shooting amateur movies, and their friends suggested they get a proper color camera and a cameraman. I was assigned by Technicolor to go touring with them. We had a van and a whole Technicolor crew, and I was the cameraman. We were shooting travelogues, working with a company called World Windows. Those travelogues were exciting work and gave me an opportunity to light what I liked, and I gained great confidence in my abilities.” Cardiff’s first break as a feature cinematographer came when he worked on The Great Mr. Handel (1942) with cameraman Claude Friese-Greene. “I had worked with Claude as a focus puller and operator, and the director, Norman Walker, wanted him to shoot the film, but [Claude] was a black-and-white man, so he suggested I collaborate with him on the film.” After that, Cardiff went back to shooting inserts and second-unit material, and one day, director Michael Powell happened to wander onto a stage where Cardiff was lighting an insert shot. “The shot was of a wall with animal heads mounted on it,” recalled Cardiff. “The animals had horns, and every time you put another light on it, you got duplicate shadows — there were horns all over the bloody wall! But I had all day to do it, and I suppose I did a very good job on it eventually, because I heard a voice say, ‘Very interesting.’ I turned around, and there was Michael Powell. He said, ‘Would you like to photograph my next film?’” That film was A Matter of Life and Death, and it began a fruitful working relationship that eventually brought Cardiff an Academy Award for Color Cinematography, which he won for Powell’s Black Narcissus. Cardiff earned two more Oscar nominations for cine- Was it the process or the practitioner? Movie buffs have long lamented the passing of three-strip Technicolor, a process praised for its ability to vividly capture nature’s colors and bring them to the screen in a painterly way. These same movie buffs will cite the films A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a. Stair- 72 July 2009

American Cinematographer - July 2009

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