American Cinematographer - August 1993 - 90

Wages of Fear, a classic exercise in Russian-style montage, fraught with a perva¬
sive Fifties existentialist dread. And Orson
Welles' murder of Akim Tamiroff in a seedy,

neon-flashing hotel room in Touch of Evil
encapsulates the emotional and stylistic
extremes of film

noir, the bottom of the

spiritual pit of American cinema, even while
it anticipates most of the visual conceits of
the NewWave.
In Antonioni's Eclipse, the final,
lifeless montage of a darkening street de¬
void of the film's fragile lovers is a complex

jigsaw of urban alienation. The climactic
scene of Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, a seem¬
ingly endless tracking shot where we see
glimpses of a house burning down and a
demented Erland Josephson careening
against the landscape of a psychic holo¬
caust, is both the antithesis and the

doppelganger of Antonioni. Both films de¬
fine a collapsing world in starkly different
ways.

My final choice was somewhat
perverse in that I chose it for its self-refer¬
ential properties. The Draughtsman's Con¬
tract is a Peter Greenaway film that deals

with

an artist making a series of detailed
drawings of an English country house. His
witty and elegant rendering distills the
house and its manicured grounds into an

In a continuing project to preserve the his¬
tory of the cinematographer's art, the career
of Stanley Cortez, ASC, was the subject of
the third installment of the ASC's "Living

History" series.
Cortez was interviewed in the
ASC Clubhouse by film historian and author

Rudy Behlmer, while the four-hour session
photographed on 16mm film with two
cameras by cinematographer Laszlo
Kovacs, ASC. Vice president and chairman
of educational programming Woody
Omens, ASC, directed and produced the

was

installment.
The concept behind the "Living
History" series, says Omens, is to "collect
information on cinematographers so that
we have a library of readily available his¬

Magnificent Ambersons.
"If you have a sense of values,
you can absorb as well as reject," Cortez
stated at one point. "A great cinematogra¬
pher has absorbed that which he has
learned and

seen

with his

own

eyes

throughout the entire world... and he has
the ability to put that into images."
The footage from the interview
is currently being catalogued, organized and
transcribed to paper. Omens says he in¬
tends to produce at least eight segments of
the "Living History" series peryear. "I don't
think there's a more noble cause
have in the ASC than to preserve

we can

the his¬

tory of cinematography," he asserts.
Crew members who worked on
the film included A. Anthony Capello, Daniel

tory. The goal is to have research material

Gold, Keith Banks, Eric Goldstein, Rich

abstracted two dimensions and becomes a

from these interviews in the form of writ¬

metaphor for what we as filmmakers under¬
take. The transfer of life onto a ground glass

transcriptions, cassette tapes and vid¬
eotapes."
Cinematographers Haskell
Wexler, ASC, and Freddie Young, BSC,
were the subjects of the first phase of the
"Living History" series, when they were
interviewed together by American Cine¬
matographer writer Bob Fisher in Febru¬
ary. The late cinematographer Jack
Priestley, ASC, photographed the segment.
After viewing the premiere inter¬

Aguilar, Gary Kangra, Gray Marshall,
Denise Agard, David Abramson, Melissa

camera

obscura and the

us, cuts

close to the heart of our own labors

freezing of it onto
some template of reality, even as it eludes
as

cinematographers.

Well, that's it - a personal in¬
ventory of images charged with powerful
emotions that inhabit my head, a list of
scenes from films that I realize have formed
much of the reservoir of what I draw upon
whenever I begin a film. It's hardly a defini¬
tive list but it is a haunting one. Your list, of
course,

ten

view, Kovacs was so enthusiastic about the
concept of the "Living History" project that
he volunteered to shoot the

will be different.

footage of

But for me, no matter what re¬
search I do when I prepare to shoot a film,
be it testing, holding discussions with the

author of such books as Memo from David
0. Selznick and Hollywood's Hollywood:

director, scouting locations or performing

The Movies about the Movies, was "abso¬

any other task that
is beneath that a

informs the work, there
deep substratum that
grounds whatever I do. We all share this
common experience. It is, I think, the inevi¬
table result of an ongoing dialogue with
one's self. We
scenes

storehouse of the
and films that have touched our
are a

minds and emotions, and we add a critical
awareness

of

our own

work to that

reser¬

voir.
Continued

88

From the Clubhouse

American

on

this page,

Cinematographer

column three.

Cortez, one of his personal heroes. Behlmer,

lutely the right person" to interview Cortez,
said Omens, because of his vast knowledge
of film history.

During the recent interview, the
loose and candid Cortez discussed

a

wide

of topics in his long film career, in¬
cluding his first influences, his philosophy
range
on

the

cinematographer's role in film, and

how he photographed specific scenes, with
emphasis on his groundbreaking work in
two classics, Night of the Hunter and The

August 1993

Roth, and Bruce Bisenz.
*

*

-

CP

*

Film Aesthetics -continued
If you haven't done it lately, you
might consider taking a few quiet moments
to

contemplate what scenes in your favor¬
ite films and (if you are a cinematographer)
in your own work have an abiding life for

and why. What is that subtle, elusive
play between the formal, technical con¬
cerns of building a scene and an almost
ineffable, emotional imperative that can
take our breath away?
Most of us are so busy working
or recuperating from work that actually tak¬
ing a break to catch up with ourselves and
make such an examination is not a high
priority. But it is. I think, moreover, that it's
an essential catalyst for our own continued
aesthetic growth.
you

It's not the list that matters. Enu¬
meration isn't the issue. It's the process, the

questions that you ask yourself after mak¬
ing such an examination. What matters, fi¬
nally, is the journey you take inside yourself,
through the labyrinth of your own image
bank and the

delights that reside therein.
American Cinematographer - August 1993

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