Even though fettered by economic restrictions imposed upon him by the public taste, the creative cinematographer continues to experiment.
—Leon Shamroy56
Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s long-term stylistic evolution and each particular studio’s stylistic differentiation, individual cinematographers make personal artistic choices within the constraints of both practical considerations and storytelling conventions. Barry Salt argues that individual styles are par-ticularly difficult to discern: “Despite being able to recognize the difference in some cases between the work of two cameramen when presented side by side, I would never claim to be able to guess the name of a cameraman who had lit a film I did not know, if shown it ‘blind.’”57 This claim may be falsifiably true, but as Salt himself suggests, lighting practices and other aesthetic strategies varied by cinematographers. “I can see little obvious connection,” he writes, “between the strong chiaroscuro appearance of the lighting in The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the rather pedestrian mid-key look of Back Street, both photographed by Karl Freund for Universal in 1932. However, when Freund’s work is juxtaposed with that of William Daniels on Camille (1937), a difference is recognizable.”58 Like house style, individual style may rest less on a strict coherence of approach than on a distinction from other cinematographers’ work.
For this reason, certain cinematographers became known in the field not only for their accomplishments but also for their ability to encapsulate expressive pos-sibilities of the medium. For instance, Charles Lang’s work on A Farewell to Arms won the Academy Award for Cinematography for 1932 largely on the basis of his ability to encapsulate the trend in the early 1930s toward romanticized pictori-alism and to do so with a minimum sacrifice of the storytelling needs. American Cinematographer’s review praised both its “absolute naturalness” and “intelli-gent pictorialism,” while valuing lighting setups “intriguing in themselves.”59 The individual cinematographer-auteur then often combined a distinct aesthetic sensibility that married to more baseline norms and conventions. Four examples help illustrate the range of individual style: James Wong Howe, George Barnes, Rudolph Maté, and Leon Shamroy. The truism about classical cinematography is
that it is a highly conformist style, and each of these cinematographers pursued difference from within the shared functions that Patrick Keating has identified as basic to classicism: storytelling, glamour, realism, and pictorialism. All the same, each style was expressively distinct.
Along with Gregg Toland, James Wong Howe was the most famous of the classical cinematographers. Not only was he the subject of the occasional popular press profile,60 he is the only cinematographer who is the subject of a dedicated historical monograph, Todd Rainsberger’s book-length study of Howe’s style.
Drawing upon both Howe’s interviews and an analysis of his work, Rainsberger identifies the overarching realist sensibility of the Howe style.61 This realism con-sisted of a few tenets: an insistence on motivated lighting sources, an attempt to transform stage sets into something more verisimilar, and a deemphasis of some glamour conventions—this, despite Howe’s initial success in shooting Mary Miles Minter during the silent years.62 The realist Howe is on display most clearly in Air Force. This film mixes documentary footage into the fictional framework and models other aesthetic choices (16mm handheld in the interior plane shots, frontal lighting, single-source lighting) on documentary filmmaking.63 Beyond the pseudodocumentary moments, the film relies on mono-directional lighting setups, particularly in the underlit nighttime tarmac scenes. In these, Howe not only motivates the light source, but also varies the intensity by direction. While his approach applies to high-key scenes as well, his realist tendencies are most striking in the low-key cinematography, as in the climactic nighttime battle scene of Objective Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945) in which single-source front-, side-, and backlight provide little visual information about the combatants.
All the same, Howe still managed to subjugate realist effects to the emo-tional needs of the story and the unobtrusive presentation of the diegesis. As Rainsberger observes, Howe “alternated between documentary realism and a heightened realism suitable for melodramas.”64 Among Howe’s early 1940s work at Warner Bros., Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942) represents perhaps the fullest subjugation of the realist impulses to the generic storytelling aims of the melo-dramatic script. In American Cinematographer’s eyes, Howe’s work on Kings Row “accentuates realism” while serving largely functional aims of storytelling.65 Some of the cinematography is similar to the semi-documentary Air Force or to Howe’s lower-key action genre films like Out of the Fog (Anatole Litvak, 1941), but Kings Row is surprisingly high-key in look, often with a nearly washed out gray-scale relying on natural light and extensive fill. For Kings Row, Howe collaborated with production designer William Cameron Menzies in an unusual arrangement in which Menzies provided drawings and determined camera positions; Howe even credited Menzies with the overall look of the film.66 Even considering Men-zies’s design oversight, though, Kings Row (figure 2.7) matches Howe’s aesthetic preoccupations of the early 1940s with the production values expected of a War-ner Bros. prestige drama. The film combines moderate lamp diffusion with faster
film stock and relatively little lens diffusion. Deep focus becomes a recurring formal device, though it is used in decidedly understated fashion. The directional lighting is a guiding principle—though not strict, it provides unexpected shad-ows or flat frontal illumination. When American Cinematographer praised the film’s ability to achieve both realism and storytelling impact, the review signaled Howe’s ability to align motivated directional lighting and genre lighting, as in instances of gothic lighting within an interior scene. As a case study, the film reveals how “realism” was not merely flat mimicry of documentary.
In contrast to the realism of Howe, George Barnes developed a romanticist, lush style. Sometimes this could take the form of pictorialism (striving for paint-erly effects), but just as often it was simply the approach to a balanced tonal range that gave a well-rounded sensibility to his work. His most famous exploration of a romanticist style is in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), which features overex-posure in the bedroom scenes to give a dreamlike quality to the action. As with many cinematographers, the independent and prestige productions gave Barnes freer rein to work in an individual style, but even his more routine assignments for RKO show a distinct approach to lighting. Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942), for instance, achieves a strong contrast in black and white with fine grain, grayscale gradation, and slight diffusion. This tonal approach com-bines qualities associated with the emerging realist style with certain aspects of the early 1930s soft style. The Twentieth Century–Fox prestige production Jane Eyre (1944) is the apotheosis of the Barnes style and a good case for the
Figure 2.7: in Kings Row (1942), a flat, “realist” approach to high-key lighting.
cinematographer-as-auteur, since Barnes’s aesthetic is decidedly a greater guid-ing force for the look of the film than Robert Stevenson’s direction. The openguid-ing shot of the film, in which servants carry a sole candle in the dark, shows the unusual combination of contrast with lushness. The glamour photography uses especially fine tonal variegation, as in figure 2.8. As a gothic narrative, the film plays heavily on the sense of atmosphere, and Barnes’s work reveals that atmo-spheric cinematography did not need to rely heavily on the pictorialism that was the default choice of Hollywood filmmakers.
Rudolph Maté, meanwhile, was better known for his adaptation and impor-tation of a “European” modernist sensibility. Modernism could entail several qualities. In his most striking examples, like the interrogation scene in Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), angular compositions, direct light into the camera, high contrast, and expressionist directional lighting all show a rebellion against the Hollywood norms of aesthetic restraint. Of course, such rule bending could function within parameters of genre and effects lighting, but given these conventions Maté stood out as an unusually “arty” and rule-bending cinematographer, and the trade-press coverage emphasized both his knowledge of art history and his experience in 1920s Europe, particularly in works like The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1928).67 This modernism is perhaps strongest in Sahara, which visually abstracts the desert imagery in a manner comparable to European and American avant-garde films. Maté could adapt to more conventional filmmaking like My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), and
Figure 2.8: ink blacks and finely rendered grayscale in Jane Eyre (1944).
many of his films break rules selectively and creatively by combining modernist touches with conventional cinematography.
Leon Shamroy became known for his self-professed minimalist lighting, particularly during his long career at Twentieth Century–Fox. He sums up his approach: “Zanuck gave me complete freedom at 20th. Here I developed my technique of using the absolute minimum of lights on a set. . . . To light econom-ically is a rarity in this business: most cameramen put a light in front, others at the side fix up backlighting here and there; I don’t.”68 In practice, lighting econ-omy was not absolute (Shamroy did in fact use complicated lighting setups), but his approach involved a number of separate strategies. Most immediately, his films rely heavily on spotlights, either to achieve glamour lighting or to achieve the full lighting for the shot. The practice is most evident in low-key films like Lillian Russell, and both that film’s bedroom scenes and the final production number are particularly striking for their use of spotlights (see figure 2.5). Even Shamroy’s Technicolor films throw pools of spotlight on the actor, as during a tableside scene in Black Swan (Henry King, 1942), in which Tyrone Power’s char-acter leans back out of the light. More expressively, too, the color films often use color spotlights, sometimes with contrasting orange-green tones. Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) lights its interiors with contrasting and crisscrossed spotlights, and in general the film’s interior scenes have surprisingly low illumi-nation, as in color plate 3. Shamroy’s work has a strong preference for lighting figures from above, even without the traditional genre/effects-lighting cues for such treatment. As if to compensate for the single-source minimalism, Shamroy sometimes lights the main figures with extra illumination, so that slight overex-posure rather than heavy diffusion provides glamour lighting.
For more ambitious scenes, Shamroy often choreographed complex crowd compositions with many lights for individual persons rather than relying on a general illumination for the crowd. He recounts his experiences filming Wil-son (Henry King, 1944): “We did one scene in the Shrine Ballroom, and I went down and hid lights behind the flags, and did a complete floor map so as to work out how we could move the arcs around. I had a hundred men moving the arcs around, and each man had to be handpicked. . . . It’s the most startling shot I’ve ever done, the most startling shot I’ve ever seen on the screen. Five thousand people in a blaze of light.”69 This is perhaps the trademark Shamroy shot: the multiple-focus composition with individuated multiple setups. One scene set in a diner in You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) is a simpler example of this kind of lighting setup.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, cinematography as a profession grew more self-consciously aware of its own history and legacy as an art form. American Cinematographer’s regular profiles in its “Aces of the Camera” series helped pres-ent and codify this historical self-image for its members. These profiles combined biography, interviews, and stylistic analysis of individual cinematographers. The
field of cinematography had an uneasy relation to individual style. The ASC and its members were understandably keen to point out the vital contributions of the cinematographer, yet their professional practice valued an unassuming style without too much individual flair. Arthur Miller summarized the storytelling goals of much classical cinematography: “My opinion of a well-photographed film is one where you look at it, and come out, and forget that you’ve looked at a moving picture. You forget that you’ve seen any photography.”70 Miller himself had a developed and unique style, but his words point out the impediment for the burgeoning notion of the cinematographer-auteur.
James Wong Howe and Leon Shamroy show how individual style both conformed to studio house style and departed from it. As American Cinema-tographer’s critic, Herb Lightman, describes the films, Shamroy’s “compositions have a modern feeling, a strong sense of line and movement which directors find valuable in presenting action from the most forceful angle. His use of color is bold without being jarring. It is Shamroy’s fine balance of art with box-office that makes his photography so widely appreciated in Hollywood.”71 On one hand this is another variation of the pattern visible in the reception of Howe’s films:
heterodoxy could be accepted or even praised within limits, as long as there was some ultimate accommodation with orthodox cinematographic practices. On the other hand, Shamroy’s heterodoxy was a particularly formalist one. Whereas Howe could justify his lighting and composition on the grounds of narrative motivation and verisimilitude, Shamroy’s took on purely expressive qualities.