collisionwork | Painting With Light

Just found out from the great website Destructible Man, a place for the scholarly study of "the dummy death in cinema" (really!) run by The Flying Maciste Brothers, that one of the greatest photographers in all of film, Mr. Jack Cardiff passed away today at the age of 94.

The Maciste Bros' tribute is HERE, with the promise of more to come.

Cardiff began his career in film in the 1910s (as an actor, then clapper boy), and was STILL working as a DP as of two years ago!

He shot close to 75 films (and directed a few, including some good ones, notably Sons and Lovers), but will probably be best remembered and loved for his glorious camera work on the Powell and Pressburger films (three of my very favorites) A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes.

He also shot Hitchcock's Under Capricorn and John Huston's imitation Powell/Pressburger film The African Queen, and many other great films of that period. However, his career extended all the way to shooting such films as Death on the Nile, Ghost Story, Cat's Eye, Conan the Destroyer, and Rambo: First Blood Part II!

The man knew and loved film, and knew and loved light. He was a master, and he was a worker.

Sorry if you read this when it crossposts on my Facebook notes page, where the videos don't show up, but you can always come over to the blog, if interested enough. Here's 6 minutes of a TV profile of Cardiff, with a number of clips (unfortunately, part 2 seems to not be posted, dammit):

And, though it's a crime to reduce Cardiff's gorgeous work to a 480x385 pixel low-res YouTube reproduction (especially if you've been lucky enough to see any of these films in an actual dye-transfer 35mm print), even in this tiny form, amazingly, you get enough of a taste of his work, so here's the classic climactic sequence from Black Narcissus featuring Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron (SPOILERS, if you care):

And here's the opening to A Matter of Life and Death, with David Niven and Kim Hunter:

RIP Mr. Cardiff.