Favorite Cinematographers (allisoncm)
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- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Michael Ballhaus was a German cinematographer. He worked on many American films, including Baby It's You (1983), Old Enough (1984), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Departed (2006).
Ballhaus was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for Broadcast News (1987), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), and Gangs of New York (2002), but never won.
His son Florian Ballhaus is also a cinematographer who worked on Flightplan (2005) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006).
Ballhaus died on 11 April 2017, at the age of 81.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Gabriel Figueroa was born on 24 April 1907 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He was a cinematographer, known for The Pearl (1947), The Young and the Damned (1950) and Maria Candelaria (1944). He died on 27 April 1997 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Producer
Yorick Le Saux was born on 10 August 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He is a cinematographer and producer, known for High Life (2018), Personal Shopper (2016) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).- Producer
- Cinematographer
- Actor
Jan Melis was born on 12 September 1972 in Nové Zámky, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. He is a producer and cinematographer, known for Let There Be Light (2019), Eva Nová (2015) and Miracle (2013).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Raoul Coutard was born on 16 September 1924 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer and director, known for Hoa Binh (1970), Alphaville (1965) and Z (1969). He died on 8 November 2016 in Labenne, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Jean Rabier was born on 16 March 1927 in Montfort-l'Amaury, Île-de-France, France. He was a cinematographer, known for Elevator to the Gallows (1958), The 400 Blows (1959) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). He died on 15 February 2016 in Port-de-Bouc, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Production Manager
Agnès Godard was born on 29 May 1951 in Dun-sur-Auron, Cher, France. She is a cinematographer and production manager, known for Beau Travail (1999), Home (2008) and Wings of Desire (1987).- Cinematographer
- Writer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Slawomir Idziak was born on 25 January 1945 in Katowice, Slaskie, Poland. He is a cinematographer and writer, known for Three Colors: Blue (1993), Black Hawk Down (2001) and Gattaca (1997). He was previously married to Maria Gladkowska.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Vittorio Storaro, the award-winning cinematographer who won Oscars for "Apocalypse Now (1979)", "Reds (1981)" and "The Last Emperor (1987)". He was born on June 24, 1940 in Rome, where his father was a projectionist at the Lux Film Studio. At the age of 11, he began studying photography at a technical school. He enrolled at C.I.A.C (Italian Cinemagraphic Training Centre) and subsequently continued his education at the state cinematography school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. When he enrolled at the school at the age of 18, he was one of its youngest students ever.
At the age of 20, he was employed as an assistant cameraman and was promoted to camera operator within a year. Storaro spent several years visiting galleries and studying the works of great painters, writers, musicians and other artists. In 1966, he went back to work as an assistant cameraman on Before the Revolution (1964), one of the first films directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Storaro earned his first credit as a cinematographer in 1968 for "Giovinezza, giovinezza". His third film was "The Spider's Stratagem (1970)" which began his long collaboration with Bertolucci. He also shot "The Conformist (1970)", "Last Tango in Paris (1972)", "Luna (1979)", "The Sheltering Sky (1990)_", "Little Buddha (1993)," for Bertolucci.
He won his first Oscar for the cinematography of "Apocalypse Now (1979)", for which director Francis Ford Coppola gave him free rein to design the visual look of the picture. Storaro originally had been reluctant to take the assignment as he considered Gordon Willis to be Coppola's cinematographer, but Coppola wanted him, possibly because of his having shot "Last Tango in Paris (1972), which had starred Marlon Brando. Brando's performance in the film had been semi-improvised, and Coppola has planned on a similar tack for his scenes in the jungle with Brando's character Colonel Kurtz.
The results of their collaboration were masterful, and he later shot the 3-D short "Captain EO (1986)", the feature films "One from the Heart (1981)" and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)," and the "Life without Zoe" segment of "New York Stories (1989)" for Coppola. He won his second Oscar as the director of photography on Warren Beatty's "Reds (1981)" and subsequently shot "Dick Tracy (1990)" and "Bulworth (1998)" for Beatty He won his third Oscar as the director of photography on Bertolucci's Best Picture Academy Award-winner "The Last Emperor (1987)".
"All great films are a resolution of a conflict between darkness and light," Storaro says. "There is no single right way to express yourself. There are infinite possibilities for the use of light with shadows and colors. The decisions you make about composition, movement and the countless combinations of these and other variables is what makes it an art."
According to Storaro, "Some people will tell you that technology will make it easier for one person to make a movie alone but cinema is not an individual art." Storaro disagrees. "It takes many people to make a movie. You can call them collaborators or co-authors. There is a common intelligence. The cinema never has the reality of a painting or a photograph because you make decisions about what the audience should see, hear and how it is presented to them. You make choices which super-impose your own interpretations of reality."
Storaro believes that, "It is our obligation to defend the audiences' rights to see the images and to hear the sounds the way we have expressed ourselves as artists,".
During the 1970s, the metaphor of cinematography as 'painting with light' took hold. Storaro, however, adds motion to the mix. Cinematography, to the great D.P., is writing with light and motion, the literal translation of the word cinematography, which derives from Greek
"It describes the real meaning of what we are attempting to accomplish," Storaro says. "We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings."
As a cinematographer, he is highly innovative. He had Rosco International fabricate a series of custom color gels for his lighting, which he used to implement his theories about emotional response to color. The "Storaro Selection" of color gels is available for other cinematographers from Rosco.
He created the "Univision" film system, which is a 35mm format based on film stock with three perforation that provides an aspect ratio of 2:1, which Storaro feels is a good compromise between the 2.35:1 and 1.85:1 wide-screen ratios favored by most filmmakers. Storaro developed the new technology with the intention of 2:1 becoming the universal aspect ratio for both movies and television in the digital age. He first shot the television mini-series "Dune" with the Univision system.
Storaro is the youngest person to receive the American Society of Cinematographer's Lifetime Achievement Award, and only the second recipient after Sven Nykvist not to be a U.S. citizen.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Ghislain Cloquet was born on 18 April 1924 in Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium. He was a cinematographer and actor, known for Tess (1979), Love and Death (1975) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). He was married to Sonia Salvy-Matossian and Sophie Becker. He died on 2 November 1981 in Montainville, Yvelines, France.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Peter Deming was born in Beirut, Lebanon. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for Mulholland Drive (2001), The Menu (2022) and The Continental (2023).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Special Effects
Frederick Elmes was born on 4 November 1946 in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, USA. He is a cinematographer, known for The Dead Don't Die (2019), The Night Of (2016) and Paterson (2016).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
Bruno Nuytten is one of the most successful French cinematographers notable for his many collaborations with outstanding filmmakers. He was twice awarded the César for Best Cinematography: Barocco (1976) and So Long, Stooge (1983). Later he started to direct and is best known for his masterpiece Camille Claudel (1988) starring Isabelle Adjani in one of her most acclaimed performances. Nuytten was in long relationship with Adjani and they have a son.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
One of the highest appraised contemporary cinematographers. He was born in Spain but moved to Cuba by age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cineclub and wrote film reviews. Then, he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro-regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente en la playa (1960) and La Tumba Francesca) had been banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favourite cameraman of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his impressive Hollywood-career. In his later years, he co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Improper Conduct (1984) (about the persecution of gay people) and Nadie escuchaba (1987). He shot several prestigious commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Nestor Almendros died of cancer.- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
- Cinematographer
When he made his directorial debut in 1970, Nicolas Roeg was already a 23-year veteran of the British film industry, starting out in 1947 as an editing apprentice and working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He first came to attention as part of the second unit on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964) two years later containing his first really distinctive solo work. He went on to photograph films for such distinguished directors as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)), John Schlesinger (Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)) and Richard Lester (Petulia (1968)) before his sensational directorial debut in 1968. Co-directed with writer (and painter) Donald Cammell, Performance (1970) was intended to be a simple-minded star vehicle for Mick Jagger and Warner Bros were so horrified when they saw the final multi-layered kaleidoscope of sex, violence, and questions of identity that they delayed its release for two years. Roeg went to Australia for his solo debut as director (Walkabout (1971)), which was also his last film as cinematographer, and throughout the next decade he produced a world-class body of work (Don't Look Now (1973); The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980)) that revealed his uniquely off-kilter view of the world, expressed through fragmented, dislocated images and a highly original yet strangely accessible approach to narrative. He married the star of Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), the elegant Theresa Russell who would play the female lead in nearly all his subsequent films, though these have generally found less favor with critics and audiences, and the release of both Eureka (1983) and Cold Heaven (1991) was severely restricted due to problems with the films' distributors.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Gordon Willis was an American cinematographer. He's best known for his work on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films, as well asWoody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979).
His work on the first two Godfather films turned out to be groundbreaking in its use of low-light photography and underexposed film, as well as in his control of lighting and exposure to create the sepia tones that denoted period scenes in The Godfather Part II (1974).
In the seven-year period up to 1977, Willis was the director of photography on six films that received among them 39 Academy Award nominations, winning 19 times, including three awards for Best Picture. During this time he did not receive a single nomination for Best Cinematography.
He directed one film of his own, Windows (1980). His last film as a cinematographer was The Devil's Own (1997), directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Willis died of cancer on May 18, 2014, ten days before his 83rd birthday, at the age of 82.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Frank Capra's favorite cinematographer began his working life as an electrical engineer who collaborated with Lee De Forest on building the first wireless transmitter. However, it was his interest in moving picture photography which led him to work in film laboratories where his numerous pioneering inventions included the first lens adjustment mechanisms (zoom lenses), a camera and flash lamp synchronizing device, oblique image superimposition projection devices and a panoramic television camera. During World War I, Walker gained valuable hands-on experience filming aerial scenes, newsreels and other documentary footage, often for the Red Cross or Gaumont News. All the while, he continued to accumulate patents, such as the Double Exposure System and the Facial Make-Up Meter.
Once qualified as a lighting cameraman, Walker started to work in Hollywood. His first film, Back to God's Country (1919), was shot under difficult conditions near the Arctic Circle. After involvement in several low budget affairs as a free-lance cinematographer, he joined Columbia in 1927. Walker was to have a profound impact in elevating the status of this studio during the next two decades, inextricably linked with Columbia's best and commercially most successful films, until his retirement in 1952. He directed Capra's first for the studio, THAT CERTAIN THING (1928), as well as Columbia's first 'A' production, the action thriller Submarine (1928), a silent film with a music and sound effects track, which was also directed by Capra. Walker and Capra worked out a way to use miniature toys and a discarded aquarium found in the props department to conjure up 'special effects'. An artistic understanding developed between the two men, and, from Capra's picture Flight (1929), Walker worked on each of the director's films for the next decade, winning an Academy Award nomination for You Can't Take It with You (1938).
Not only an expert craftsman in composition, camera movement and perspective, as well as consummately skilled in the use of wide-angle and zoom lenses (of which he had a vast personal collection), Walker also excelled at lighting his sets. His most memorable scenes include the moonlit hay field of It Happened One Night (1934), the torchlit funeral procession of Lost Horizon (1937), and, of course, who could forget George Bailey running along the snow-covered main street of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) ? Known in the industry as a 'woman's photographer', Walker consistently captured the best attributes of his leading ladies through his close-ups, shot with his own patented 4-inch lenses. Though he worked primarily on black-and-white features, Joe Walker was equally adept at the medium of color and won his third of four Oscar nominations for Columbia's A-grade biopic, The Jolson Story (1946).
After his retirement, Walker's ever-active mind developed and manufactured the Electro-Zoom Lens for RCA (expanding on his earlier, basic design of 1932), later used as standard equipment by TV cameramen in the 1960s. In 1982, he became the inaugural recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, bestowed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for outstanding technological contributions to the industry. He detailed his memoirs two years later in his autobiography, entitled "The Light on Her Face".- Cinematographer
- Special Effects
- Editorial Department
The favorite cinematographer of legendary director Alfred Hitchcock began working at Warner Bros. when he was 19 years old. He climbed his way up from camera operator to assistant camera man and eventually took over the Special Photographic Effects unit at Warners on Stage 5 in 1944. He became an expert in forced perspective techniques which were widely in use at the time as cost-saving measures, or on B-pictures. Burks did special effects work on major productions like Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Unsuspected (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
In 1949, Burks graduated to becoming a fully-fledged director of photography. His striking black & white work on The Fountainhead (1949) was particularly evocative in showcasing the stark, austere architectural lines of the film's chief protagonist, Howard Roark (Gary Cooper). On the strength of this, and his next film, The Glass Menagerie (1950), Hitchcock hired him to shoot his thriller Strangers on a Train (1951). From this developed one of Hollywood's most inspired collaborations, as well as a close personal friendship.
When his contract at Warner Brothers expired in 1953, Burks followed Hitchcock to Paramount and went on to play an integral part in creating the brooding, tension-laden atmosphere of the director's best work between 1954 and 1964. His range varied from the neo-realist, almost semi-documentary black & white look of The Wrong Man (1956) to the intensely warm and beautiful deep focus VistaVision colour photography of Vertigo (1958). His muted tones matching the claustrophobic setting of Rear Window (1954) stood in sharp contrast to the vibrant, full-hued colours used in the expansive outdoor footage of To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959).
The experience Burks had gained in forced perspective miniatures in his early days at Warner Brothers, also stood him in good stead on 'Vertigo' (the mission tower), 'North by Northwest' (the Mount Rushmore scenes) and, later, 'The Birds'. Because of his expertise, Burks was often able to contribute ideas to shooting scenes more effectively. He was also an innovator in the application of both telephoto and wide angle lenses as a means to creating a specific mood. The Hitchcock-Burks partnership ended after Marnie (1964), and, under less-inspired directors (except for A Patch of Blue (1965)), his later work inevitably declined in quality. Robert Burks and his wife, Elysabeth, were tragically killed in a fire at their house in May 1968.
Robert Burks won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Colour Photography for 'To Catch a Thief'. He was also nominated for 'Strangers on a Train', 'Rear Window' and 'A Patch of Blue'.- Cinematographer
- Editorial Department
- Special Effects
Edmond Richard was born on 6 January 1927 in Paris, France. He was a cinematographer, known for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Les Misérables (1982) and The Trial (1962). He died on 5 June 2018.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Regarded as one of the foremost exponents of cinematic expressionism in the 1920's, Fritz Arno Wagner was trained at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris and began in the film industry working for Pathé Freres in 1910. Within just two years, he was promoted to head Pathé's offices in Vienna, and, subsequently, in Berlin. He briefly worked out of New York in 1913, reporting for Pathé Weekly, then returned to Germany for wartime service in the cavalry. After being invalided out, he progressed from still photographer to 2nd Cameraman. By 1919, he had advanced to full director of photography.
Wagner was noted for his moody, atmospheric lighting. He did outstanding work for the directors F.W. Murnau and Georg Wilhelm Pabst, best exemplified by his chilling, eerily-lit gothic masterpiece Nosferatu (1922), with its shadows and distorted images (the jerky, unsettlingly grotesque movements of Count Orlock -- as played by Max Schreck -- have undoubtedly served to inspire more recent examples of the genre, such as The Ring (2002)). Wagner photographed Arthur Robison's hallucinatory thriller of obsessive jealousy, Warning Shadows (1923), in a similar vein, using mirrors and light effects to convey delusions and subconscious desires. Wagner's career remained prolific during the 1930's. He worked on many more prestige films (to name but a few: Pabst's Westfront 1918 (1930), M (1931), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Amphitryon (1935), Two Merry Adventurers (1937)), but the quality of his output began to decline by the mid-1930's under the artistic strictures imposed during the Nazi regime. Post-war, he directed the newsreel "Welt im Bild" and largely confined himself to work as cinematographer on mainstream popular entertainments for DEFA. At age 63, Wagner died as the result of falling from a camera truck.- Cinematographer
Distinguished veteran cinematographer John F. Seitz had eighteen patents for various photographic processes to his name. These included illuminating devices, processes for making dissolves and the matte shot, which he perfected during filming of Rex Ingram's Trifling Women (1922). Seitz started with Essanay in Chicago, then joined the St. Louis Motion Picture Company as a lab tech in 1909. Within another four years, he had progressed to director of photography. He was signed by Metro in 1920, doing his best work in collaboration with Ingram, most notably on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). Personally selected by William Randolph Hearst, Seitz was also behind the camera for The Patsy (1928), one of the major hits for Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. By this time, he was the highest paid cinematographer in Hollywood.
Seitz's trademark was low key lighting and differentially illuminating different regions of the screen (ie. background, foreground and middle). His colour photography was characterised by a tendency to favor tan or beige as backgound colours, and vivid colours for costumes or props. Seitz's career in the 1930's, spent at 20th Century Fox (1931-36) and MGM (1937-40), was generally unremarkable. However, he enjoyed a massive resurgence at Paramount (1941-52), working on some of the best films made by Preston Sturges (Sullivan's Travels (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)) and Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950)). Add to that another two excellent films noir, This Gun for Hire (1942) and Lucky Jordan (1942) - both directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Alan Ladd. He was a master at creating atmosphere through ominous shadows and looming close-ups.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Yves Bélanger was born on 7 July 1960 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a cinematographer, known for Brooklyn (2015), Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Wild (2014).- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
Darius Khondji was born on 21 October 1955 in Tehran, Iran. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for Amour (2012), Se7en (1995) and Delicatessen (1991). He is married to Marianne Khondji. They have three children.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Director
Boris Kaufman, the Oscar-winning cinematographer who shot Jean Vigo's oeuvre and helped introduce a neo-realistic style into American films, was born on August 24, 1897, in Bialystok, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. The youngest son of librarians, the Soviet directors Denis Kaufman (a.k.a. Dziga Vertov, meaning "Spinning Top") and Mikhail Kaufman were his older brothers. Dziga Vertov was one of the great innovators in Soviet cinema, the father of the agit-prop film, who directed Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and his brother Boris imitated his beloved camera tricks when he shot the documentary À Propos de Nice (1930) for Vigo.
The Kaufmans' parents decided to move to Moscow at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and Denis went to school in St. Petersburg. In 1917, Russia experienced two revolutions, one which overthrew the Czar and the later, the "October" Revolution, which overthrew the bourgeois democracy and established the Bolshevik Party as the new rulers of what they called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Denis and his brother Mikhail were enamored of the October Revolution and volunteered their services as filmmakersto the new socialist state.
During the revolutionary period, Kaufman's parents moved back to Poland, which after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, became independent from the Soviet Union. They took along Boris, who was much younger than his brothers. Poland and the Soviet Union eventually fought a border war, and the young Kaufman's parents sent him to Paris to be educated. Their son Denis, now Dziga Vertov, whose new name connoted the speed of the new medium and of his new life as a revolutionary artist, as well as the revolutions of a film reel, become a cinema philosopher as well as director. Dziga Vertov issued manifestos calling for filmmakers to take a formative role in shaping the new socialist order, replacing "dream films" with movies articulating "Soviet actuality."
Boris Kaufman, who eventually emigrated to France in 1927, later credited his brother Mikhail with his education as a cameraman. "Mikhail taught me cinematography by mail," he told Columbia University Professor Erik Barnouw.
After the Kaufman brothers' parents died, Mikhail had taken on a paternal responsibility for Boris, writing him regularly, and informing him about his film work. Though the brothers never met again after 1917, they did stay in touch via the mails throughout their lives. Boris viewed his brother's films in Paris and was drawn to similar work with Jean Vigo.
A photographer himself, Vigo had acquired a movie camera in order to make films, but he couldn't master it. Vigo had the great luck of meeting and collaborating with Kaufman, who was to evolve into one of the masters of black-and-white cinematography. It was Kaufman who is responsible for the wintry style of L'Atalante (1934), Vigo's sole feature film, as well as the imagery of his other filmed worked, such as Zero for Conduct (1933). As a cinematographer, Kaufman was instrumental in helping Vigo realize his vision on film. The films Kaufman shot for Vigo are both romantic and surreal, infused with a dream-like quality.
Vigo, a consumptive, died of tuberculosis in October 1934, ending their great collaboration that had started with À Propos de Nice (1930), and had continued with the documentary about the swimmer Jean Taris, Taris (1931). The latter documentary featured underwater visuals captured by Kaufman that underscored the dreamy quality of swimming, of being underwater. Vigo and Kaufman enhanced this dreaminess by utilizing slow-motion photography, to serve as correlative for the natural slowing of the body in swimming and to elucidate the glow of skin under water.
The collaborators moved on to fiction with Zero for Conduct (1933), a short film drawn from Vigo's memories of an authoritarian boarding school. The movie influenced the directors of the French New Wave, particularly François Truffaut and his The 400 Blows (1959), and was the inspiration for Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). The great classic "L'Atalante" (1934) finished up the collaboration, one of the greatest between a director and a cinematographer. The realization of Vigo's genius would have been unthinkable without Kaufman.
Kaufman shot Lucrezia Borgia (1935) for Abel Gance, but with the passing of Vigo, he temporarily lost his direction. He shot two shorts for the avant-garde director Dimitri Kirsanoff and was the director of photography on four films with director Léo Joannon.
After serving in the French Army during the sitzkrieg and the Battle of France, Kaufman emigrated to Canada as a war refugee. He was hired by John Grierson to be a cameraman for the National Film Board of Canada. Kaufman moved to the United States in 1942, where he eventually became a citizen. Locked out of feature work by the guild system, Kaufman supported himself shooting short subjects and documentaries before Elia Kazan chose him to shoot On the Waterfront (1954). The Kazan film, for which Kaufman won an Academy Award for cinematography, was his first American feature.
Kazan had wanted Kaufman, with his roots in the documentary, as a collaborator as he planned to inject realism on the order of the Italian neo-realists into American film. Kazan, in his autobiography "A Life" says it was his collaboration with Kaufman that taught him that cinematographers were artists in their own right. (Interestingly, being a former Russian/Soviet citizen and the brother of two prominent Soviet directors, Kuafman was under suspicion during the Cold War of communist sympathies. It was likely that his correspondence with his brother in the USSR was read by U.S. intelligence agents. His lack of career progression until Kazan picked him to shoot On the Waterfront (1954) may have been a result of anti-red paranoia. Thus, only someone like Kazan -- one of the few directors, and the most prominent filmmaker to testify as a friendly witness before the Houe Un-American Activities Committee -- having established his anti-communist credentials, could have employed Boris Kaufman during the height of the post-World War II Red Scare. And, of course, the film Kaufman shot for Kazan is a not-so-thinly veiled anti-communist apologia for informing.)
Kaufman also photographed Baby Doll (1956) (for which he received a second Oscar nomination) in B+W and Splendor in the Grass (1961) in color for Kazan. He was the director of photography on Sidney Lumet's first film, 12 Angry Men (1957), and he also shot The Fugitive Kind (1960), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) and the gritty The Pawnbroker (1964) for Lumet, all in B+W.
Interestingly, Kaufman shot the landmark nudist film Garden of Eden (1954), which led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Excelsior Pictures Corp. v. Regents of University of New York State), in which the majority held that the film was not obscene or indecent, and that nudity was not itself obscene. A decade later, he shot Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's sole foray into film, Film (1965), which was directed by Alan Schneider from Beckett's screenplay. These two movies are testimonials to his adventuresome and iconoclastic spirit, rooted in the experimental cinema.
Boris Kaufman retired in 1970, after shooting for Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970) for Otto Preminger. He died on June 24, 1980, in New York, New York.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Writer
Born in Tahiti, the son of writer James Norman Hall, author of "Mutiny on the Bounty," Conrad Hall studied filmmaking at USC. He and two classmates formed a production company and sold a project to a local television station. Hall's company branched out into making industrial films and TV commercials. They were hired to shoot location footage for several feature films, including's Disney's The Living Desert (1953). In the early 1960s, Hall was hired as a camera assistant on several features and worked his way up to camera operator. He received his first cinematographer credit in 1965. Hall won acclaim for his rich and complex compositions, especially for In Cold Blood (1967) and won an Academy Award for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He won two more Oscars, for American Beauty (1999), in 2000, and Road to Perdition (2002).