Action heroes

Gareth Evans pays tribute to the world's cinematographers.

Nov 10 2006

Who made the world? All right, who makes the filmic worlds in which we happily immerse ourselves? Believe the official, hierarchical version of the creative process and it is the singular talent of the director. Even in that explicitly industrial realm of Hollywood, still the Romantic ideal persists of the individual artist conjuring realities into being.

This weekend a Riverside season ‘From Prague to Hollywood: The Cinematography of Miroslav Ondricek’ is a welcome tribute to one of contemporary film’s most generous and accomplished directors of photography (DoP) and is important in a wider sense. After all, who, outside of that shrinking band of obsessives known as cinephiles, could name a cinematographer, alive or dead? And this despite the fact that it is the DoP, perhaps more than anyone else, who nurtures the unique atmospherics of the cinematic into life, crafting the seductive rooms, streets, woods and weather of those imagined realms that haunt our dreams and fuel our longing.

Andrei Tarkovsky famously wrote that making a film was like ‘sculpting in time’. However, like so many filmmakers before and after him, he benefited profoundly from the relationship with a cinematographer who instinctively understood the tone and mood sought in the shaping of those shadows that make film. So it’s just as valid to think of the cinema as a ‘sculpting in light’, a concept embodied in the title of a significant homage, the 1992 documentary 'Visions of Light'. Granting recognition to this essential role, 'Visions' speaks to numerous DoPs and includes clips to illustrate the signature links between director and camera as well as historical and thematic approaches, whether in noir, the ‘New York’ look or various European attitudes.

Crucially it is the cinematographer who guides the audience in how and where they are being encouraged to look. Think of 'Citizen Kane' (DoP Gregg Toland), that exemplar of the endless potential of the gaze, and the scale of the possibilities becomes clear. Shaping
emotion and narrative directly in choices over lighting, colour and framing, the DoP is expected to rise to the challenge of studio and location shooting in every possible context and configuration, and has often been required to develop new technologies to do so. When the elements come together, dialogue between director and cinematographer truly sings (for example Chris Doyle and Wong Kar-Wai on 'Chungking Express', or Vittorio Storaro and Francis Ford Coppola on 'Apocalypse Now').

Miroslav Ondricek and director Milos Forman were key players in the Czech New Wave. They first worked together on 1963’s 'Audition' before the Soviet incursions into Czechoslovakia in 1968 saw them both relocate to the US, and collaborate on 'Hair', 'Amadeus', 'Ragtime' and 'Valmont'. Renowned for his easygoing demeanour in shooting, Ondricek has been praised for his ability to endow historical dramas with a real sense of lived experience, gifting vivid texture and democracy to expansive scenarios, treating extras with all the narrative importance of the primary action. This relaxed attention has also generated defining work with Lindsay Anderson ('If...', 'O Lucky Man!'), George Roy Hill ('Slaughterhouse-Five') and Penny Marshall ('Awakenings').

Many of the above titles will be shown this weekend, alongside such rareties as Anderson’s 'The White Bus'. It is such a work that exemplify Ondricek’s enduring achievement. As he himself says, ‘my generation of photographers broke new ground in cinematography by drawing films out into reality. This required a new kind of light. We knew that poetry cannot come from something artificially created, and we attempted to bring this lesson to the screen.’

‘From Prague to Hollywood: The Cinematography of Miroslav Ondricek’ is at the Riverside from Friday-Sunday.

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