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Fletch F. Fletch wrote:A movie version of The Subterraneans was made and he hated it.

'Many of the great cinematographers are identifiable by a signature style, whether it be painterly lighting effects or a penchant for epic vistas. Brit lenser Douglas Slocombe is an exception - the roughly 75 features he shot are united only in their adaptive commitment to finding each project's ideal visual language. From his work on nearly all the classic Ealing comedies through a sustained collaboration with Steven Spielberg, Slocombe's camera has been chameleonic. But its brilliance has seldom gone unnoticed. Slocombe remains charmingly modest about his contribution to the art form. Reached by phone at his London home, he looks back on having addressed "a great variety of pictures... each time on a completely different level. A lot of cameramen try to evolve a technique and then apply that to everything. But I suffer from a bad memory and could never remember how I'd done something before, so I could always approach something afresh. I found I was able to change techniques on picture after picture."

Period pieces, intimate psychological studies, exotic adventure tales and romantic comedies are just a few of the genres accommodated in an oeuvre that reinvented itself yet again in a final career lap lensing all three of Spielberg's cliffhanging Indiana Jones films. That flexible mastery was fostered during 17 years of employment at England's legendary Ealing Studios, where Slocombe became the pre-eminent house cinematographer. "Ealing was rather like Hollywood in the old days," Slocombe recalls. "It had a number of cameramen and directors and writers under contract, so there was a continuity of production. We all knew each other so well, we'd spent the eves together in the local pub. It was very much a community."

After Ealing's demise in the late 1950s, Slocombe freelanced for different companies, at one point signing a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox that resulted in a series of CinemaScope spectaculars, from the seafaring adventure of A High Wind in Jamaica to the high flying of WWI-set biplane saga The Blue Max and the African intrigue of Guns at Batasi. Perhaps his most striking work from this mid-'60s period lies in the unsettling b&w atmosphere of Losey and Harold Pinter's The Servant, whose gradually more expressionistic images convey the perverse shifting power balance between "master" [James Fox] and scheming "gentleman's gentleman" [Dirk Bogarde].

Slocombe was often attracted to projects that invited multiple visual approaches. For Huston's sadly studio-truncated drama Freud, he deployed "at least four different techniques within the film, all in b&w, to separate the flashbacks, the biographical story, dream sequences and so forth." George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt as well as Zinnemann's Julia similarly conjured wholly different looks for its contemporary scenes and romanticized memory segments.

"I always took everything in my stride... I'd always find a solution for any problem," Slocombe says. Still, he confesses, "In all the films I did, the ones I enjoyed most were always those that were literary subjects - not necessarily coming from a book, but with a script that one could listen to." He cites the "brilliant and funny" black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets as a personal favourite, along with The Great Gatsby ["I don't think that film received the press it perhaps deserved."] and the much laurelled Julia. Given that preference, it did not at first seem a natural fit when Spielberg asked the cinematographer to shoot the popcorn epic Raiders of the Lost Ark. Though very intrigued, Slocombe was somewhat taken aback by Spielberg's favouring "a very, very tight schedule, enormous numbers of set-ups every day, very large sets that he didn't want laboriously lit. It was challenging in terms of keeping on schedule - or rather ahead of schedule, as was his wont." Nonetheless, he soon grew to consider this collaboration among his most enjoyable, one that carried on through two sequels.' [From article by Dennis Harvey in Variety, 2002.]

Gordon wrote:Which part of my statement wasn't "entirely true", Michael? I state that Suspiria was wasn't shot in 3-strip, but that the original Italian (and perhaps other European countries) prints were dye-transfer. The U.S. prints were by DeLuxe. There is no falsity in my statement!

Gordon wrote:Though, with that said, I see that The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976, Lewis John Carlino [screenwriter of Seconds] ) is on DVD, which sounds like a pretty strange movie, it is said to visually impressive, with the great Ted Haworth's (Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Longest Day, Seconds, Jeremiah Johnson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) set design illuminated by Slocombe with his regular camera operator Chic Waterson. It is based on one of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea's more obscure novels. Has anyone here seen that movie? Sarah Miles shows all and masturbates in a bathtub, apparently.

MichaelB wrote:Actually, my use of the phrase "not entirely untrue" clearly referred to rumours spread by others, not to anything that you wrote.

And my argument stands: although it's true that Suspiria wasn't actually shot in three-strip, the lighting and general cinematographic plan was nonetheless designed from the outset to be aimed towards producing final prints in dye-transfer, creating as close to the effect of three-strip Technicolor was possible given the available technology and the desire to shoot in a Scope aspect ratio (I really don't think Suspiria would have worked in 1.33:1, even had it still been possible to screen that ratio in mainstream cinemas!).

In other words, I was adding colour to an argument that you were trying to present in stark high-contrast black and white. There was nothing wrong with your facts, it's just that they weren't quite nuanced enough for my taste.

Steven H wrote:Anderson avoids computer work, or any processes that will lead to unneeded generations between the original negative and final print positive. Can someone in the know tell me if this will really produce noticeable results, or is it just a director eccentricity?

Cold Bishop wrote:As for Japan, I personally feel some of the best "Scope" cinematography was done by them. Their exploitation films are especially eye-popping-ly stunning.

Lino wrote:

Cold Bishop wrote:As for Japan, I personally feel some of the best "Scope" cinematography was done by them. Their exploitation films are especially eye-popping-ly stunning.

Agreed 100%. Look no further than School of the Holy Beast or any of Norifumi Suzuki's movies for that matter to witness how masterfully they handled the scope format.

Oh, and don't forget Nobuo Nakagawa's too. Those are some truly gorgeous films and perfectly composed works of art too, especially Black Cat Mansion, one of the most beautiful horror movies ever filmed.

Steven H wrote:

Gordon wrote:Though, with that said, I see that The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976, Lewis John Carlino [screenwriter of Seconds] ) is on DVD, which sounds like a pretty strange movie, it is said to visually impressive, with the great Ted Haworth's (Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Longest Day, Seconds, Jeremiah Johnson, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) set design illuminated by Slocombe with his regular camera operator Chic Waterson. It is based on one of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea's more obscure novels. Has anyone here seen that movie? Sarah Miles shows all and masturbates in a bathtub, apparently.

You mean based on one of Mishima Yukio's obscure novels, right? I've seen it, and it's out on DVD from Image and looks pretty good, and is anamorphic. I really liked the film, it was creepy in a very real way (and not just because Kris Kristofferson pretty explicitly gives Sarah Miles head.) The set design and/or cinematography didn't strike me as remarkable, but perhaps i need to see it again.

Steven H wrote:Lino and Cold Bishop, what would you consider a good starting point for Suzuki Norifumi? I only have the Red Peony film he did in 1968, but I have access to most of his work. What do you suggest for initial viewing? I can enjoy Wakamatsu or Suzuki, but I balk at the extreme genre styles, and the "girl gangs" stuff doesn't seem that enticing.

Cold Bishop wrote:Also, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial I've always heard regarded as having great lurid color cinematography.