Cine m at ogr a p h y
BEH IND
THE SI LVER
SCREEN
Behind the Silver Screen
When we take a larger view of a film’s “life” from development through exhibition, we find a variety of artists, technicians, and craftspeople in front of and
behind the camera. Writers write. Actors, who are costumed and made-up, speak
the words and perform the actions described in the script. Art directors and set
designers develop the look of the film. The cinematographer decides upon a
lighting scheme. Dialogue, sound effects, and music are recorded, mixed, and
edited by sound engineers. The images, final sound mix, and special visual effects
are assembled by editors to form a final cut. Moviemaking is the product of the
efforts of these men and women, yet few film histories focus much on their labor.
Behind the Silver Screen calls attention to the work of filmmaking. When
complete, the series will comprise ten volumes, one each on ten significant tasks
in front of or behind the camera, on the set or in the postproduction studio. The
goal is to examine closely the various collaborative aspects of film production,
one at a time and one per volume, and then to offer a chronology that allows
the editors and contributors to explore the changes in each of these endeavors
during six eras in film history: the silent screen (1895–1927), classical Hollywood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the Auteur Renaissance
(1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the Modern Entertainment
Marketplace (2000–present). Behind the Silver Screen promises a look at who
does what in the making of a movie; it promises a history of filmmaking, not
just a history of films.
Jon Lewis, Series Editor
1.
Acting (Claudia Springer, ed.)
2.
Animation (Scott Curtis, ed.)
3.
Cinematography (Patrick Keating, ed.)
4.
Costume, Makeup, and Hair (Adrienne McLean, ed.)
5.
Directing (Virginia Wright Wexman, ed.)
6.
Editing and Special Visual Effects (Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, eds.)
7.
Producing (Jon Lewis, ed.)
Screenwriting (Andrew Horton and Julian Hoxter, eds.)
8.
9.
Art Direction and Production Design (Lucy Fischer, ed.)
10.
Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects (Kathryn Kalinak, ed.)
Cine m at ogr a p h y
Edited by Patrick Keating
new Brunswick, new Jersey
Dedicated to two inspiring teachers,
David Bordwell and Lea Jacobs
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cinematography / edited by Patrick Keating.
pages cm. — (Behind the silver screen ; 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8135–6350–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6349–7 (pbk. :
alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6351–0 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. Cinematography—History. 2. Digital cinematography—History. I. Keating,
Patrick, 1970–
TR848.C53 2014
778.5’3’09—dc23
2013037742
This collection copyright © 2014 by Rutgers, The State University
Individual chapters copyright © 2014 in the names of their authors
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written
permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street,
New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by
U.S. copyright law.
Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction Patrick Keating
ix
xi
1
1. The Silent Screen, 1894–1927 Patrick Keating
2. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946 Chris Cagle
3. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967 Lisa Dombrowski
4. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980 Bradley Schauer
5. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999 Paul Ramaeker
6. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present Christopher Lucas
11
34
60
84
106
132
Academy Awards for Cinematography
Notes
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
159
165
185
193
201
203
Acknowledgments
I owe my first and foremost thanks to Rutgers University Press, the Academy of
Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and series editor Jon Lewis for inviting me
to edit this volume. Jon has been a patient and encouraging editor, and it has
been my privilege to work with him. I also extend my deep appreciation to Leslie
Mitchner and the team at Rutgers University Press for all that they did, with their
kind and capable hands, to shepherd the Behind the Silver Screen series.
I have enormous admiration and gratitude for the authors collected here—all
of whom I am honored to consider friends both on and off the page. Thank you
for your deep thinking and timely revisions, and for giving me cause to revisit so
many wonderful movies.
Closer to home, I wish to acknowledge the support I received for this project
from my institution, Trinity University; grants from Academic Affairs and the
Department of Communication enabled the inclusion of color illustrations in
this volume. Research funds from Trinity University enabled me to travel to Los
Angeles and review documents in the Margaret Herrick Library.
I’ve been fortunate to have many excellent teachers in my life, including David
Bordwell, Lea Jacobs, Judy Irola, and Woody Omens, all of whom have taught me
much about cinematography. My warmest thanks go to my wife, Lisa—for reading chapters and keeping me fueled with positivity. I’m so lucky that we get to
spend our lives sitting shoulder-to-shoulder watching movies together.
ix
Abbreviations
The main text uses the following abbreviations:
ASC American Society of Cinematographers
d.p. Director of Photography, another term for cinematographer
The endnotes use the following abbreviations:
AC American Cinematographer, the ASC’s trade journal, still in print
MPW The Moving Picture World, a trade journal from the silent period
xi
Cine m at ogr a p h y
Introduction Patrick Keating
The craft of cinematography brings together a range of distinct but complementary tasks, such as the planning of the lighting, the composition of the film
frame, the orchestration of the camera movement, and the manipulation of the
negative in the laboratory. Through these tasks, the cinematographer, in close
collaboration with the director and other crew members, adds structure and
nuance to a film’s visual style. For decades, cinematographers have insisted on
the artistic nature of their craft. Back in 1931, James Wong Howe wrote, “With
the early films, lighting merely meant getting enough light upon the actors to
permit photography; today it means laying a visual, emotional foundation upon
which the director and his players must build.”1 Decades later, Vittorio Storaro
proposed an even bolder definition: “Photography means light-writing, cinematography means writing with light in movement. Cinematographers are authors
of photography, not directors of photography. We are not merely using technology to tell someone else’s thought, because we are also using our own emotion,
our culture, and our inner being.”2 For both cinematographers, cinematography
is an expressive art, whether the goal is to express the shifting moods of the
story, as in Howe, or to express a more personal set of concerns, as in Storaro.
This admittedly romantic definition of cinematography must be contextualized,
qualified by our awareness that this is after all an industrial craft, made within
1
2 Patrick Keating
a system based on hierarchy, mass-production, and the commercial imperative.
Keeping both sides of cinematography in mind, this book will tell the story of
cinematography in American cinema, explaining how this complex art and
craft changed across the decades—a process that began with minimal crews
hand-cranking the camera under the midday sun and continues into the present
day with a wide array of technical advances and an industry-wide conversion to
digital imagery.
As we turn our attention to the men and women responsible for these images,
we encounter several historiographic challenges. One of the issues facing any
historian of cinematography is the fact that cinematographers themselves have
been telling the history of their craft for decades. This is no doubt true of most
Hollywood crafts, from editing to costume design, but the point seems especially
salient for cinematography. The group’s honorary organization, the American
Society of Cinematographers, has been publishing a magazine, American Cinematographer, since 1920, using the magazine and other publications to shape
a public narrative of the craft’s rise, its transformation over time, and its persistence in the face of technological and institutional change. Starting in the
1970s, an assortment of published interviews, featuring both veterans from the
studio period and more contemporary figures, provided an additional forum for
the members of the craft to tell their own history.
This preexisting self-curated history provides enormous benefits to the
scholarly historian seeking to understand the field, and yet those benefits also
bring risks. On the one hand, the trade journals and the interviews provide an
enormous wealth of material for the historian to consider, regarding specific
technologies, collaborations with directors, artful solutions to particular storytelling problems, and more philosophical accounts of guiding aesthetic ideals.
All six of the essays in this book rely extensively on these invaluable sources. On
the other hand, the historian must remember that the ASC is hardly an unbiased
source; its excellent magazine occasionally passes over important developments,
and it usually frames existing debates in ways favorable to its mission. As is
usual in any form of history, all primary evidence must be interpreted in order
to be understood.
To put this another way, the historian of cinematography must go beyond
simply summarizing the pages of the trade journals and offer some broader
explanatory framework to help us understand how the field of cinematography
developed and changed, both onscreen and off. Fortunately, there exist several
exemplary works of film scholarship to help guide this process, even if cinematography has not received as much attention as other fields, most notably directing.
By reviewing a few of these previous works, we can get a better sense of the larger
ongoing questions that have guided research into the history of cinematography: in particular, the question of technology, the question of authorship, and the
question of classicism.
Introduction 3
The Question of Technology
One challenge facing the historian of cinematography is the problem of technology. To what extent does technology drive stylistic change? It seems plausible to
suppose that many stylistic shifts can be explained most efficiently by pointing to
proximate changes in technology. The arc light helps explain the presence of hard
shadows in films from the 1920s. To understand the rise of deep-focus cinematography in the 1940s, we might point to faster film stocks. The availability of the
Steadicam provides a ready explanation for certain elaborate camera movements
in the 1980s. Indeed, it is difficult to see how one might explain these stylistic
developments, or related trends, without pointing to technology at some point
in the account.
On the other hand, there are good reasons to be wary of technological determinism. For one thing, it should be clear that the causal relationship between
technology and style can go both ways. Just as a new technology might spark
cinematographers to explore a new style, the stylistic preoccupations of cinematographers might push the industry to invest in certain technological research
likely to have market potential. More importantly, we must balance the accounting of technological change with the awareness that technology is never the only
determining factor in stylistic history, since the history of technology must itself
be located within a broader institutional and social context. Any technology can
be charged with multiple, sometimes contradictory, cultural meanings.
Cinematographers themselves have often proposed a “toolkit” model of technological change. In an oft-quoted 1942 response to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
1941), Charles Clarke criticized Kane’s cinematographer Gregg Toland for using
deep-focus too often, instead proposing that deep-focus should be seen as “something which rounds out our assortment of artistic tools, so that we have a better
way of meeting the dramatic requirements of any story-situation.”3 This attitude
toward technological transformation—embracing a new technique as progress
only so long as it extends the number of tools a cinematographer can use to
match the style to the story—would recur again and again over the years, from
CinemaScope to the digital intermediate. However, when cinematographers are
forced to accept a new technology as a requirement and not one option among
many, they often push back.
One of the most indispensable works in the study of cinematography is Barry
Salt’s Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. As the title suggests, Salt
puts the relationship between technology and style at the center of his concerns.
Drawing on a careful examination of trade journals like American Cinematographer and the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Salt details all the
relevant changes in technology from the 1890s to the present, from camera designs
to laboratory practices, while offering an equally rigorous account of statistically
measurable changes in film style. Though Salt’s volume sometimes is criticized as
4 Patrick Keating
a work of technological determinism, Salt explicitly denies that technology drives
stylistic change; instead, he emphasizes the determining power of filmmakers’
intentions, praising the filmmakers who innovate the most influential styles.4
By contrast, in Production Culture, John T. Caldwell focuses less on the look
of the films than on the culture of the workers who make them—workers who
have developed complex ways of theorizing their own practice, including their
use of technology. Film technologies take on significant connotations within
this culture, supported by the discourse of the practitioners who use them. For
instance, cranes, high-powered lamps, and Panavision lenses might connote
“big-screen production value,” and the concomitant sense that crew members
are there to allow these expensive machines to do their work, while a handheld
low-resolution DV camera shooting in available light might carry very different
connotations: the sense that the crew is using its machines to keep up with an
“unfolding documentary-like reality.”5 This is not just a matter of what a film
style might mean onscreen, but also a matter of how the technologies sustain
cultural ideas about value, artistry, and the agency of film workers. Rejecting the
“instrumental” view that technologies like cameras and lamps are simply tools
that filmmakers use to make pictures, he insists that Hollywood’s own production culture works to theorize those technologies, giving them meanings that in
turn shape production practices.
The Question of Authorship
All three of these examples—Clarke, Salt, and Caldwell—raise questions of
authorship, another longstanding issue in the historiography of cinematography.
Though some cinematographers might bristle at the idea that the director is the
sole “auteur” of the film, most cinematographers are comfortable describing their
job as assisting the director in the realization of his or her vision. In the pages
of American Cinematographer, one can find a range of ideas about authorship.
For instance, one issue in 1991 offered some brief profiles of cinematographers
who had recently made the switch to directing. Cinematographer-turned-director
Ernest Dickerson said, “I’d like to tell my stories but I’d like to help other directors tell their stories as well,” thereby granting the director the status as primary
author.6 But a year later, the same magazine profiled Dickerson again after he had
resumed his role as cinematographer one more time, on Spike Lee’s epic Malcolm
X (1992). Here, the article emphasizes collaboration, crediting the film’s complex
three-part color scheme (shifting from vivid colors to monochrome to muted realism) to the work of Dickerson and production designer Wynn Thomas, guided by
Lee’s influence as both director and co-screenwriter.7 Such an emphasis on collaboration positions the cinematographer as one of several creative interpreters
of the story.
Introduction 5
Though few film historians endorse the auteur theory in its pure form, it is
still the case that many works of film scholarship are strongly oriented toward
the director. One of the purposes of a volume such as this is to help correct this
imbalance by calling attention to the contributions of other crafts. And yet such
a revisionist approach might posit a range of responses along a continuum. One
option here would be to elevate certain cinematographers to the role of auteur,
perhaps by pointing to the distinctive and influential styles of major figures like
Toland or Storaro. Another approach would be to question the idea of the auteur
on a more fundamental level. In an early (1973) critique of the auteur theory, Graham Petrie wrote, “It is no longer going to be enough to assume that the director’s
contribution is automatically of major significance; equally, it will be necessary
to avoid the dangers of replacing one culture hero by another and launching into
‘The Cameraman as Superstar’ and solemn studies of the personal vision of Sol
Polito or James Wong Howe.”8 Instead, Petrie proposes other categories (such as
“scene-stealers” and “harmonizers”) that might include cinematographers with
recognizable styles. By the 1980s, the influence of the auteur theory already had
waned considerably in academic film studies, and many scholars of the industry
adopted as a working assumption the idea that film authorship was inevitably collaborative, especially in a mass-production system like Hollywood. Such scholars
often supported this hypothesis with archival research into how specific films got
made. Here, Robert Carringer’s in-depth study of the making of Citizen Kane
provides an exemplary model, using archival evidence to explain how director
Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland, associate art director Perry Ferguson, optical printer Linwood Dunn, and many others worked together to craft
the film’s extraordinary images.9
Carringer’s approach is based on the close study of an individual film. At
the other end of the scale, a scholar might examine a large cluster of films. For
instance, a fascinating recent study by a team of Cornell psychologists has found
that Hollywood cinematography has grown recognizably darker from 1935 to
the present.10 The pattern appeared in a sample of 160 films, across a range of
decades, with a measurable linearity. This argument does attribute some agency
to cinematographers: the authors note that the director, cinematographer, and
editor have the most power to shape a film’s visual style, and that this “relatively
small community of filmmakers has gradually changed their craft,” constantly
refining their methods of holding the audience’s attention. Yet the pattern itself
has emerged with a consistency that no individual filmmaker intended, since
no filmmaker was even aware of the long-term subtle progression at this level
of detail, even if some may have had a conscious personal preference for darker
images. As this example suggests, one need not study particular authors to
develop fine-grained observations about stylistic change.
6 Patrick Keating
The Question of the Classical Style
The most influential analysis of Hollywood cinema as a group style is The Classical Hollywood Cinema, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.
While many of the 100-plus films selected for this study share visible commonalities, it should be noted right away that the authors do not claim that all Hollywood
films look the same. Quite the contrary, Thompson’s careful account of the techniques of the “soft style” in the 1920s and Bordwell’s discussion of deep-focus
cinematography in the 1940s both detail important shifts in the visual texture of
Hollywood films. It is by moving up a level of abstraction that one can find the
factors constituting a group style. Hollywood filmmakers, they argue, were committed to an ideal of clear narration, using the tools of film style to make the story
(in particular, the goal-driven actions of the characters) comprehensible to large
audiences. To that end, Hollywood cinematographers often worked hard to make
their techniques as unobtrusive as possible. This ideal remained a guiding principle from the early years of the feature film to the end of the studio system and
beyond.11 When considering how to adopt a new technology, from the soft-focus
lens to CinemaScope, the cinematographer’s first question was, “How can I use
this device to tell the story?”
Trade journals and interviews provide ample evidence that many filmmakers
continue to espouse “classical” principles. The respected cinematographer Roger
Deakins once said, “It’s about the script and the story. The best cinematography,
I’m afraid, is the photography which doesn’t get any mention.”12 And yet it seems
clear that the films of today differ greatly from the films of seventy years ago. As
one way of addressing this intermingling of continuity and change, Bordwell has
proposed that contemporary Hollywood cinema follows principles of “intensified continuity,” using faster editing rates and increased camera movement to
amplify a film’s visceral impact, without abandoning the commitment to broadly
comprehensible storytelling. In this way, the classical principles remain relevant,
even if Hollywood has modified its aesthetic in significant ways.13
However, many scholars would argue that this proposal does not go far
enough, failing to account for the increasing role of spectacle in a Hollywood
cinema increasingly dominated by blockbusters for global audiences, sequels,
and action spectaculars that seem stitched together for the primary purpose
of launching a theme park ride. For instance, Scott Bukatman has argued that
the apparent persistence of classical technique only serves to mask the otherwise obvious decline of narrative in the New Hollywood: “While Hollywood
cinema continued to revel in the sensational, sensual realm of visual, auditory,
and kinesthetic effects, the devaluation of narrative was hidden within a desperate overvaluation of overly explicit storytelling; a denial of its own undeniable
supersession.”14 Others make the related argument that style itself has become
spectacle, with an appeal that goes well beyond storytelling.15
Introduction 7
Indeed, one might push this skepticism even farther, wondering just how
classical films were, even in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. My own
previous work has offered some proposals along this line. While reaffirming the
value of the classical model, I also consider how cinematographers defined “storytelling” very broadly, placing special emphasis on the use of expressive lighting
to suit the mood of the story, and I argue that even this broader conception of
classical storytelling cannot fully account for the value that the system placed
on other functions, most notably glamour lighting, which studios insisted cinematographers practice independent of narrative motivation.16 Other scholars
point to particular genres or cycles that appear to break from the clarity of Hollywood norms. In a landmark essay on film noir, originally published in 1974,
Janey Place and Lowell Peterson showed how noir cinematography systematically
departed from Hollywood conventions, favoring off-balance frames, hard-toread compositions, and unglamorous lighting schemes.17 These stylistic traits
remain significant, given how influential the neo-noir style has been on Hollywood lighting since at least the 1980s. Most generally, this scholarly debate forces
us to consider carefully the relationship between cinematography and storytelling. How can visual style serve the story, and how might cinematography push
beyond the limits of classical norms?
Chapter Preview
Of course, this brief survey cannot do justice to the wide range of ideas developed
in cinematography scholarship in the field of film and media studies, but it has
served to highlight some of the key issues that this book’s six chapters discuss.
All six contributors wrestle with these questions—technology, authorship, and
the persistence or decline of classical norms—though they do not always come to
the same conclusions.
My own chapter examines cinematography in the silent era, from the 1890s
to the late 1920s. Following Tom Gunning, I draw a distinction between the “cinema of attractions,” which directly appeals to the spectator’s attention through a
series of exciting moments of spectacle, and the subsequent “cinema of narrative
integration,” which subordinates those sensory appeals to the logic of an unfolding story.18 Many important cinematographic devices, from the close-up to the
pan, appeared in former period, which thrived until around 1907. The cinema of
attractions puts the cinema itself on display, including the devices of cinematography, offering special effects, electric lighting, and the spectacle of movement
as attractions to be enjoyed for their own sake. Significantly, the attraction does
not go away during the cinema of narrative integration; its energy persists in
many forms, from the glamorous close-ups of classical Hollywood stars to the
spectacular digital effects of today. The rest of my chapter argues that narrative
8 Patrick Keating
integration was one of three interlocking processes that shaped Hollywood
cinematography in the silent period and beyond, the other two being industrialization and aestheticization. Just as Hollywood grew into an evermore efficient
mass-production system, Hollywood cinematographers developed a public
identity as artists, using their pictorial skills to shape the moods of the stories
being told. These three processes—narrative integration, industrialization, and
aestheticization—could complement one another, but they could also produce
tensions, tensions that would shape the theory and practice of Hollywood cinematography for years to come.
In chapter 2, Chris Cagle examines the studio period, from the transition
to sound to 1946. While acknowledging that this was a period of stability overall, he points to several layers of innovation and difference operating within the
steady studio context. Moving from the general to the specific, those layers can be
found at the industry-wide level, at the level of the studio, and at the level of the
individual cinematographer. At the industry level, photography grew sharper,
focus deeper, and the lighting darker over the course of the 1930s and 1940s.
Though we might point to certain films as the culminations of these changes, and
to other films as notable exceptions to the trends, both arguments must rest on a
prior recognition that the industry as a whole was exploring new stylistic ideas.
Within this industry-wide context, we can locate the specific “house styles” of the
studios. After interrogating and clarifying the notion of “studio style” as a theoretical concept, Cagle proceeds to examine three case studies: the polished style of
MGM in the 1930s, the more realistic approach to glamour of Warner Bros. in the
early 1940s, and the prestige realist style of Twentieth Century–Fox throughout
the 1940s. A final level of specificity considers the style of the individual cinematographer. Though almost all cinematographers were skilled professionals in full
command of industry and studio norms, a handful of cinematographers brought
distinctive visual sensibilities to their projects. As examples, Cagle considers the
realism of James Wong Howe, the romanticism of George Barnes, the modernism of Rudolph Maté, and the artful minimalism of Leon Shamroy.
In chapter 3, Lisa Dombrowski considers the postwar decades, when Hollywood filmmakers confronted declining theatrical audiences due to the impact
of television, suburbanization, and other sociocultural factors. Dombrowski
argues that many changes in the period’s cinematography were driven along
two seemingly contrasting tracks: realism and spectacle. A key example here is
the rise of location shooting, which served as a form of realism in the case of
the postwar semi-documentaries like The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948, d.p.
William Daniels), and yet provided extravagant spectacle in the case of runaway
productions shot in foreign locales in the 1950s.19 Similarly, cinematographers
pursued realism by breaking with longstanding norms of glamour lighting,
while new technologies in color and widescreen put cinematic imagery itself
on display. Though Dombrowski stresses that most cinematographers retained
Introduction 9
classical values, using style to support clear and engaging storytelling, she points
to a number of cinematographers who pushed the envelope, testing the limits
of cinematographic stylization with deep noir shadows, as in the work of John
Alton, or with bombastic color palettes, as in certain musicals from the 1960s.
Her chapter ends in 1967, often seen as an important transitional year for Hollywood, with the rule-breaking Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, d.p. Burnett
Guffey) pointing the way toward the new look and attitude of the 1970s.
That decade is the primary subject of Bradley Schauer’s chapter on the “Auteur
Renaissance.” Just as a new generation of directors like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman revitalized Hollywood filmmaking with fresh ideas about film drawn
from art cinema, so too did a new generation of cinematographers like Gordon
Willis and Vilmos Zsigmond emerge to refresh the field with new approaches to
image-making. Many of these young cinematographers introduced techniques
to deliberately soften the image, such as flashing the negative to reduce contrast,
placing diffusion over the lens to give pictures a subtly hazy quality, and using
long lenses and open apertures to create a shallow depth of field. This new soft
style is an excellent example of how the cultural meanings of a device might shift
over time; in the silent period, the same set of devices carried connotations of
ethereal aestheticism; now, a soft image might connote naturalism just as much
as aestheticism, a naturalism borne out of a visible rejection of the crisp professional polish that had become the Hollywood norm. Schauer also considers
how mainstream Hollywood cinematographers adapted visual ideas from other
sources, borrowing handheld camerawork from cinéma vérité and split-screen
photography from World’s Fair exposition films. For the Auteur Renaissance
generation, the challenge was to take these highly expressive new forms and
make them function within the context of what was still a storytelling cinema.
In chapter 5, Paul Ramaeker covers Hollywood cinematography from 1981
to 1999. In the 1980s, Hollywood abandoned the narrative experiments with art
cinema that had characterized many of the most innovative films of the 1970s,
instead adopting a blockbuster-driven strategy designed to maximize profits for
companies that increasingly functioned as global corporations. Although this
business strategy entailed a conservative return to classical genre stories most
likely to bring box office success, cinematography pushed away from classicism,
placing a new priority on spectacular visual impact. The Steadicam and other
devices allowed cinematographers to incorporate more mobile framings; the
example of Storaro inspired experimentation with carefully controlled color palettes; and the rise of neo-noir sparked a revival in high-contrast photography
with deep shadows. Ramaeker proposes three frameworks to help us understand cinematography in the New Hollywood. First, cinematography became
hyperbolic, taking traditional devices like the tracking shot or low-key lighting
scheme and amplifying them for maximum visual impact. Second, filmmakers
made knowing references to preexisting styles and films, from the musical to