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Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography, a lovely 90-minute conversation about, meditation on, and illustration of movie photography, is authored by many eyes: Its directors are film scholar Stuart Samuels, film editor Arnold Glassman, and Variety critic Todd McCarthy. It is also "written" by McCarthy--a credit that might look odd on an interview-plus-clip film but is amply justified by the felt presence in the film of a shaping intelligence. These creators have succeeded in...what's that? forgot something, you say?...oh yes, Visions' DP is Nancy Schreiber, whose drolly varied lightings and posings of her talking heads delight the eye and sometimes quietly rhyme with what they are talking about. As for Visions' excerpts from its more than 100 films, they are always shown in proper ratio and look mint clean. Todd McCarthy told Matthew Flamm in the New York Post that the scenes from Vittorio Storaro's The Conformist are from a newly struck print. And everything in Visions looks as if it could say the same.
The movement in Visions is chronological. Current cinematographers take us through the high phases of (pretty largely) American cinematography--by way of influence or reminiscence or apprenticeship or some combination thereof. The documentary opens with Guy Green images from Oliver Twist being commented on by Ernest Dickerson--an instance of Dickerson's impressionability in childhood.
The fluid cameras of the silent cinema, as supremely exemplified by the Karl Struss-Charles Rosher Sunrise, were cabined and confined at the onset of sound, but soon broke out of their prisons in the virtuoso movements of the Thirties: Sol Polito images from Gold Diggers of 1933, an extraordinary Oliver T. Marsh shot of Joan Crawford gazing at a slowly moving train from the 1931 Possessed. But the job of the cinematographer soon degenerated (that word is not used but is implied) into star-flattering: Ernest Haller presents Bette Davis' face in Jezebel; Bill Daniels invents the Garbo visage; Lee Garmes shapes the Marlene mask in Shanghai Express. The hegemonic studios insisted on the cult of the face. Visions has, in its heart of hearts, little time for icons; it is a closet...