Jack Cardiff Biography
Jack Cardiff was born in Yarmouth in 1914 and became best known for his mastery of film photography. He contributed with great importance and pre-eminence in the field of aesthetic research, especially chromatic, and in the search for technical solutions.
His career as a director, however, was less significant, limited to a period of thirty years, between 1942 and 1973, and often tainted by a smug aestheticizing academicism. However, his skill with the camera was put to the service of great filmmakers such as Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Richard Fleischer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Albert Lewin and Alfred Hitchcock.
In 1948, he won an Oscar for the symbolic suggestion and photographic virtuosity of the colors of Powell and Pressburger's "Black Narcissus." In 2001, he received the honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and in 1994 he received the International Award given to him by the American Society of Cinematographers.
He has always exploited the technical opportunities offered by the evolution of the medium and cinematographic formats to compose images of great spectacular impact, as in the cinemascope of "Fanny" by Joshua Logan or the vistavision of "War and peace" by King Vidor. During World War II, he worked as a propaganda documentary cameraman for the British government corporation Crown Film Unit, such as on Pat Jackson's "Western Approaches." Cardiff's real school was the sound stages, where he started as an assistant and camera operator, in films such as "The Ghost Goes West" by René Clair or "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" by Powell and Pressburger.
It was with this pair of directors that he gave his best, rendering on the screen the sumptuousness and evocative suggestion of fantastic atmospheres, exoticism, mystery and delirious fantasy, as in the film "A Matter of Life and Death" of 1946. Cardiff's talent for suggesting unusual dimensions with light is found in genre films, such as thriller, horror, science fiction and adventure, photographed for Fleischer, such as "The Vikings" of 1958, "Amityville 3-D" of 1983 and 1987's "Million Dollar Mystery."
In 1996, he wrote the memoir "Magic Hours", and in 2000 the documentary "Persistence of Vision" by Craig McCall was dedicated to him. Jack Cardiff died in 2009.
