Carlo Di Palma Biography
Carlo Di Palma was born in Rome in 1925 and grew up in a cinematographic environment as his father was the factory manager of the SAFA factories. At the age of seventeen he became assistant operator to the famous Gianni Di Venanzo. He also worked as an assistant with Luchino Visconti and other Italian masters of black and white cinema. When Di Venanzo became director of photography on Achtung! Bandits! (1951) by Carlo Lizzani, Di Palma became a camera operator.
In the 1960s he was one of the protagonists of the cinema lighting revolution, using reflected and diffused light obtained through photo-flood lamps. He took this research to its extreme consequences, especially in the field of color, exploiting the use of quartz lamps. Thanks to his ability to manipulate natural light, he became one of the finest interpreters of post-war film photography.
Di Palma contributed decisively to a memorable work such as Red Desert (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni, providing an extraordinary figurative interpretation. After a phase of super 8 screen tests, he collaborated with Antonioni to create a film built on the suggestions of colour, both for the transfiguration of the chromatic range of the image, but also for the direct painting of color on things, on trees and even on white painted surfaces.
In the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s, Di Palma worked with Antonioni again, this time on Identification of a Woman (1982). He later worked mainly in the United States, lighting films for Woody Allen such as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), among others. Everyone Says I Love You and Harry in Pieces (1997) earned him the Silver Ribbons.
