Image Makers: The Adventures of America's Pioneer Cinematographers

When a movie is a hit, often folks credit the director or actors. Rarely do they think about or mention the cinematographers--the folks who have amazing eyes and make the films look so amazing. A great example of how important a great cinematographer is would be in "The Third Man"...a gorgeous film where the star clearly is the guy filming the picture. This movie pasy homage to many of the great cinematographers over the last 100+ years.

I loved this film for several reasons. First, it helps you notice the work of the cinematographer...showing you and describing scenes where various innovations are used. Second, it had so many wonderful people involved with it...such as Leonard Maltin and Kevin Brownlow. Well worth seeing and lovingly made...well worth your time if you consider yourself a true cinephile.

TCM has just run this history of the art of the cinematographers and I am impressed. It tells the story of camerawork through the careers of half a dozen cameramen, from Billy Bitzer through Greg Toland. While it is not a perfect work, continuing the legends of early cinema, it works best in showing the evolution of the craft, Without denigration, it shows, for example, that Greg Toland did not invent deep focus for CITIZEN KANE.

More than that, it exalts the cameraman (and camerawoman) to a rightful place in the collaborative art that is cinema. The idea of the auteur, the single genius -- usually the director -- who is responsible for everything good in a movie, has become the unfortunate standard, with everything that doesn't work blamed on someone else: sometimes an actor that gets too big a head, but more often the despised and anonymous "suits", producers who monkey with the auteur's vision to the movie's woe.

William Wyler, one of the great directors of the studio era, said "It's 90% you get a good script, and maybe 10% actors. There's nothing else in it." If he said that, it simply points out the astonishingly high median of skilled and creative cameramen available to him during this period.... when he worked with the best.

This documentary is thoroughly charming. Does anyone know the opening theme music title? The haunting tune is also repeated several times during the film and sounds like a mystical carousel ride song. It's currently stuck in my head which can often be annoying but this one I truly enjoy. I'll watch below if any other review can help me out. It's not any of the 4 music selections listed in the films trailing credits... I checked. Thanks all!

While this does occasionally descend into hyperbole it is a valuable look back and examination of the pioneer days and the who's who of the first cameramen. Well worth checking out.

Good doc that taught me a lot of stuff ranging from the interestingly trivial...that Chaplin's DP was a semi pro ballplayer...to the rather important, namely that the transition from silent to sound was a lot more seamless for cinematographers than I would have imagined. And the tragic: Losing Gregg Toland at forty four strikes me as a loss to Hollywood creativity the equal of Thalberg, Murnau or Lombard. Talking heads were, for the most part, informative rather than self importantly verbose, although Kevin Brownlow comes off as trying a bit too hard to be this doc's Shelby Foote, so to speak. (i.e. Pushing the eccentric Brit stuff the way Foote did the Southernoid schtick in Ken Burns' "The Civil War")

My main criticism is that picking these seven DP's seems rather arbitrary. I mean, why didn't Leon Shamroy, Stanley Cortez or Ernest Haller make the cut? They were around at the same time as most of these other guys and had equally distinguished careers. I think a better approach would have been to nix all those too cute drawings that take up at least ten minutes of screen time as well as applying the cutting shears to Brownlow and use the time saved for additional worthy cameramen as well as, in some cases, a more generous sampling of their work. (i.e. Rosher/Daniels seem under represented).

Grade: B.