Cameraman is a biodoc about Jack Cardiff, the great early Technicolor cinematographer. The film shows how he moved up in the ranks of English cinema and, due to his years of experience as a camera operator, was selected to learn the complicated process of color photography from the Technicolor labs. He worked on several productions with The Archers, that is the great British filmmaking collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger. He was a camera operator for
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, partly because he was one of the only people on the continent who knew how to use the gigantic camera, and later went on to be the director of photography for the great
A Matter of Life and Death.
Once Powell and Pressberger split up, Cardiff worked as cinematographer on such films as John Huston's
The African Queen and Lawrence Olivier's
The Prince and the Showgirl (the subject of the new movie,
My Week with Marilyn).
This is a very nice tribute piece filled with wonderful clips from some of the greatest British color films ever made. It makes very clear how talented Cardiff was and how important he was to the development of color filming. There are lots of talking-head interviews, including Martin Scorsese, for whom The Red Shoes (another film that Cardiff worked on) was an important work.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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