Jack Cardiff is widely acknowledged as the cinematographer whose experimentation with the new format of Technicolor created some of the most influential color images in the history of cinema.
Born in 1914, he was a child actor and appeared in his first silent film (My Son, My Son) at the age of just four; he found his vocation behind the camera at the age of 15 when he started working as a clapper boy and camera assistant at British International Pictures.
By 1936, Cardiff had become a camera operator at Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios. It was then that he was chosen to be Technicolor’s first trainee in the UK on the basis of an interview in which he professed technical ignorance, but a fascination with how painters used light to achieve certain effects. He operated camera on the first film to be shot in the UK in Technicolor—Wings of the Morning (1937)—and was mentored by US cinematographer Ray Rennahan. He also traveled the world with 16mm travelog filmmaker Count von Keller shooting films in three-strip Technicolor in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
During the war, he shot several documentaries with the Ministry Of Information’s Crown Film Unit including the Oscar-winning Western Approaches in which he had to cram the unwieldy three-strip Technicolor camera onto lifeboats and ships to shoot the action.
It was a fortuitous job as second-unit cameraman on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1943 which would start a partnership that would define Cardiff’s career. Powell was so impressed by his work on Blimp that he hired him as cinematographer on A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the epic post-war fantasy which he shot in both color and black and white.
Black Narcissus followed in 1947. Set in the Himalayas but shot entirely at Pinewood Studios outside London, the film confirmed Cardiff’s painterly eye and his debt to Vermeer, Turner and Caravaggio. His use of light, shadow, color and movement in creating the expressive visual mood for the pent-up drama and repressed sexuality of the film was striking and won him an Oscar.
The third and final film he shot for Powell and Pressburger—The Red Shoes in 1948—took his experimentation with color and light to even bolder levels. The classic film, set in the world of ballet, included the stunning Robert Helpmannchoreographed Red Shoes ballet, and Cardiff came up with numerous ideas to add visual excitement from changing the speeds of the film when shooting the dance to dramatic close-ups on the dancers—no mean feat bearing in mind the size of the Technicolor camera.
Although he wouldn’t work again with Powell and Pressburger, Cardiff went on to create other works with great directors—with Alfred Hitchcock on Under Capricorn (1951), which featured dizzying long takes around complicated sets, and with John Huston on The African Queen (1951), which was shot on a river boat in the Belgian Congo. His career took off from then and he shot a series of dazzling Technicolor movies in the 1950s, both in Hollywood and the UK, including Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), The Magic Box (1951), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), War and Peace (1957), The Prince and the Showgirl (1956) and The Vikings (1958). He became renowned for his ravishing lighting of screen goddesses from Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe to Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.
His close relationship with actors and his keen interest in serving the story led him to direct his own films, first on B-movies like Intent to Kill (1958) and Web of Evidence (1959) and then, famously, on Sons and Lovers in 1960. His film of the DH Lawrence novel, set in a northern English mining town and shot, ironically, in black and white, won seven Oscar nominations, including one for Cardiff as director. His cinematographer Freddie Francis won the Oscar.
He focused on directing throughout the 1960s but when the UK film industry almost ground to a halt in the 1970s he made a decision to return to cinematography and his output was as busy and diverse as ever taking in action movies including Rambo and Conan The Destroyer and epic TV mini-series The Far Pavilions and The Last Days of Pompeii.
He died in 2009 at the age of 94, but by then his legacy had been truly recognized. He was the first cinematographer to win the honorary Oscar in 2001, and a feature-length documentary on his career—Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff—was released in 2010 to great acclaim. It featured extensive interviews with the likes of Cardiff aficionado Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow and Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
01 Jack Cardiff with John Huston on the set of The African Queen
02 The Red Shoes
03 The African Queen
04 A Matter of Life and Death
05 Black Narcissus
