Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff (HD Trailer)
[Source: ModusOperandiFilms]
Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff, a new documentary directed by Craig McCall, tells the story of one of the most influential directors of photography in the age of color. His groundbreaking work on the classic 1948 dance movie, The Red Shoes, is key to his reputation.
As NPR reports:
“In The Red Shoes…Powell and Cardiff depicted ballet in a radical new way, [Thelma] Schoonmaker says, ‘designing a ballet in which the dancers are not on a stage or a proscenium framing but they’re flying through the air, and all kind of wild and crazy things are going on. Because they’re capturing in the film the feelings of a dancer and what it feels like, and particularly a dancer in love.'”
“To give the audience this new experience of what dance feels like to the dancer, Cardiff invented a way to change the speed of the camera, to make a dancer pause almost imperceptibly at the top of a leap, to float free for a moment, as it were.”
“And he made the massive Technicolor camera, almost as big as a refrigerator, do hand-held shots, by mounting it on a bungee cord platform attached to the ceiling and then swinging it around to capture the whirling excitement of bodies in motion.”
Official Site: Jack Cardiff
Available on Amazon: The Red Shoes: The Criterion Collection