Duncan Petrie,
The British Cinematographer.
London: BFI, 1996.
ISBN 0-85170-581-2, 0-85170-582-0 pbk.
182pp.

Uploaded 15 September 1998

This is a very well researched and worthy presentation of a much-neglected aspect of cinema history and certainly will increase appreciation of the important contribution made by British cinematographers.

However, the book does not start well. In the introduction, Duncan Petrie presents what he claims is a paradox which affects the evaluation of British cinematography. He refers to both Francois Truffaut and Satyajit Ray denigrating British films as “uncinematic” and counters this by listing the disproportionately high number of American Academy awards won by British cinematographers between 1940 and 1990.

There is a major problem with the first part of this argument, as both the directors quoted are actually referring to the use of the camera (e.g. mis-en-scène) by most British directors, rather than being critical of the cinematographers’ contribution. Indeed, Truffaut was very impressed by some British cinematographers’ work, even in unlikely vehicles such as Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, and chose its British cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, to shoot Fahrenheit 451. Likewise, in the early 1960s, Satyajit Ray expressed admiration for the British “realist” cinematographer Walter Lassally.

It would have been more relevant to Petrie’s argument to cite examples from some of the major film history texts, which neglect to acknowledge the important contribution made by British cinematographers to the “visual qualities” of critically acclaimed films.

Although some might question Petrie’s assumption that the American Academy Awards are the ultimate evaluation of cinematography, it is really impressive that twenty one out of seventy one awards (almost 30%) during a fifty one year span went to British cinematographers, despite a judging system inherently favouring US productions. The figures are even more remarkable when one considers other ground-breaking British visual treatments, such as Oswald (“Ossie”) Morris’ work on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, which did not win an Oscar.

Most of the book is devoted to career notes and filmographies of individual cinematographers – an invaluable resource for future historians – preceded by an outline of relevant developments in British film production during one hundred years from the first local filming in 1895.

One of the great strengths of this first section of the book is its presentation of economic, creative and technical influences on cinematography. Economic factors, such as the domination of international screens by American films, create the climate in which all filmmakers work. Within that climate, the cinematographers’ creative contribution is limited by the directors’ visual sense and without appropriate technical resources neither the director nor cinematographer’s vision can be fulfilled.

On the book production side, it is a great pity that there is no index and that the proof-reading is not up to the standard of the text. This can cause confusion for the lay reader when, for example, “shot” appears instead of “shoot” (p59).

The author’s lack of specialist technical knowledge only rarely reveals itself when he attempts to go into too much detail, as in a paragraph on lenses (p 28) which will amuse practising cinematographers, or when he coins strange phrases such as “denser illumination” (p46). Misleading factual errors, such as associating “tremendous… …depth of field due to the large negative used” in VistaVision (p48), could have been avoided by consultation with any of the cinematographers he interviewed.

These faults are more than made up for by the range and quality of Duncan Petrie’s research, which has yielded fine quotes revealing the extent to which cinematography is “an intrinsic player in the drama itself” (p73).

Throughout the book there are fascinating insights, not only into the art and craft of cinematography, but also into the complex process of film making – as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, photographed by Jack Cardiff with a giant Technicolor three-strip camera:

One sequence involved a track from one end of a dining table to the other, ending on a close-up of Ingrid Bergman. The table was covered in props and it was impossible to crane over the top as the shot would be too high, looking down on her and Hitchcock wanted it low. So the table was cut into twelve sections with the plates and glasses glued solidly to each section. The camera started a low track and as it went forward each actor pulled himself, and their part of the table backwards, to fall on to a mattress. According to Cardiff it was like waves parting but the effect worked and the shot ended on a precise 35mm close-up (p78).

Petrie’s contribution to the history of British film making is garnered from both written and oral history. It is a blessing to film historians that cinematographers such as Freddie Young, who started work in the industry in 1917 at the age of fifteen, are still alive to tell of such things as production methods in the silent days and the problems and developments experienced during the transition to sound.

The author laments having been unable to include entries on some cinematographers he considered worthy of inclusion (for example Australians will miss reading about visiting British cinematographers Gordon Dines and Ted Scaife, who respectively shot Siege of Pinchgut and Smiley and exerted some influence in that country) due to the publisher’s restrictions on length.

This problem could have been alleviated by not including the storyline for films (often well known or irrelevant) but, on the very positive side, Petrie’s keen observation and sympathetic analysis of the photography of whole films, and even of particular scenes, is a delight for all those – such as myself – who despair at the almost exclusive attention paid to script, direction and performance in much contemporary film criticism and historical writing.

In conclusion, The British Cinematographer is essential reading for all those interested in the history and development of visual storytelling in the cinema.

David Muir