Cinematography in the 1930s Introduction Cinema

Cinematography refers to the process in film of lighting a shot and achieving quality in the visual images that are captured (Giannetti and Eyman, 2001). The cinematographer in any film is also known as the director of photography and may be either an artist or a technician. It is this individual who is responsible for ensuring that the images appearing on screen are presented to reflect the mood, ambience, and style seen by the film's director, producer, and writer as essential to conveying its meaning. The director of photography (DP) works closely with the director and interprets the action of the story in terms of light, shade, composition, and camera movement. Other responsibilities include selecting the type of lens to be used for a shot, which influences the appearance of the image, and determining the camera's position and angle. The DP rarely operates the camera directly; this function usually falls to a camera operator.

It is the purpose of this report to examine cinematography in 1930s Hollywood cinema and to identify the dramatic changes occurring in that era which literally, according to Dimendberg (2003), changed the very nature of the film industry.

Early experiences in motion picture technology included Eadward Muybridge's sequential still photographs of horses jumping around 1877, followed by 1895's kinetoscope developed by Thomas Edison as a continuous loop of film that passed over a series of rollers and in

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icture trust, in Australia by Cinesound and Australian Films, and by leading studios in Austria, France, Italy, Germany, India, Japan, and South America (1930s: Technicolor and beyond, 2003, p. 2). Black (1995), agreeing that technology in the form of new lenses and lighting equipment helped to advance the field of cinematography n the 1930s, also pointed out that new collaborations of an artistic nature between directors and cinematographers also advanced the art. Specifically, cinematographers equipped with new technology became better able to employ aesthetic ideals than they had in the past. Perhaps most significantly, says Black (19950, both Hollywood directors and cinematographers of the 1930s approached film-making from an ideological as well as an artistic and commercial perspective, using their various skills to make political and social points alongside artistic statements. This is particularly evident, says Black (19950, in films such as All Quiet on the Western Front, a war film that detailed the horrors of war in manner that made a strong anti-war message implicit for audiences. Cinematographer Arthur Edson was responsible for the dramatic use of light and shadow (known in art as chiaroscuro) that make this fil

Category: Film - C