Lifetime Achievement Award to Creator of Cinematic Worlds : Film: Cinematographer Stanley Cortez will be honored for his work on such classics as ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ and ‘Night of the Hunter.’

The life of cinematographer Stanley Cortez is filled with images as powerful as those he created in such classic films as “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Night of the Hunter” and “Since You Went Away.”

Working with directors like Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Julien Duvivier and Samuel Fuller, Cortez has created cinematic worlds of rich variety and poetic beauty: a vanished turn-of-the-century America in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Gothic horror in “Night of the Hunter,” claustrophobic nightmares in Fuller’s “Shock Corridor.”

On Sunday, the robust 81-year-old Cortez will be remembered for those and other precious images with the fourth Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers. And from March 9-11, eight of his films--including those above--will be shown in a retrospective hosted by the American Cinematheque at the Directors Guild.

Cortez’ work and his reputation as a maverick have made him a “dominant force in cinema as an art form,” says American Society of Cinematography president Leonard South. “He approaches film like a fine painter.”

Stephen H. Burum, whose cinematography credits include “The Untouchables” and “The War of the Roses,” says Cortez’ great strength is his ability to make extraordinarily powerful images that reflect the content of the scenes without drawing attention to the technique.

They also reflect the man, and a very active life.

“All of us in the creative field must be observers of human life,” says Cortez. “The things that you experience give you the grammar of life itself, which you interpret in your work.”

As a young portrait photographer in 1920s New York, Cortez went to visit his brother, silent film star Ricardo Cortez, on a film set and fell in love with what he saw.

“I walked into the studio and saw hundreds of lights,” Cortez recalls. “It was a big set, with 300 people. A great orchestra played a great waltz, and there stood the director--D. W. Griffith--holding a megaphone. I stood watching, transfixed by the magic of it all.”

Cortez entered the film business as a camera assistant, working on two of Griffith’s last films and on several Busby Berkeley musicals. He soloed as a cinematographer in 1937 and then sprang into prominence with his work on Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

In 1955, a quarter-century after walking wide-eyed onto the Griffith set, he went to work on “The Night of the Hunter,” which starred Robert Mitchum and was directed by Charles Laughton. Combining the eloquent simplicity of Griffith’s silents with the stylized lighting and angles of German Expressionism, Laughton and Cortez created a film many consider one of the most remarkably photographed--and frightening--of all time.

Today, Cortez is an enthusiastic champion of other cinematographers’ work and though he is an outspoken opponent of colorization, he finds more good than evil in new technology, particularly the laser video disc. After seeing his “The Magnificent Ambersons” on disc recently at an American Society of Cinematography screening, he said, “I was dancing with joy. It looked absolutely fabulous.”