Masters of the Light : The revelatory documentary ‘Visions of Light’ pays tribute to those often-forgotten masters of the movies, the cinematographers

If movies are magic, then cinematographers are the resident wizards. Creators of images, manipulators of sun and shadow, they are drawn to light as well as its absence, and they use both to spin the visual webs that snare us all. At their best, says director of photography Allan Daviau, cinematographers “make the pauses speak as eloquently as the words.”

But because their work is technical, more dependent on complicated hardware and specific knowledge than that of either the writer or the director, cinematographers tend to be the forgotten folk of the movie process. If everyone outside the business wants to write a screenplay and everyone inside it thinks they can direct, directors of photography are much less likely to be either lionized or envied, and even such basics as appreciation and understanding can be hard to come by.

Which is why “Visions of Light,” the new documentary opening Wednesday at the Nuart in West Los Angeles for a regrettably brief one-week run, is both a treat and a revelation. Made with the cooperation of the American Society of Cinematographers (which holds its annual awards banquet tonight), “Visions” is not just the visual treasure house you’d expect it to be, overflowing with some of the most gorgeous images, both familiar and not, in the history of American film; it is also a revisionist look at that history, an attempt to give the cinematographer the rightful place at the table more insistent collaborators have claimed for their own.

Co-directed by editor Arnold Glassman, screenwriter and interviewer Todd McCarthy and producer Stuart Samuels (who will speak at the Nuart on Wednesday night), “Visions” thoughtfully intermixes clips from 125 films and interviews with more than two dozen cinematographers. Such people as Daviau (“Bugsy”), Nestor Almendros (“Days of Heaven”), Michael Ballhaus (“GoodFellas”), Haskell Wexler (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”), Vittorio Storaro (“The Conformist”) and just about everyone else not only tell tales about their own work but speak perceptively about the entire history of the form.

One of the unexpected themes of “Visions” is how much interconnection with and indebtedness to those who have come before them today’s cinematographers feel. An apprenticeship system both actual and spiritual is at work, with Haskell Wexler, for instance, speaking with near-awe about the time he spent under the wing of veteran James Wong Howe. And everyone is more than eager to talk up the unsung heroes of the profession, from Gregg Toland and John Alton to the more contemporary Gordon Willis and Conrad Hall, who reveals how a happy accident led to a beautiful visual touch in “In Cold Blood.”

Accident, risk, instinct and experimentation in fact turn out to be key components of a cinematographer’s modus operandi. Since the history of the profession is one of repeatedly having to start from scratch when revolutions such as the coming of sound, color and finally wide-screen formats suddenly and irrevocably changed all the rules, Stephen Burum (“The Outsiders”) says cinematographers have gotten used to “always pushing, always wanting to explore, getting into trouble and fighting your way out of it.”

In the beginning, in the turn of the century days of Melies and Lumiere, it was much simpler: The person who ran the camera was the only filmmaker around. After that, early cinematographers such as D. W. Griffith’s legendary Billy Bitzer not only knew the mechanics of still photography inside out, they also were able to get exceptional results (witness “Birth of a Nation”) with what by today’s standards was notably primitive equipment.

One advantage for cinematographers who worked in the 1920s, the golden age of silent film, was that the small, lightweight camera, unencumbered by the strictures of sound recording, had the freedom to go anywhere. As a result, the clips demonstrate, a wonderful sense of giddiness and excitement marked the visual style of the best of these pictures.

From the Perils-of-Pauline thrills of the Griffith-Bitzer “Way Down East” to the ahead-of-its-time experimentation and complex technical accomplishments of European-influenced films such as King Vidor’s “The Crowd” (shot by Henry Sharp) and F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss behind the camera), a liveliness that still intoxicates today was frequently on display.

A few words from Al Jolson put an abrupt end to all that. For when sound came in, as “Visions” funereally points out, its technical demands almost literally nailed the camera to the floor. Though some directors (such as Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer George Folsey in “Applause”) tried to get around the problem by moving the camera when there was no dialogue, all too many films (witness an ossified clip from one particularly static early sound effort) were stuck with the consequences of putting the microphone in a flower arrangement and having to hover nearby.

As sound recording gradually got more sophisticated, so did visual styles. MGM, for instance, insisted on making the stars look drop-dead glamorous even if they were nominally sweating to death in the tropics (as Jean Harlow was in “Red Dust”). It is an article of faith among today’s directors of photography that Garbo’s longtime cinematographer William Daniels had as much to do with the creation of her on-screen persona as the star did herself.

Perhaps the most inventive of all black-and-white directors of photography was Gregg Toland, whose career was truncated by death at age 44. Best known for doing such an extraordinary job on “Citizen Kane” that director Orson Welles shared a title card with him, Toland (visible at work in a rare bit of home-movie footage) was much more than a one-shot wonder. He used classic documentary compositions in “The Grapes of Wrath” and worked wonderfully with darkness and shadow in “The Long Voyage Home.” Some of “Visions of Light’s” most moving interview footage shows the startling effects his genius had on such diverse current talent as Sven Nykvist and Lazslo Kovacs.

Speaking of darkness and shadow, “Visions” not unexpectedly deals lovingly with the most visually exciting of Hollywood genres, the moody film noir, lit and photographed by men who “were not afraid of the dark.” The master of this kind of thing, whose all but forgotten reputation this film gives a welcome boost to, was John Alton. As stark, vivid clips from the almost never seen “The Big Combo” (1955) and “T-Men” (1947) beautifully demonstrate, absolutely no one did it any better than he did.

Color, as noted, once again shook things up, and glimpses of the almost unimaginable richness of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” create a longing for the long-gone three-strip Technicolor process it was shot in, while Vittorio Storaro’s almost mystical description of how he employs modern color helps explain why he is such a master at its use.

When “Visions of Light” reaches the modern age, it turns more anecdotal, with Conrad Hall explaining how he brought respectability to what used to be considered visual mistakes, Nestor Almendros (in his last interview) expounding on the virtues of “the magic hour” just before sunset, and Gordon Willis, alias the Prince of Darkness, insisting that even if he did go too far into shadow at times, “Rembrandt did too.”

The cinematographers also talk about specific techniques, complete with illustrations, from Michael Ballhaus describing the disconcerting efforts of simultaneously tracking out and zooming in for a shot in “GoodFellas” to Vilmos Zsigmond explaining how he came up with and then grew tired of the desaturated color look he developed for Robert Altman in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”

Perhaps the most interesting case study is John Alonzo’s commentary of the work he did for Roman Polanski on “Chinatown,” describing (as the clips follow his lead) the adjustments both he and the actors had to make so that the hand-held camerawork that created the voyeuristic ambience Polanski wanted could become a reality.

If there is a next frontier for cinematographers, it is probably the use of video, and it is interesting to note that this film (itself shot by Nancy Schreiber) taped all its interviews on extremely impressive High Definition Television, otherwise known as HDTV. So when John Alonzo says that modern cinematographers “took more risks because we had more toys to play with,” it makes you wonder if the surprises this new toy calls forth will be able to compete with the past glories “Visions of Light” so wonderfully brings to light. And to life.