The Cinematographer as Artist: A Way of Painting With Light

One way of looking at Conrad L. Hall is as an Oscar-winning cinematographer, but another is as a master artist who uses light and composition as his paintbrush and celluloid as his canvas. The man responsible for the distinctive look of films ranging from the crisply chilly black-and-white “In Cold Blood” to the surreal suburbia of “American Beauty” has been described as a magical realist.

“He tries to suggest a meaning, a psychology, an atmosphere that may not be expressed by the characters in the film but are expressed visually,” explains Chen-Sim Lim, programmer at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. “He tells us with his lighting and his composition what the characters may not be saying themselves.”

Hall’s career of more than 50 years is being feted by the UCLA archive with a two-week retrospective, “Conrad Hall: Art of Light.” The festival opens tonight at the James Bridges Theater in the university’s Melnitz Hall with a screening of the newly restored 1972 John Huston film “Fat City.” Hall supplied the hard-edged visuals for this gritty drama about a boxer on the skids. He will participate in a question-and-answer session after the screening.

Other highlights of the festival include “In Cold Blood” (1967) and “The Professionals” (1966), also newly restored; “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), for which Hall received his first Oscar; “The Day of the Locust” (1975); and “Wild Seed” (1965), one of his first feature films.

Hall, who has received nine Oscar nominations, has also been named Kodak cinematographer in residence at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and will conduct workshops during the spring quarter.

The son of James Norman Hall, co-writer of the novels “Mutiny on the Bounty” and “The Hurricane,” Hall, 75, was born and raised in Tahiti, where he now owns an island. He had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and initially had set his sights on journalism at USC. “I tried for a while to see whether there were any writing genes rattling around, and I signed up for journalism my junior year,” Hall recalled in a recent interview. “I got a D-plus in creative writing. I decided to look for something else to do.”

In search of a new major, he perused the course catalog. “It started with A for astronomy, B for biology and C for cinema. I thought, ‘Cinema? You mean like movies? Rubbing elbows with the stars? Making all that money?’ For all the wrong reasons, I signed up, and then had a love affair with the visual language and learned to tell stories like my dad.”

When he switched to cinema in 1947, Hall realized he was getting in on the ground floor of a still-young art form. “The turn of the century is when it began, and in 1947 it was only 47 years into it,” he said. “Now it is 102 years into it, and I’ve been with it for 52 years. I thought about being on the ground floor of something--that was one of the main reasons I got into it, to have the chance, the opportunity to be in something new.”

Just as it was kismet that he turned to cinema, it was another serendipitous move that he became a cinematographer. After he graduated from USC, he and two friends, Marvin Weinstein and Jack Couffer, formed a production company and bought a short story to make as a feature. “We all wanted to direct it,” said Hall. Knowing that was impossible, they put three strips of paper labeled producer, director and cinematographer into a hat. Hall drew cinematographer.

He’s still trying to direct a film--a comedy he wrote about a gigolo going through a midlife crisis--so he can have control over the story.

A Collaborator With Valuable Input

Steve Zaillian, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Schindler’s List,” also directed two films, on which he worked with Hall: “Searching for Bobby Fischer” (1993) and “A Civil Action” (1998). Hall received Oscar nominations for both.

Zaillian said Hall is much more of a collaborator than most cinematographers. “He is one of the most important storytellers in terms of being like a writer or a director,” he said. “He taught me a lot, really, about how to direct.”

Hall broke into TV in the early ‘60s as a cinematographer on the rodeo series “Stoney Burke” and the sci-fi anthology series “The Outer Limits.”

Hall considers Richard Brooks, the director of “The Professionals” and “In Cold Blood,” his surrogate father.

It was Brooks’ decision to shoot “In Cold Blood,” based on Truman Capote’s nonfiction book about the brutal murder of a Kansas family by two small-time hoods, in black and white. “I couldn’t imagine doing it in color because it is a bleak story and it seems to me that the colorness of it would somehow impinge on the power of the events that took place,” Hall said. “It was absolutely the right thing.”

His work on the jaunty, nostalgic western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was 180 degrees removed from the starkness of “In Cold Blood.” His use of sepia and golden hues gave the Paul Newman-Robert Redford classic a burnished glow.

“What I did in the film was to sort of create a less rigid style of shooting westerns than had occurred before,” Hall said. His use of zoom and long lenses in the sequences in which the posse were was chasing Butch and Sundance were intended as a metaphor of changing times.

Beginning in the late ‘70s, Hall took a decade-long sabbatical to write screenplays. “These were stories I wanted to tell,” he said. “I didn’t want to become a director, but I wanted to have the opportunity to direct a film.”

He returned to his craft in 1987 with the Bob Rafelson thriller “Black Widow.”

“He hadn’t done a movie in five years,” Hall said. “I hadn’t done one in 10 years. We met in the grocery store.... He said, ‘I’ve got this film I want to do called “Black Widow.” Would you like to shoot it?’ I decided to come back.”

Hall’s latest film is “Road to Perdition,” which reunites him with “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes. The film, starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, opens in July. He hasn’t worked since he finished filming the Depression-era drama last summer, noting that long hours of filming take their toll.

“I mean, a painter doesn’t have the hardships that a cinematographer has. These incredible hours impinge on your creativity,” he said.

Hall is especially honored that UCLA is giving him his retrospective, because his cinematographer son, Conrad W. Hall, graduated from UCLA in 1980. “He just finished shooting ‘Panic Room,’” said the elder Hall. “I am such a proud father.”

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“Conrad Hall: Art of Light” screens tonight-June 2 at the James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, located on the northeast corner of the UCLA Westwood campus. Admission is $7 general and $5 for students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Assn. members. For information, call (310) 206-FILM or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu.

Tonight at 7:30, “Fat City”; Tuesday at 7 p.m., “In Cold Blood” followed by “Electra Glide in Blue”; next Saturday at 7:30 p.m., “The Professionals” followed by “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”; May 26 at 7 p.m., “The Day of the Locust” followed by “Tequila Sunrise”; June 2 at 7 p.m., “Wild Seed” followed by “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”