Those cinematographers again

I mentioned last week that TCM is running a spotlight this month to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the American Society of Cinematographers. Every Wednesday, they're running movies from some of the outstanding cinematographers in movie history. There's also a documentary being run several times, Image Makers: The Adventures of America's Pioneer Cinematographers. I recorded it last week, and it's going to be on again tomorrow at 4:30 PM and again on the 27th.

Having watched it, I'm not certain if the title is quite right, since it's not always about the "adventures". Sure, there was some of that since a fair amount of what was going on was being done for the first time. And the first cinematographers in Hollwyood certainly had some adventures. I knew that one of the reason film production moved to Hollywood was for the weather, which allowed for filming outdoors during much more of the year, something that was important when they didn't always have enough light to do more elaborate indoor scenes. I had forgotten that part of it was also due to patent issues. Thomas Edison was trying to patent as much of the movie-making business as possible. (Eventually, United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co. ended that.) This is covered a bit, and is an interesting part of the documentary.

Much of the movie is given over to about a half dozen cinematographers up through Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe, discussing some of their great movie work and how they created it. (I know I've specifically mentioned Toland's cinematography in The Best Years of Our Lives before, and one specific example of his work on that film that I'm mentioned here gets mentioned in the documentary as well.) A lot of that is interesting, if not exactly "adventures".

There are also some audio archives with pioneering cinematographers, as well as interviews with a couple of their descendants along with film historians like Kevin Brownlow, all of which provides a lot of good background information. All in all, even if it's not perfect, this one is quite a worthy documentary, and well worth a watch.