A focus on cinematographer

Willis, now retired and living in Falmouth, is to receive an honorary Oscar tonight at the Academy of Motion Picture’s Governors Awards, as are John Calley (recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), Roger Corman, and Lauren Bacall. It’s an especially impressive list. Calley is a much respected Hollywood executive, a key figure during the ’70s at Warners, later the head of both United Artists and Sony, and an independent producer whose films have run the gamut from “The Remains of the Day’’ to “The Da Vinci Code.’’ Corman, of course, is a unique figure in Hollywood history, for decades an impresario of slyly subversive schlock who helped foster the careers of Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme, among others. Lauren Bacall you know about - you do know how to whistle, don’t you?

The reason the list is so impressive is, presumably, the same reason the awards are being given now instead of March 7, at the regular awards ceremony. The academy is trying to sex up the broadcast (and increase television ratings) by doubling the number of best picture nominees to 10 and off-loading such lesser items as the honorary awards. But even the academy isn’t so stupid as to fail to realize that those are often the worthiest, and most distinguished, recipients. So the last thing it wants is to make the honorary awards seem like just a graybeard version of the technical awards (which got off-loaded some time ago).

So to keep people interested, the academy’s put together a great list. And if you care about the movies, the greatest name on that list belongs to Willis. Bacall’s the biggest name, of course, and she’s great, too. But few people in the history of film in any field have had the kind of run Willis had between 1971, with Alan J. Pakula’s “Klute’’ (has New York City ever looked more matter of factly kinky?) and 1985, with Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.’’ Willis earned his nickname, “the Prince of Darkness,’’ with the first two “Godfather’’ pictures. But Willis, who’ll be appearing at the Harvard Film Archive next Friday and Saturday, was no less good with radiance - “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy’’ (1982), for Allen, or Pakula’s “Comes a Horseman’’ (1978), an otherwise forgettable movie whose glorious exteriors make one mourn the western Willis might have photographed for, say, Sam Peckinpah. They could have called it “Ride the Higher Country.’’

Willis’s most celebrated shot is probably the long, long Library of Congress reverse shot in “All the President’s Men.’’ His most celebrated achievement, and rightly so, has to be the look of the “Godfather’’ movies: the alternation between shadow and light, the use of tableau-like long shots, etc. Conversely, the accomplishment he gets least credit for, and in some ways it’s his most impressive, is single-handedly making Woody Allen a visual director. Before “Annie Hall’’ (1977), the first movie Willis shot for Allen, none of his pictures had anything approaching a look. Contrast that with how distinctive, distinguished, and utterly different from each other are the visual presentations of “Annie Hall,’’ “Interiors’’ (1978), “Manhattan,’’ “Stardust Memories’’ (1980), “Sex Comedy,’’ “Zelig,’’ “Broadway Danny Rose’’ (1984), and “Purple Rose.’’

And that leaves unmentioned Willis’s sumptuous, one-of-a-kind evocation of the Great Depression in “Pennies From Heaven’’ (1981), his codifying a camera grammar for the paranoid thriller in Pakula’s “The Parallax View’’ (1974), or how John Houseman credited Willis’s visual scheme for helping “create’’ Houseman’s character in James Bridges’s “The Paper Chase’’ (1973). Houseman said that in the acceptance speech he gave when he won his best supporting actor Oscar. Now Willis will get to give one, too.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com