Jack Cardiff 1914 - 2009

The great cinematographer -- perhaps the greatest color cinematographer -- has died at the ripe old age of 94. He's best remembered for his films with the directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and rightly so: 1947's "Black Narcissus" won the cinematography Oscar not just on the strength of Cardiff's jaw-dropping Technicolor Himalayan landscapes but for the glowing eroticism the film discovers in it oxygen-starved community of nuns.

The team's follow-up was 1948's "The Red Shoes," a four-star classic about art, dancing, commitment, and the hard work of creativity that's also one of the most hyper-real looney tunes visual experiences in film history, That goes double for the climactic "Red Shoes" production number that lifts off from musical cinema like a UFO from planet Earth. Not for nothing is this one of Martin Scorses's all-time favorite movies, and Cardiff's handiwork is in every bleeding frame.

Cardiff worked with plenty of other directors, of course -- John Huston ("The African Queen"), Alfred Hitchcock ("Under Capricorn"), Joseph Mankeiwicz ("The Barefoot Contessa") -- and he directed 13 films himself, from the nearly sublime (1960's "Sons and Lovers" is actually one of the better D.H. Lawrence adaptations of its day) to the ridiculous. But he seemed to flower most fruitfully with oddball visionaries like Powell and Albert Lewin, for whom Cardiff shot the dreamlike if not downright nutty "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman." Ava Gardner and the Spanish coast have never looked more bewitching:

Glenn Kenny, as usual, has some lovely things to say, pointing out that Cardiff's "Magic Hour" is one of the more essential books on the art of cinematography and that one of the man's final jobs was, yes, "Rambo: First Blood II". Oh, what the hell:

The dying craft of motion picture camerawork just died a little further.