Focus Features

Jack Cardiff, who died last week at the age of 94, was one of the world's great cinematographers, an expert especially in the art of color photography.  He received numerous honors across the length of his career, including 2 Oscars – one for the cinematography of Powell & Pressbuger's Black Narcissus in 1947 and a second in 2001 for his contribution to cinema.

What follows is an appreciation by Kevin Macdonald, the grandson of Emeric Pressburger. Macdonald is also the Oscar-winning director of the documentaries One Day in September and Touching the Void, as well as the fiction films, The Last King of Scotland and State of Play.

“Jack Cardiff was a cameraman and director of so many distinguished films over the course of his amazingly long career – from The Four Feathers to Rambo: First Blood Part II by way of Huston's The African Queen – that it might seem preposterously reductive to single out two films as the apogee of his art. But The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus were no ordinary pieces of cinematography. In those films, it seems to me, cinema came as close as it ever will to being a painterly medium, one where the images are so potent, so fervid and intense, that they have separated themselves forever from the humble world of reality – from the objects that were actually filmed. Nobody could make those cumbersome Technicolor cameras, with their three strips of negative running simultaneously and their insatiable appetite for light, sing quite like Cardiff could. Apparently they are showing a restored print of The Red Shoes as a Special Presentation at Cannes this year. No other tribute could be so fitting.”

Among the films that Cardiff photographed was The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by Laurence Olivier, starring himself and Marilyn Monroe.

Here is Jack Cardiff's own account of meeting Monroe taken from his autobiography, Magic Hour (Faber & Faber, 1996):

"A door opened behind me, there was a blur of soft material as Marilyn sped swiftly into Arthur Miller's arms, not looking at me until she was hugged in his bear-like embrace. Then she slanted a shy, sleepy smile at me. I had never seen this Marilyn before, in any film or photo. This was no hot sex symbol; this was a little girl, with her face pressed into Daddy's chest, shyly curious of a visitor.

Cardiff with Marilyn Monroe

Her face was still rosy, flushed from sleep, and her buttercup-gold hair tangled like a Botticelli cherub. Her eyes had the unreal clarity of the porcelain eyes in a doll: large, wondering, wide apart and slightly turned down at the outsides; and the mouth, timorously half-parted lips; the saucy turned-up nose - here indeed was a delightful evocation of Renoir.

She didn't say anything to me at all – not even “hello.” She just looked at me with a kind of possessiveness, like a child showing Daddy her prize handiwork from school, and Daddy cuddled his baby with proud tenderness. Still no word to me. Only a soft murmur to Miller as she gazed at me in cosy triumph.

“Isn't it wonderful, darling? He's the greatest, and I've got him!”

I gave them a silly smile, feeling uncomfortably gift-wrapped. That was my first impression of Marilyn Monroe: a wide-eyed innocent child, as pure as springtime.  Could I have been so naive? But everyone had the same reaction when they first met her; her beguiling innocence was not deliberately put on, despite some cynics' opinions.  She seemed to have the vulnerability of a child and you instinctively wanted to protect her.  Larry Olivier told me long afterwards that he, too, had had the same reaction when he first saw her: “But she's only a child! My God, I'm going to fall in love with her!”

“The child” and I had breakfast that morning, and we talked about the film. As I listened to that breathy voice, shy, tremulous, with sudden soft laughter – the sort that causes poets of invoke celestial metaphors – I was completely under her spell and left the house quite convinced that I had just met an angel.”

Jack Cardiff, who died last week at the age of 94, was one of the world's great cinematographers, an expert especially in the art of color photography.  He received numerous honors across the length of his career, including 2 Oscars – one for the cinematography of Powell & Pressbuger's Black Narcissus in 1947 and a second in 2001 for his contribution to cinema.

What follows is an appreciation by Kevin Macdonald, the grandson of Emeric Pressburger. Macdonald is also the Oscar-winning director of the documentaries One Day in September and Touching the Void, as well as the fiction films, The Last King of Scotland and State of Play.

“Jack Cardiff was a cameraman and director of so many distinguished films over the course of his amazingly long career – from The Four Feathers to Rambo: First Blood Part II by way of Huston's The African Queen – that it might seem preposterously reductive to single out two films as the apogee of his art. But The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus were no ordinary pieces of cinematography. In those films, it seems to me, cinema came as close as it ever will to being a painterly medium, one where the images are so potent, so fervid and intense, that they have separated themselves forever from the humble world of reality – from the objects that were actually filmed. Nobody could make those cumbersome Technicolor cameras, with their three strips of negative running simultaneously and their insatiable appetite for light, sing quite like Cardiff could. Apparently they are showing a restored print of The Red Shoes as a Special Presentation at Cannes this year. No other tribute could be so fitting.”

Among the films that Cardiff photographed was The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by Laurence Olivier, starring himself and Marilyn Monroe.

Here is Jack Cardiff's own account of meeting Monroe taken from his autobiography, Magic Hour (Faber & Faber, 1996):

"A door opened behind me, there was a blur of soft material as Marilyn sped swiftly into Arthur Miller's arms, not looking at me until she was hugged in his bear-like embrace. Then she slanted a shy, sleepy smile at me. I had never seen this Marilyn before, in any film or photo. This was no hot sex symbol; this was a little girl, with her face pressed into Daddy's chest, shyly curious of a visitor.

Cardiff with Marilyn Monroe

Her face was still rosy, flushed from sleep, and her buttercup-gold hair tangled like a Botticelli cherub. Her eyes had the unreal clarity of the porcelain eyes in a doll: large, wondering, wide apart and slightly turned down at the outsides; and the mouth, timorously half-parted lips; the saucy turned-up nose - here indeed was a delightful evocation of Renoir.

She didn't say anything to me at all – not even “hello.” She just looked at me with a kind of possessiveness, like a child showing Daddy her prize handiwork from school, and Daddy cuddled his baby with proud tenderness. Still no word to me. Only a soft murmur to Miller as she gazed at me in cosy triumph.

“Isn't it wonderful, darling? He's the greatest, and I've got him!”

I gave them a silly smile, feeling uncomfortably gift-wrapped. That was my first impression of Marilyn Monroe: a wide-eyed innocent child, as pure as springtime.  Could I have been so naive? But everyone had the same reaction when they first met her; her beguiling innocence was not deliberately put on, despite some cynics' opinions.  She seemed to have the vulnerability of a child and you instinctively wanted to protect her.  Larry Olivier told me long afterwards that he, too, had had the same reaction when he first saw her: “But she's only a child! My God, I'm going to fall in love with her!”

“The child” and I had breakfast that morning, and we talked about the film. As I listened to that breathy voice, shy, tremulous, with sudden soft laughter – the sort that causes poets of invoke celestial metaphors – I was completely under her spell and left the house quite convinced that I had just met an angel.”