by Robert S. Birchard
From the time of his first solo effort as a director, on The Virginian (Lasky-Paramount, 1914), Cecil B. DeMille was a filmmaker who understood the value of lighting to enhance the emotional appeal of the stories he brought to the screen. For that film, DeMille and future ASC member Alvin Wyckoff stuck a flare into the ground and used it as source illumination for a nighttime campfire scene. The effect was somewhat overpowering — the flare gave off as much smoke as light — but Wyckoff and C.B. were on the right track: using source lighting to enhance realism.
DeMille’s early films had a dark, moody look that was characterized as “Rembrandt Lighting,” a technique first developed for the Broadway stage by DeMille’s mentor, producer David Belasco, and Belasco’s art director, Wilfred Buckland, who joined DeMille’s Hollywood staff in 1914. Later, DeMille opted for a softer, less consciously “artistic” look that was designed to reveal the splendor of his sets in eye-filling but subtle tones.
DeMille could be a tyrant — a persona he developed to bring order to the chaos that can take over a movie set — but he was well aware that the making of motion pictures is a team effort, and that a director guides rather than dictates the efforts of cast and crew. He often expressed appreciation to his co-workers with tokens of gratitude, such as the “DeMille Medal,” a commemorative quarter with a certificate of appreciation for work well done, or by sharing his profit percentage from The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1956) with long-serving associates.
The scroll reproduced below, which DeMille presented to the American Society of Cinematographers, was a heartfelt gesture in praise of ASC members Wyckoff, L. Guy Wilky, J. Peverell Marley, Karl Struss, Victor Milner, Hal Rosson, George Barnes and other cinematographers who had helped bring his films to the screen — and, by extension, of all ASC members for their contributions to the art of filmmaking.
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He Is A True Artist
Amid the strange ingredients of Hollywood — a world typified by the human swarm and the artistic abstraction — there is a figure unknown to the chants of promoters and glorifiers. His hand has rarely held the scepter of public acclaim, his brow is not crowned with the envied olive leaf which so often settles upon the lordly producer and queens of beauty. This figure, a giant in his industry, is the cameraman — the sine qua non of a profession which often boasts that no one in its ranks is indispensable. No one, I say, save the cameraman.
I believe this is why:
He is the custodian of the heart of filmmaking as the writers are of its soul …
His tool is a box with a glass window, lifeless until he breathes into it his creative spirit and injects into its steel veins the plasma of his imagination …
The product of his camera, and therefore of his magic, means many things to many persons — fulfillment of an idea, an ambition ... realization of dreams …
He is the judge who applies the laws of dramatic effect in complete coordination and fellowship with the director who interprets those laws …
Light, composition, treatment are his instruments of power, which he wields with intelligence and sensitiveness to bring to full bloom the meaning of his art …
His versatile management of an intricate mechanism yields astonishing results in mood, emotion, dramatic effect …
A slanting shadow becomes a shattering portent of doom …
A lifeless chair instills the feeling of infinite sorrow …
A dead wall awakens a foreboding of plunging terror …
A flash of a man’s face rises to the grandeur of drama, inspiring and ennobling …
Before his wizardry, wrinkles fade from the faces of Hollywood’s ageless, imperishable beauties … chins take on lovely contours … years melt away ….
Yes, the technique of the cameraman is the technique of artistic vivisection that lays bare the inner workings of our profession. If art can be said to be the expression of beauty in form, color, sound, shape or movement, then it must be said that same art is the art of the cameraman — expressed in the boundless reaches of his imagination.
For his patience and singleness of purpose in a most arduous work, he is eminently deserving of that which is justly said of few men: “He is a true artist.”
— Cecil B. DeMille
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