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Francis additionally helmed several features for Tyburn, an independent studio formed by his son Kevin. Not surprisingly, these and Francis’ many other genre credits earned him great admiration from horror fans, who still invite him to speak at conventions and revival screenings. He candidly remarks, "I enjoyed working at Hammer and the other studios, and I kept making one film after another just because I was having great fun - I didn’t realize that they weren’t very good films! Oddly, though, while I have some rather good credits as a cinematographer, I get more recognition than you can imagine for those ghastly horror movies."

Asked how his experiences as a director reshaped his ideas about cinematography, Francis replies, "I won’t work with a director unless I feel that I’m on his wavelength. The three or four weeks I need in preparation for a picture mainly consists of just talking to the director so I can understand what he wants. Sometimes a director needs help. I’ve made wonderful films with directors who have never been in a film studio in their lives - they don’t have to know everything. But others, like Robert Mulligan, with whom I worked on Clara’s Heart and The Man in the Moon, is very knowledgeable and organized.

"The cinematographer is an executive of the production and has to run things for the director," he adds. "You also have to read his mind and then get that up on the screen, because any good director has already shot the picture in his head and can see those images. They can be improved, but they are there."

Francis’ next major project would be a perfect example of this dynamic. In the mid-1970s, he took a creative sabbatical to concentrate on writing and developing new material, while also directing some television productions. But in 1979, he was enticed back into the realm of cinematography by director David Lynch and producer Jonathan Sanger.

Lynch had recently gained attention with his singularly unique film Eraserhead.Impressed with the director’s talents, satirist and horror aficionado Mel Brooks signed on to executive-produce Lynch’s next film, The Elephant Man, based on the true story of John Merrick, a 19th-century Englishman afflicted with a disfiguring congenital disease. (Actor John Hurt played the role, with the aid of astonishing special makeup work by Christopher Tucker.)

Brooks obtained permission from Paramount to shoot the Victorian-era film in anamorphic black-and-white. Creatively, it was an audacious move, as this combination of formats had not been utilized in a major film for more than a decade; Francis himself had not shot a black-and-white feature in 15 years. But Francis’ work on Sons and Lovers had caught Lynch’s eye, as the director later told AC: "The photography was about light and dark, and it had a mood. It had such a great look that it seemed only natural to hire Freddie."

The Elephant Man was principally shot at Wembley Studios in Panavision, utilizing Kodak’s Plus X stock - the only monochrome emulsion which met Francis’ standards and was available in sufficient quantities. Due to the dearth of black-and-white features, most of Britain’s labs had let their processing equipment fall into disrepair, necessitating that the cinematographer do extensive tests with several facilities. Rank finally won the contract. Noted Francis in The British Cinematographer, "Rank’s processing produced a result which immediately filled me with confidence. My first impressions were that the [Plus X] had increased in speed and that the grain had diminished to such an extent as to be negligible. . . above all, it was a true black-and-white stock with every minutest tone in between."

Despite this promise, Kodak’s emulsion varied in sensitivity (increasing by a full stop at one point), and Rank had some problems in delivering the image quality that Francis demanded. However, as audiences would attest, the efforts paid off, resulting in an evocative film which retains a haunting, dreamlike textural quality while effectively rendering the gritty reality of the story and setting. To date, The Elephant Man remains the last major black-and-white feature made in Britain. "People gave me far more credit for that film than I deserved," Francis submits. "David knew what he wanted and I was able to show him how to get it.

"There was one shot that absolutely drove us mad," the cinematographer remembers. "We were shooting in this old hospital, within a corridor that was about 60 yards long with gaslight fixtures running all the way down. In the shot, a nurse comes along and turns off the lamps one by one, with the hall gradually becoming darker. The obvious solution for the lighting was to use dimmers, but people hadn’t used dimmers for a long time because in color photography they change the color temperature of the light. Of course, we were shooting in black-and-white, so that didn’t matter. We had to scrounge up all of these rusty old dimmer units. We needed a lot of them, and the noise they created was terrible!"

After a long absence, Francis was back at the forefront of his field, and subsequent productions would cement his reputation as one of cinematography’s finest practitioners. One of these triumphs, Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, consists of a film-within-a-film of a story set in 19th-century England. The period tale concerns a man who is engaged to be married but has a passionate affair with another woman, and the actors who portray the illicit lovers go through a relationship which parallels that of their characters.

To help differentiate the picture’s dual stories, which both starred Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, Francis used a Lightflex to desaturate colors and decrease contrast in the film-within-film segments. The on-camera accessory was invented in 1972 by Gerry Turpin, BSC (who would later shoot one of Francis’ last films as a director, The Doctor and the Devils, in 1985). The Lightflex consists primarily of an oversized filter-hood faced with optical glass. Dimmer-controlled quartz lamps built into the hood reflect into the lens and overlay a controlled amount of light on the scene to be photographed at the time of exposure. The device can be used to adjust the gamma curve of the emulsion, and also extends its photometric range without affecting grain. Francis would come to regularly use the Lightflex, which became an integral part of his photographic process. This acessory was later developed into the Arriflex VariCon. "I found the Lightflex to be an absolutely fantastic tool," the cameraman says. "After Arriflex bought and improved the design, Volker Bahnemann of Arri New York sent me one of my own. I don’t think many people use them, except for students. They’re always ringing and asking me if they can borrow mine!"


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