Douglas Slocombe | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Ralph Douglas Vladimir Slocombe (1913-02-10)10 February 1913 Putney, London, UK |
| Died | 22 February 2016(2016-02-22) (aged 103) London, UK |
| Years active | 1940–1989 |
Ralph Douglas Vladimir Slocombe[1]OBE,BSC,ASC,GBCT (10 February 1913 – 22 February 2016) was a Britishcinematographer, particularly known for his work atEaling Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the first threeIndiana Jones films. He wonBAFTA Awards in 1964, 1975, and 1979, and was nominated for theAcademy Award for Best Cinematography on three occasions.[2]
Slocombe was born inPutney,[1] London, the son of Marie (née Karlinsky) and journalistGeorge Slocombe (1894–1963). His mother was Russian.[3] His father was the Paris correspondent for theDaily Herald, and so Slocombe spent part of his upbringing in France, returning to the United Kingdom around 1933.[4][5][6] He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from theSorbonne.[7]
Slocombe initially intended to become a photojournalist, and as a young photographer, he witnessed the early events leading up to the outbreak ofWorld War II.[8][9] VisitingDanzig in 1939, he photographed the growing anti-Jewish sentiment. In consequence, he was commissioned by American film-maker Herbert Kline to film events for a documentary calledLights Out, covering aGoebbels rally and the burning of a synagogue, for which he was briefly arrested.[10][11] Slocombe was inWarsaw with a movie camera on 1 September 1939 whenGermany invaded. Accompanied by Kline, he escaped, but his train was machine-gunned by a German aeroplane. In 2014, he said of the experience that:
I had no understanding of the concept of blitzkrieg. I had been expecting trouble but I thought it would be in trenches, like WW1. The Germans were coming over the border at a great pace ... We were trundling through the countryside at night. We kept stopping for no apparent reason, but we came to a screeching halt because a German plane was bombing us. After its first pass we climbed out the window and crawled under the carriage. The plane came back and started machine-gunning. A young girl died in front of us.[11]
After escaping from the train, Slocombe and Kline bought a horse and cart from a Polish farm, finally returning to London viaLatvia andStockholm.[11]
After returning to England, Slocombe became a cinematographer for theBritish Ministry of Information, shooting footage of Atlantic convoys with theFleet Air Arm. He also developed a relationship withEaling Studios, where filmmakerAlberto Cavalcanti, who helped him obtain his position, worked.[8] Some of his photography was used as second unit material for fiction films.[8]
Slocombe moved into photographing for feature films atEaling Studios during the later 1940s, after being hired on the strength of his documentary work.[12] Slocombe later described his early work onChampagne Charlie (1944) as amateurish, in one case resulting in a sequence having to be reshot.[9] However, in his career, Slocombe worked on 84 feature films over a period of 47 years.[13]
Slocombe would later speak approvingly of Ealing's culture of script development.[14] However, he also noted that its restrictive studio system headed byMichael Balcon, in which outside work was not normally permitted, made it impractical for him to attempt to begin a career as a director, something which he had considered.[15]
His early films as a cinematographer included such classicEaling comedies, notablyKind Hearts and Coronets (1949),The Man in the White Suit (1951),The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), andThe Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). He was particularly praised for his flexible, high-contrast cinematography for the horror filmDead of Night (1945), and for his bright, colourfulWest Country summer landscapes onThe Titfield Thunderbolt.[8]
Apart from filming, Slocombe worked also on developing plans for shots, visiting prisoner-of-war camps in Germany as part of pre-production forThe Captive Heart (1946).[16] ForSaraband for Dead Lovers (1948), shot inTechnicolor, the production team settled on a muted, gloomy style unusual for the time, which Slocombe in 2015 considered as among his best work of the period.[17] The style of the film, about a doomed extramarital affair in 17th-century Germany, was variously praised as unconventional and criticised for being excessively symbolic, while also leaving exterior and interior shots poorly matched.[18]
A special effect shot he created was a scene inKind Hearts and Coronets, in whichAlec Guinness, playing eight different characters, appeared as six of them simultaneously in the same frame.[9] Bymasking the lens and locking the camera down in one place, the film was re-exposed several times with Guinness in different places on the set over several days. Slocombe recalled sleeping in the studio to make sure nobody touched the camera.[5] Slocombe personally regardedBasil Dearden as the "most competent" of the directors he worked with at Ealing.[19]
He found widescreen equipment sometimes restrictive, finding theTechnirama camera system used onDavy (1958) "a block of flats" and difficult to compose shots with.[20]
CriticPauline Kael said of Slocombe's lighting work inJulia (1977) that it was "perfectly lighted, which is to say, the color is lustrous, the images so completely composed they're almost static picture postcards of the heroine."[21]
Financial problems forced Ealing Studios to wind down from 1955 onwards, and close later in the decade. In 2015, Slocombe said of the period that "we had to get on with our careers – there was little time for sentiment."[17]
ForThe Italian Job (1969), Slocombe was hired by producerMichael Deeley because "he tended to do very moody work, and he was very efficient". Slocombe later remembered shooting insideKilmainham Gaol, a genuine closed prison, and finding the experience unpleasant: "the real thing, there is something quite terrifying about it. One knows hundreds and hundreds of people have suffered here...although this was a comedy, all this was still in the back of one's mind".[22]
Ihe 1971 was the film's cinematographer ofMurphy's war set in Venezuela during World War II focuses on a stubborn survivor of a sunken merchant ship who is consumed in his quest for revenge and retribution against the Nazi German submarine that sank his ship and slaughtered the survivors.
He won theBritish Society of Cinematographers Award five times, and was awarded its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.[23] He also won a special BAFTA award in 1993.[2]Roger Ebert particularly praised his work onJesus Christ Superstar (1973), writing that it "achieve[s] a color range that glows with life and somehow doesn’t make the desert look barren."[24] Not all reviews of his later colour work were favourable: while his cinematography onNever Say Never Again (1983) has been described by one author as "subtle, subdued...[it] creates a mellow mood", it has also been assessed as "muddled and brown".[25][26] Notable among his later films isRollerball (1975).[27]
In the 1980s, he worked withSteven Spielberg on the first threeIndiana Jones films, after Spielberg enjoyed working with him as an auxiliary cinematographer onClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).[27] These were among his last major projects, as he was 75 at the time of filming the last,Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and also began to suffer from eyesight problems in the 1980s.[27][28] He was quoted in 1989 as saying of it "there's an excitement in doing action films. I probably enjoy them on a sort of Boy Scout level."[29]Janusz Kamiński, cinematographer onIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said that he deliberately shot the film to emulate Slocombe's visuals, in order to create an appearance of continuity with the previous pictures.[30]
Slocombe experienced problems with his vision from the 1980s onwards, including a detached retina in one eye and complications from unsuccessful laser eye surgery in the other, and was nearly blind at the end of his life.[5] In his later years, he lived in West London with his daughter, his only child.[11]
He was appointedOfficer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the2008 New Year Honours, and attended a BAFTA dinner in his honour in 2009.[12] Heturned 100 in February 2013.[13][31] Despite his blindness, Slocombe remained able to give interviews into his last years, and was interviewed by David A. Ellis in a book entitledConversations with Cinematographers, in 2011 by French television in French, by theBBC on the invasion of Poland in 2014, and on the history of British films in 2015.[17][27][11] He was quoted in the latter interview as saying "it's a weird feeling to have outlived virtually everyone you ever worked with."[17]
Slocombe died on the morning of 22 February 2016 (12 days after his 103rd birthday), in a London hospital from complications following a fall.[27][32]
Documentary film
| Year | Title | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | Lights Out in Europe | Herbert Kline | Uncredited |
| 1943 | Greek Testament | Charles Hasse | |
| San Demetrio London | Charles Frend | Uncredited |
Feature film
Television
| Year | Title | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1957 | Play of the Week | Peter Brook | Episode "Heaven and Earth" |
| 1975 | Love Among the Ruins | George Cukor | TV movie |
Academy Awards
| Year | Category | Title | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Best Cinematography | Travels with My Aunt | Nominated | [33] |
| 1977 | Julia | Nominated | [34] | |
| 1981 | Raiders of the Lost Ark | Nominated | [35] |
BAFTA Awards
| Year | Category | Title | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | Best Cinematography | The Servant | Won | [2] |
| 1965 | Guns at Batasi | Nominated | ||
| 1967 | The Blue Max | Nominated | ||
| 1969 | The Lion in Winter | Nominated | ||
| 1974 | Travels with My Aunt | Nominated | ||
| Jesus Christ Superstar | Nominated | |||
| 1975 | The Great Gatsby | Won | ||
| 1976 | Rollerball | Nominated | ||
| 1979 | Julia | Won | ||
| 1982 | Raiders of the Lost Ark | Nominated | ||
| 1985 | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom | Nominated |
American Society of Cinematographers
| Year | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2002 | International Award | Won |
British Society of Cinematographers
| Year | Category | Title | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1963 | Best Cinematography | The Servant | Won |
| 1968 | The Lion in Winter | Won | |
| 1973 | Jesus Christ Superstar | Won | |
| 1974 | The Great Gatsby | Won | |
| 1977 | Julia | Won | |
| 1984 | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom | Nominated | |
| 1995 | Lifetime Achievement Award | Won | |
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
| Year | Category | Title | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | Best Cinematography | Julia | Won |
In 1980, Douglas Slocombe was a respected cinematographer approaching retirement age. Then he got a call from Steven Spielberg asking would he consider filming his upcoming adventure movie, Raiders of The Lost Ark. So began the last, and highest-profile, phase of Slocombe's career.
