Aces of the Camera — Rudolph Maté (1942) 🇺🇸
Aces of the Camera XX: Rudy Maté, A.S.C.
by Walter Blanchard
A studio publicist once described Rudy Maté, A.S.C. [Rudolph Maté] as “the shyest man in Hollywood.” Publicity-men being what they are, that’s undoubtedly an overstatement: but there’s no doubt that the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Rudy is as different as possible from the dashing extroverts fiction writers like to characterize as cameramen. But that’s quite logical, too, for fictional cameramen seem always to be made to appear as hard-boiled technicians, with nothing of the artist even hinted about themselves or their work.
And Rudy Maté is an artist to his fingertips. Half-a-dozen Academy Award nominations testify to that!
As a matter of fact, Rudy Maté had no intention of becoming a cinematographer in the first place; both the profession and the career were thrust upon him by force of circumstances. But once started, he climbed the cinematographic ladder with a rapidity that would seem absolutely incredible today. He made his way to the top in Europe — and stayed at the top; when he came to this country ten or twelve years ago, his artistry as quickly won him high ranking here, as well. But to tell the truth, he probably took less pride in the fact that last year his professional skill put two of his pictures in the Academy Award Nominees’ listing than in the fact that he became a citizen of the U.S.A.
Maté’s background was in one way the least likely preparation imaginable for a cinematographic career — and in other ways, perhaps the most perfect. Here’s how it happened. Rudy was born some forty-four years ago in Cracow, Poland. His father was a prosperous citizen of what is now Jugo-Slavia, and young Rudy’s upbringing was typical of that of any son of Europe’s educated classes. The period immediately following the close of World War I found Rudy at the University in Budapest, studying philosophy, with particular attention to the history of Art.
Then came the post-war depression, and one morning Rudy learned that he must start immediately to make a living for himself. Immediately, he went after a job — he wasn’t particular what, so long as it brought him a few pengoes a week and half a chance for advancement. By luck, that first job was as a highly unskilled helper in the laboratory of a Budapest motion picture studio. It was hardly the sort of work you’d expect to find a budding philosopher doing. It wasn’t a “white-collar” job at all; just work — sometimes messy and always hard. But Rudy went at it with a will: I don’t know if, like the Lord High Admiral in “Pinafore,” he “cleaned the windows,” but he certainly swept the floor, cleaned developing-tanks, carried film about, and helped load the developing-racks and mix solutions. Being of an inquiring mind, he made it a point to learn as much as possible of the why and wherefore of what he was doing. And always he kept his eye alert for a better opening.
One day it came. One of the studio’s cinematographers, he learned, was looking for an assistant. Figuratively, at least, Rudy took off his laboratory apron and told the cameraman not to look any farther — that he had already accepted the job!
So young Maté went out on the set as an assistant — for one picture. He carried the camera and held the scene slate, and made himself as nearly useful as a raw, green assistant could be in those silent-picture days. And he kept his studious eyes open every second, and his mind absorbed everything he saw his chief do. When the picture was completed, Rudy decided he was ready to strike out boldly for a better job.
So he went to Vienna, where he knew they also made pictures — and on a larger scale than they had in Budapest. In Vienna, he found a producer who was looking for a cameraman. Rudy calmly informed him that he was a cameraman from Budapest, and would be glad to photograph the picture. “I didn’t think it was necessary,” says Rudy, “to tell him I had never photographed a picture before! Besides, he never asked! Anyway, he didn’t tell me he had never produced one! Back in 1921 I didn’t know many producers, and the name Alexander Korda wouldn’t have been any more — or less — familiar to me if he had been the biggest producer in Europe. We made that picture, and several others, together, and educated ourselves professionally in the process. We were just a couple of young fellows trying to get along in a business neither of us knew much about… but I’m sure neither of us dreamed we’d get along so far that twenty years later we’d work together in Hollywood, on a picture like That Hamilton Woman! which he produced and I photographed last year!”
Still seeking new worlds to conquer, Rudy went from Vienna to Berlin which was then, as it remained until the coming of Nazism killed it, the greatest production center in Europe. But Rudy never got a job in Berlin. Instead, he found in Berlin a producer who was looking for a cameraman to photograph a picture for him in Paris! So Rudy went to Paris, where he stayed for many years, photographing pictures for most of the French producers, both “major” and independent, including, Rudy comments wryly, “many Russian producers who probably hired me not so much because of my photographic ability, but because I could speak Russian! The Russians, you know, are like the English and Americans in one respect: they may live and work in a foreign land, and speak the language fluently — but they prefer to speak their own whenever they can. So I spoke Russian — and worked!”
Probably the most notable of Maté’s French-made productions was The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has earned indisputable rank as one of the three all-time great films produced in Europe in the middle twenties, and together with Variety, and The Last Laugh exerted a dominant influence on the artistic course of the cinema during the latter days of silent filming.
Variety sensationally demonstrated the dramatic values of unusual camera-angles and the moving-camera technique. The Last Laugh — probably the only successful silent picture ever made completely without subtitles — carried silent-picture story-telling to its highest development. And Joan of Arc showed what could be done with dramatic close-ups, for the entire story was told — and told powerfully — in close-ups, seldom, if ever, employing even a waist-length figure. The extent to which the production depended on Maté’s photodramatic artistry can well be imagined. Perhaps an even mere striking example of what Maté’s camera could mean to a picture occurred several years later in another French-made production — this time a sound-film — The Vampire, which was acknowledged by press and public to be a success solely on the strength of Maté’s exquisite camerawork!
But it is since he has come to this country that Rudy Maté has done his most outstanding work. Such pictures as Dodsworth, The Adventures of Marco Polo, Foreign Correspondent, Flame of New Orleans, It Started with Eve, and most recently, Pride of the Yankees, prove it. Generally speaking, European-trained cinematographers, when they come to Hollywood, have a slow and difficult time conditioning their minds and methods to American moviemaking methods; some I have known have taken as much as a year and a half or two years before their Hollywood work was even remotely on a par with what they turned out in Europe. But Rudy Maté “clicked” in Hollywood almost from his first day’s work, and has steadily built until his ability and reputation stand infinitely higher than when he came here, and when last winter Gregg Toland, A.S.C., went into active Naval service, leaving vacant what is generally regarded as Hollywood’s top camera job, it was not surprising that the astute Samuel Goldwyn should pick Rudy Maté to fill the vacancy.
As might be expected from his background, Rudy Maté approaches his work in a very studious fashion. He likes, wherever possible, to spend several days — more if possible — studying and analyzing a script before production starts, so that he can plan and carry through a definite photographic progression in his treatment of the scenes and sequences he photographs. To him, the dramatic climaxes of a picture are also photographic climaxes, and camerawork, as well as story and direction, should build progressively and smoothly to them.
He’s no slavish follower of tradition, whether artistic or technical. “Sometimes,” he says, “a scene may benefit by being handled in a more or less routine manner. But there are other times when you may get the best results if you go directly against the conventional rules! For instance, even the most elementary amateur textbooks on lighting say you should never light a person’s face from underneath, except when you deliberately seek a weird effect. But in photographing Pride of the Yankees, I found a definite necessity for breaking this rule.
“I lit most of Gary Cooper’s scenes from below. I used a soft lighting, it is true, but it came predominantly from this angle we are taught never to use. That treatment, as I found from advance tests, ‘ironed out’ the natural wrinkles on Cooper’s face, and made him appear much younger than his real age, as was dramatically necessary in most of the picture. Only in the later sequences, when he was portraying Lou Gehrig as an older man, and in failing health, did I light him from conventionally higher angles. The result was that he looked older in these scenes, and we got the dramatic effect we wanted very easily, and with a minimum of make-up. The camera in this instance definitely aided Cooper’s fine characterization.
“The same thing holds true of my early study of the history of Art. It was about the only real preparation I had for a photographic career. But if I had deliberately tried to imitate the work of the painters I had studied, I am sure I would never have been at all successful. It is one thing to let yourself be influenced by what you can learn of the way these old masters approached the problems of composition and lighting: it is quite another thing to attempt to copy them directly on the screen. They had their medium, and you have yours; and any attempt at direct imitation would give you something which was certainly not a painting — and just as certainly not a real motion picture. But if you can translate their mental approach, and maybe their dramatic feeling, to your medium as you would translate something from one language to another, you will find your own artistic skill benefiting correspondingly.”
End.
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Collection: American Cinematographer, August 1942
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see other entries of the Aces of the Camera series