Aces of the Camera — Stanley Cortez (1942) 🇺🇸
Aces of the Camera XIX: Stanley Cortez, A.S.C.
by Walter Blanchard
Stanley Cortez, A.S.C., is a young man with ideas. Very positive ones. You may not necessarily agree with them — indeed, he doesn’t expect constant agreement with his concepts — but you can hardly help admiring him for having them, and for sticking to them so steadfastly. Having known Stan for many years, I’m quite convinced that if the entire industry lined up and told him his concept of a scene was wrong, he wouldn’t admit it until he had proven the question, one way or the other, on the screen! Even then, you might not agree with his concept, but you’d have to admit that what he put on the screen was a faithful reflection of the way he saw that particular scene.
This positive attitude has been both an asset and a liability to the Cortez career. An asset because even though he is decidedly one of the younger generation of today’s directors of photography, he brings things to the screen with a thoroughly distinctive flavor which is rapidly gaining him recognition as one of the industry’s rising young men. A liability because such positivity can hardly help rubbing people the wrong way at times.
He’s had another liability to contend with, too, in the fact that he is the younger brother of a successful actor-director, Ricardo Cortez. And when a star’s younger brother goes to work as an assistant cameraman, nobody is likely to take him seriously — especially if, like Stanley, he admits to having artistic ambitions.
But Stanley Cortez fooled them. He not only turned out to be a good assistant cameraman, but he made his way up the ladder to the position of operative cameraman. There, he worked with many of the industry’s all-time camera aces — Arthur C. Miller, A.S.C. was the first, and Lee Garmes, A.S.C., Hal Mohr, A.S.C., Charles Rosher, A.S.C., Ray June, A.S.C., Ted Tetzlaff, A.S.C., and Lucien Andriot, A.S.C., were others. Working with them, he took what he likes to describe as a five-year college course in cinematography, learning through practical experience, with the greatest masters of the profession as his teachers. And he built on this foundation with constant study of what other people and other producing centers were putting on the screen, including the highly analytical writings of many Russian, German and French cinematographers and directors whose treatises on the artistic aspects of the cinema seldom make their way into English.
And so it was that some six years ago he advanced to the position of director of photography, becoming a member the A.S.C. in 1936. And he has steadily battled his way up, first going through the professional “finishing-school” of photographing ten-day “quickies,” then getting his chance on program features which might have all of two or even three weeks of shooting lavished on them, and finally, during the past year or so, to “A” pictures. Orson Welles picked him to direct the photography of The Magnificent Ambersons; Walter Wanger chose him to photograph the recent — and very difficult — Eagle Squadron.
His work today combines the effects of his thorough grounding in practical technique, his study of the pictorial and often intricately psychological aspects of cinematography as an art-form, and an instinctive feeling for the medium with which he works. His mental approach to it is interesting. “When people talk about cinematography as a science,” he says, “they are only telling half the story. Dramatic cinematography as we see it in the studios is also an art — and a very largely unexplored psychological medium, as well.
“Let me explain: if we simply set up a camera to make a mechanically accurate record of an action, we are justified in approaching cinematography from a strictly scientific basis. But in a modern production, we are doing two other, and very different, things. We are trying to create a series of visually attractive compositions. And we are trying to produce an emotional or psychological response which will give the audience the ‘feel’ of the story we are portraying.
“In this work, there is a very definite danger of becoming so engrossed in the technicalities involved that we miss fire on the pictorial and emotional factors which are the heart of our scene. We’ve all of us seen scenes (not always in short-schedule pictures, either!) in which it was obvious that the man in charge of the photography was so greatly concerned about turning out a negative which would meet the laboratory’s technical standards — ‘print right in the middle of the scale’ — that he weakened, or maybe even lost the emotional value of that scene.
“This will probably sound like heresy to the exclusively technically-minded, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter a bit to me whether a scene prints on light 3 or light 21 — so long as I get the visual effect I’m seeking! If I miss that, even though the scene is technically flawless, I consider that I’ve missed on that scene. After all, the technicians have given us a really remarkable degree of technical leeway in our medium: our modern negative emulsions have much more latitude than most of us give them credit for, and this is further increased by the control possible in developing, and printing. Why not make the most of it, if it will help us in getting the artistic and emotional effects which are the real raison d’être for our picture?
“On the other hand, certain technicalities are inextricably bound up with the artistic and emotional values of cinematography. Some of them — like lighting balance — are obvious; a scene in which the lighting is out of balance is almost certain to distract the audience’s attention from the dramatic and emotional values we’re trying to convey.
“Another of these factors — and one too often neglected — is observing the proper continuity of diffusion. If we see a sequence in which the star, for example, is heavily diffused, while the intercut long-shots or the close-ups of the leading man show little or no diffusion, we’re abruptly jerked away from story, and made — at least subconsciously — aware of the mechanics of photographing it. The same thing applies in a lesser sense to the use of different degrees or types of diffusion on scenes which are to be intercut.
“It can apply to almost every phase of cinematography. Indeed, good dramatic cinematography is not so much ‘holding up a mirror to life’ as it is holding up a subtly distorting glass to create an illusion that is more realistic than reality itself. Repeatedly we have to do the unnatural thing in lighting, diffusion, camera-angles, perspective or filtering to create an impression of dramatic realism.
“Indeed, the definition some famous actor — I think it was George Arliss — once gave of acting, could very well be applied to dramatic cinematography. He said it’s ‘being unnatural — without getting caught at it.’ And that is what we cinematographers must do. We try to convey the impression that our camera was somehow privileged to eavesdrop on a group of real people undergoing some actual experience. To get that impression, we must often make use of every technical trick and artifice at our command, even though we” may be forced to do things that seem unreal, or violate established technical conventions. But as long as we convey that impression of realism, and point up the dramatic and psychological aspects of the action, we’re succeeding in our work!”
End.
—
—
—
Collection: American Cinematographer, July 1942
—
see other entries of the Aces of the Camera series