GEOFFREY UNSWORTH BSC -CINEMATOGRAPHER

In the late 1930s, Technicolor in America had crossed the Atlantic and blessed the shores of Great Britain. Or is that, Technicolor was blessed by it’s crossing of the shores to Great Britain? For there was camera assistant Geoffrey Unsworth,
caught up in an exciting time of innovation. Technicolor had opened numerous job prospects for all camera personnel, and
were looking for experimental, young people to play around and work their 3 strip Technicolor cameras. Unsworth, and his good friend Jack Cardiff leaped at the opportunity, and were instantly labelled the ‘enfant terribles’ of the camera world. The rich, saturated cinematography they had provided for numerous films of Emeric Pressberger and Michael Powell had made them synonymous with experimentation. Later on however, as a cinematographer, although he had access to all of Hollywood’s most state of the art Technicolor technology, Unsworth was more interested in studying all colours of the cinematic spectrum. For him, cinema was an education, an emotional experience and personal response to a storytelling situation. In order to gain these experiences, Unsworth departed from his Technicolor routes in the late 1950s, by photographing the gritty drama ‘Hell Drivers’ and the doom-laden Titanic tragedy ‘A Night To Remember’ in stark black and white. It is a well-known fact that black and white is the hardest photographic medium to work in, so Unsworth’s challenge was to walk in and master this fine art of cinematography.

Perhaps Geoffrey Unsworth’s best remembered films are ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Cabaret’, for which he had returned to the wonderous saturated colours of his early Technicolor days. However, one must also consider the maturity of his use of
colour in the photography of these films, as ‘2001’ especially feels as effectively stark as any of his black and white pieces
had. The emotional response the audience feels, and what the audience believes to be the DOP’s intention is to have created a world of colour, variety and optimism, that is so similar in it’s shades of saturated brightness, that the internal feeling is bleak and uncomfortable. Critics everywhere praised ‘2001’ for it’s use of atmosphere, almost suggesting that Kubrick’s greatest success emerged from the meticulous craftmanship of this very British lighting cameraman. The audience ‘felt’ Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography, they never saw it.

By the time of photographing Richard Attenborough’s ‘A Bridge Too Far’, Unsworth had become very fond of a special gauze
and filter look. In fact this very personal look now accompanied his contradicting monotone technicolors. His experiences with nearly every form of cinematography had given him a rich pallette of story-telling tools.

For the opening of Superman in 1978, Geoffrey Unsworth gave us a rich, saturated, glowing Krypton fantasy world, One
where even the most high calibre of movie stars (Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard) were used to gamble a very unique
photographic aesthetic. Large pieces of 3M ‘front projection’ material, fabric used to make rear and front projection process
special effects screens, 400 times more reflective than normal surfaces, was used to costume the actors of the Krypton
Council, the starship, and even parts of the buildings. When light is positioned head-on with the FP material covered objects, they appear to glow bright white. Hollywood legends are very particular about the way the cameraman lights them. Their vanity and experience tells them that they always look better lit from one side. Unsworth had to retain this relationship with these VERY special actors, but also had to create a glowing aura to halo all of the costumes. On top of this, his continuously craning camera was performing unlimited amounts of complex camera movement, that had to work in tandem with the front projection set-up. This caused logistical nightmares for maverick camera operator Peter MacDonald.

George Lucas some years before Superman had insisted that Geoffrey Unsworth photograph his film ‘Star Wars’, but
Unsworth had already committed to another project. Lucas new of the cameraman’s distinguished '2001' background, and
wanted him to give Star Wars a muted, epic look. Lucas instead settled for a bitter working relationship with cameraman Gilbert (Dr. Strangelove) Taylor, a relationship that was far from mirrored when Unsworth later worked with Richard Donner on
Superman.

Richard Donner wanted to make a film about an American legend, a romanticised epic with a sense of objectivity. He didn’t
favour the ‘dutched’ tilted camera angles of the Batman TV show, and wanted a look for the film that would display a whole
variety of feelings for the subject matter, and he found that in Geoffrey Unsworth. The versatile cameraman’s vast experience
in the field meant that he could deliver any style from black and white 1930s newsreel theatres, saturated fantasy surfaces of
Krypton, to the muted, documentary-style, coffee-stained city vistas of Metropolis. What was unique however was his merging of fantasy with documentary styles. For example, when Superman makes his first appearance at the helicopter crash, we see the muted urban landscape, dimly lit and brutal, and almost as if superimposed onto the action is Superman, in colourful saturated hues.

Geoffrey Unsworth died suddenly in 1978, and is remembered as one of Britain and indeed the world’s greatest cinematographers.