The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

120 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN June 1954 for day, they looked ' lighted ' — as at night. In other words, when we lit them so you could see actually inside, they had the appearance of being over-lighted and thus were unnatural. They looked like shop windows. The problem here was to arrive at a lighting balance where there was enough light inside the apartments to reveal the action, but not enough to make them appear fully lighted as for night. In no case could we use conventional cross-lighting to enhance separation and definition. Moreover, the direction of the lighting within the apartments in the day shots had to look natural — as from daylight coming through the windows. " There was the additional problems of keeping the light intensity at the same level no matter how a player moved about in an apartment. Thus if the lighting was set at the right level for a player at the rear of a room, should he walk forward toward the window, he would be ' burned up ' by illumination brighter than that outside. We solved this problem by placing graduated scrims just below the light units so that, as the player walked towards the light, the illumination falling on him would be gradually diffused the closer he came to the light." A glance at the photos of art director Mac Johnson's pre-production sketches of the set will show how the day and night lighting schemes were visualised in advance. They also show the vast scope of the lighting that was necessary in order to give the set the authenticity of a large area of one of New York City's most interesting communities. It required the genius of a man of Burks' extensive photographic experience to impart this authenticity to the sky backings, the distant structures, the facades of the apartments, and to the interesting courtyard where so much of the critical action takes place and, of course, to the apartment interiors themselves. At the time pre-lighting of the set was taking place, a comprehensive chart of distances and focusing was prepared for the camera assistants. A study of the illustrations will show that it would have been impractical to run a tape from Stewart's window (the basic camera position) to any one of a number of points where action was to take place across the courtyard, just before starting to shoot. Instead, all measurements were made at one time and noted on the chart. Thus when it came time to shoot the salesman-murderer, say, standing beside his bed, a glance at the chart showed the exact distance from camera to player. This was all the more important when one realises that, using a telephoto lens on most of the shots, depth of field was extremely shallow. " I got quite a kick out of Lennie South, my assistant, who has been with me for many years," said Burks. " He was telling me that it was the first time in his career as a camera assistant that he changed focus from 50 to 51 feet!" But in this case, such minute changes in focus were vital, for in some cases if a player, photographed from a distance of 70 feet, was to move back just a half a step, focus had to be adjusted accordingly — an example of the fine tolerances with which Burks and his crew had to work. And now we come to what was, perhaps, the most imaginative and meticulous phase of the photography of Rear Wiiidow — the continuous, non-stop introductory shot, which establishes the locale and identifies the principal characters in the story. Not in the memory of Hollywood's oldest cinematographer was there ever an introduction shot filmed on a sound stage which revealed so much in just 250 feet of film exposed in one continuous take. In this shot, the camera opens on a closeup of a thermometer near Stewart's open window, which indicates it is a hot summer's day. The camera then moves out through the window and approaches the apartment across the courtyard to introduce all of the interesting characters who live there and who play an important part in the story. The camera continues on its revealing journey and finally returns to Stewart's window, where it shows him asleep. Moving in to a big closeup, it shows perspiration trickling down his face. The camera pans down to Stewart's castencased leg; it shows the inscription: "Here lie the broken bones of L. B. Jeffries " — thus revealing his name. The camera moves on to show a broken press camera on a nearby table; pans up to a photo which shows two racing cars in a mid-air crash on the Indianapolis speedway — the wheel of one car, torn loose, coming directly at the camera. This explains how Stewart's leg was broken. The camera moves on to a series of still other photos : Korean war scenes, fires, etc., which serve to reveal that the occupant of the apartment is a professional news picture photographer. The camera continues its probing; it shows a wide assortment of the photographer's equipment. It comes to rest above a light box on which rests a large photo negative of a girl — a cover shot; then it pans to a pile of magazines, and on the cover of the top magazine we see reproduced the photo made from the negative shown earlier. At this point it is pretty well established that Stewart is a news photographer laid up with a broken leg suffered in line of duty; that it is a very hot day, and that he lives in an apartment building surrounded by others where some very interesting characters also reside. From this,