Gregg Toland
Gregg Wesley Toland was an American cinematographer known for his innovative use of techniques such as deep focus, examples of which can be found in his work on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and The Long Voyage Home. He is also known for his work as a director of photography for Wuthering Heights, The Westerner, Ball of Fire, The Outlaw, Song of the South and The Bishop's Wife.
Toland earned six Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, and won for his work on Wuthering Heights. He was voted one of the top ten most influential cinematographers in the history of film by the International Cinematographers Guild in 2003.
Career
Toland was born in Charleston, Illinois, on May 29, 1904, to Jennie, a housekeeper, and Frank Toland. His mother moved to California several years after his parents divorced in 1910.Toland got his start in the film industry at the age of 15, working as an office boy at the Fox studio. He became an assistant cameraman a year later.
His trademark chiaroscuro, side-lit style originated by accident: while shooting the short film The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra, one of two available 400W bulbs burned out, leaving only a single bulb for lighting.
During the 1930s, Toland became the youngest cameraman in Hollywood, but soon became one of its most sought-after cinematographers. Over a seven-year span, he was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, winning only once, for his work on Wuthering Heights. He worked with many of the leading directors of his era, including John Ford, Howard Hawks, Erich von Stroheim, King Vidor, Orson Welles and William Wyler.
Service during World War II
When the Office of the Coordinator of Information was created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt before the United States' entry into World War II, Toland was recruited to work in the agency's film unit. Toland was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Navy's camera department, which led to his only work as a director, December 7th. This documentary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Toland co-directed with John Ford, is so realistic in its restaged footage that many today mistake it for actual attack footage. This 82-minute film was trimmed by censors into a 20-minute version, which took the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and was released in its entirety in 1991.''Citizen Kane''
Some film historians believe Citizen Kanes visual brilliance was due primarily to Toland's contributions, rather than director Orson Welles'. Many Welles scholars, however, maintain that the visual style of Kane is similar to many of Welles's other films, and hence should be considered the director's work. Nevertheless, the Welles movies that most resemble Citizen Kane were shot by Toland collaborators Stanley Cortez and Russell Metty.In a 1970 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Welles told the story of how he met Toland, whom Welles considered "the greatest cameraman who ever lived". Although Citizen Kane was Welles's first feature, it was Toland—whom Welles already knew by reputation—who sought out Welles:
came to my office and said, "I want to work in your picture. My name is Toland." And I said, "Why do you, Mr. Toland?" And he said, "Because you've never made a picture. You don't know what cannot be done." So I said, "But I really don't! Can you tell me?" And said, "There's nothing to it." And gave me a day-and-a-half lesson—and he was right!
While shooting Kane, Welles and Toland insisted that Welles gave lighting instructions that fall normally under the director of photography's responsibility. Many of the transitions in the film are done as lighting cues on set, where lights are dimmed up and down on stage. Apparently, Welles was unaware that one could achieve the effects optically on a film so he instructed the crew to dim the lights as they would have done on a theater production, which led to the unique dissolves. Different areas of the frame dissolve at different times, based on the lighting cue. However, the visuals were truly a collaboration, as Toland contributed great amounts of technical expertise that Welles needed so that he could achieve his vision. Years later, Welles acknowledged: "Toland was advising him on camera placement and lighting effects secretly so the young director would not be embarrassed in front of the highly experienced crew."
Cinematography innovations
Toland's techniques were revolutionary in the art of cinematography. Cinematographers before him used a shallow depth of field to separate the various planes on the screen, creating an impression of space as well as stressing what mattered in the frame by leaving the rest out of focus.In Toland's lighting schemes, shadow became a much more compelling tool, both dramatically and pictorially, to separate the foreground from the background and so to create space within a two-dimensional frame while keeping all of the picture in focus. According to Toland, this visual style was more comparable with what the eyes see in real life since vision blurs what is not looked at rather than what is.
For John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Toland leaned more heavily on back-projection to create his deep focus compositions, such as the shot of the island women singing to entice the men of the SS Glencairn. He continued to develop the technologies that would allow for him to create his images in Citizen Kane.
Deep focus and lighting techniques
Toland innovated extensively on Citizen Kane, creating deep focus on a sound-stage, collaborating with set designer Perry Ferguson so ceilings would be visible in the frame by stretching bleached muslin to stand in as a ceiling, allowing placement of the microphone closer to the action without being seen in frame. He also modified the Mitchell Camera to allow a wider range of movement, especially from low angles. ″It was Toland who devised a remote-control system for focusing his camera lens without having to get in the way of the camera operator who would now be free to pan and tilt the camera."The main way to achieve deep focus was closing down the aperture, which required increasing the lighting intensity, lenses with better light transmission, and faster film stock. On Citizen Kane, the cameras and coated lenses used were of Toland's own design working in conjunction with engineers from Caltech. His lenses were treated with Vard Opticoat to reduce glare and increase light transmission. He used the Kodak Super XX film stock, which was, at the time, the fastest film available, with an ASA film speed of 100. Toland had worked closely with a Kodak representative during the stock's creation before its release in October 1938, and was one of the first cinematographers using it heavily on set.
Lens apertures employed on most productions were usually within the f/2.3 to f/3.5 range; Toland shot his scenes in between f/8 and f/16. This was possible because several elements of technology came together at once: the technicolor three strip process, which required the development of more powerful lights, had been developed and the more powerful Carbon Arc light was beginning to be used. By utilizing these lights with the faster stock, Toland was able to achieve apertures previously unattainable on a stage shoot.
Optical print shots and in-camera composites
Gregg Toland collaborated on a number of shots with special-effects cinematographer Linwood G. Dunn. Although these looked like they were using deep focus, they were actually a composite of two different shots. Some of these shots were composited with an optical printer, a device which Dunn improved upon over the years, which explains why foreground and background are both in focus even though the lenses and film stock used in 1941 could not allow for such depth of field.But Toland strongly disliked this technique, since he felt he was "duping," thereby lowering the quality of his shots. Thus other shots were in-camera composites, meaning the film was exposed twice—another technique that Linwood Dunn improved upon.
''Citizen Kane'' and ''The Long Voyage Home''
Toland had already had experience with heavy in-camera compositing, and many of the shots in Citizen Kane look similar in composition and dynamics to a number of shots in Ford's The Long Voyage Home.For instance, both movies contain shots that create an artificial lighting situation such that a character is lit in the background and walks or runs through dark areas to the foreground, where his arrival triggers, off-screen, a light not on before. The result is so visually dramatic because a character moves, only barely visible, through vast pools of shadow, only to exit the shadow very close to the camera, where his whole face is suddenly completely lit. This use of much more shadow than light, soon one of the main techniques of low-key lighting, heavily influenced film noir.
The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane share a number of other striking similarities:
- Both films allowed lenses at times to distort faces in close-up, especially during low-key lighting sequences described above.
- Sets, both interiors and exteriors, were lit mostly from the floor instead of from the rafters high above. A radical departure from Hollywood's traditional lighting, this technique also took much longer to execute, thus contributing significantly to production costs. However, the effect was strikingly more realistic, since light sources placed closer to the characters allowed softer lighting, which lights placed far above the set could not produce.
- Both directors, Welles as well as Ford, put Toland's credit as cinematographer on screen at the same time as their own credit as director, an unusual and conspicuously generous tribute; in both films, Toland's credit was also the same size as the director's.