Image Makers: The Adventures of America's Pioneer Cinematographers

Good doc that taught me a lot of stuff ranging from the interestingly trivial...that Chaplin's DP was a semi pro ballplayer...to the rather important, namely that the transition from silent to sound was a lot more seamless for cinematographers than I would have imagined. And the tragic: Losing Gregg Toland at forty four strikes me as a loss to Hollywood creativity the equal of Thalberg, Murnau or Lombard. Talking heads were, for the most part, informative rather than self importantly verbose, although Kevin Brownlow comes off as trying a bit too hard to be this doc's Shelby Foote, so to speak. (i.e. Pushing the eccentric Brit stuff the way Foote did the Southernoid schtick in Ken Burns' "The Civil War")

My main criticism is that picking these seven DP's seems rather arbitrary. I mean, why didn't Leon Shamroy, Stanley Cortez or Ernest Haller make the cut? They were around at the same time as most of these other guys and had equally distinguished careers. I think a better approach would have been to nix all those too cute drawings that take up at least ten minutes of screen time as well as applying the cutting shears to Brownlow and use the time saved for additional worthy cameramen as well as, in some cases, a more generous sampling of their work. (i.e. Rosher/Daniels seem under represented).

Grade: B.