Douglas Slocombe

Ralph Douglas Vladimir Slocombe, OBE (10 February 1913 – 22 February 2016) was an English cinematographer. He was known for his work at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, and the first three Indiana Jones films. Quotes [Photography on Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948)] There was the political requirement from the Technicolor front office that you should light with a very low contrast - they didn't like high contrast - and you mustn't leave shadows to go black. I didn't like that idea entirely, so I decided to still go with the full contrast of black and white, but multiplied by the extra light requirements, of course. Because I thought this film needed a lot of shadows and so forth. And I discovered on the first day that of all the colours on the set the black shadows became wonderfully rich and intense - and so I carried on with these contrasts. As cited in Sarah Street, Simon Brown, Elizabeth Watkins British_Colour_Cinema: Practices and Theories, London: BFI, 2013 It's a weird feeling to have outlived virtually everyone you ever worked with. "Remembering Ealing Studios and the golden age of British film", BBC News (30 August 2015). American Cinematographer (June 1989) "Douglas Slocombe on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", American Cinematographer (June 1989). From my point of view, one of the intriguing things about working on a picture like this is that you have to go along the same way the film does — at breakneck pace. I would guess that the average film is told in something like 300 to 500 setups. But all three of the Indiana Jones films have to run to at least 1,500 setups, probably close to 2,000. It's an incredibly expensive exercise, so there are great pressures to keep to the schedule, which is tight to begin with. The sets seem to get bigger and bigger these days [...] and particularly Steven Spielberg's sets — they're absolutely enormous. I always felt that the fellow who built the coliseum in Rome must have been an ancestor of Steven's. Through the years, I found that, as schedules got tighter and tighter, I had less and less time to light a set. I found myself not checking the [light] meter until I had finished the set completely and decided on the proper stop. Then at the end, I would hold the meter out, and it would usually say exactly what I thought it should. If it didn't, I wouldn't believe it, or I would hold in such a way as to make it say my stop. [...] After a time, I decided that this was ridiculous and stopped using it entirely, and stopped even bringing it along. I don't suppose I've used one for a good 15 years now. BBC News (2014) "Douglas Slocombe: The cameraman who escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland", BBC News (11 February 2014). I had fallen in love with photography and was making a living doing photographic features for publications such as Picture Post, Paris Match and Life magazine. [...] But in 1939 I saw a huge headline which I think was in the Sunday Express. It said: "Danzig - Danger Point of Europe." I packed up my Leica, got on a train and went. [Left after three weeks, but asked to return with a newsreel camera by Herbert Kline, a documentary film maker] The Eyemo was heavy and could be noisy. Once I was in an auditorium filming a speech made by Goebbels when suddenly it decided to emit a huge snarling sound. Goebbels froze and hundreds of uniformed Brownshirts turned and glared at me in anger. It was not a comfortable moment. [Kline had joined him] But I still remember the shock when at about 05:00 on 1 September we awoke to find the attack had begun. [...] There were bombers overhead and the whistle of falling bombs.I had no understanding of the concept of blitzkrieg. I had been expecting trouble but I thought it would be in trenches, like WW1. The Germans were coming over the border at a great pace. The film Slocombe worked on with Kline, Lights Out in Europe, was released in 1940. External links Category:1913 births Category:2016 deaths Category:Cinematographers Category:People from London