From 1984 until his death at the age of 89 in 2007, Freddie Francis , the two-time Academy Award–winning cinematographer and director (for Jack Cardiff’s Sons and Lovers [1960] and Edward Zwick’s Glory [1989]), was a dear friend of mine. Indeed, I wrote a book about him in 1991, appropriately titled The Films of Freddie Francis, which is really more of a book-length interview, as Freddie and his wife Pamela generously invited me into their home for a marathon Q&A session that lasted nearly twelve hours, covering his entire career as both cinematographer and director.
During the course of the session, the name of David Lynch came up. It’s no secret that Francis had by that time become typecast as a horror director because of his long association with Hammer Productions beginning with the film Paranoiac (1962), and from 1961 to 1969 he worked in Gothic cinema with a high degree of success, particularly with such films as Nightmare (1964) and The Skull (1965). But by the time he was drafted by producer Herman Cohen to direct Joan Crawford’s last film, the abysmal Trog (1970)—during which Crawford couldn’t remember her lines, so they were chalked on to a series of huge moving blackboards, which you can actually hear being moved about on the soundtrack—Francis was sick of directing horror films and longed for a return to cinematography.
In the 1970s, Francis was forced to continue directing films and episodes of television series he had no interest in simply to pay his bills, and by 1980, he hadn’t actually shot a film since Karel Reisz’s remake of Night Must Fall in 1964. Indeed, he was in a creative and personal slump and needed to work with someone new and imaginative. That’s when David Lynch came calling. Lynch was a great admirer of Francis’s work in black and white—his best work, in my opinion—and he wanted Freddie to shoot The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch’s first real feature . Initially counseled not to hire Francis , who hadn’t been a DP for sixteen years, Lynch decided to ignore that advice, and the second act of Francis’s career was launched—for, of course, the film was spectacularly successful.
During the shooting of The Elephant Man , Francis and Lynch worked more or less as collaborators, arguing about setups and lighting strategies but always coming to a shared approach that satisfied both men. Francis , a strong and forceful personality, also helped Lynch when the film’s star, Anthony Hopkins , took a dislike to Lynch. Freddie intervened and smoothed things out between them (Dixon 144). However, with the success of The Elephant Man , Lynch was able to write his own ticket and launched an extremely ambitious project, the science-fiction film Dune (1984), based on Frank Herbert’s novel. This time, things did not go as smoothly. As Francis told me:
That was my last special effects film, because I hate them. Let’s take Elephant Man . David Lynch and I would go on the set in the morning and we’d talk about how we were going to shoot it. We’d shoot it, and at the end of the day we’d say, “That’s the stuff that’s going in the movie.” [Because of the film’s extensive use of blue screen], an awful lot of Dune would go on, and we’d shoot some people in foreground, and you’d come off and say, “Well, I wonder what it’s going to look like when it comes out in the movie?” I don’t like that. From my point of view I find it very uncreative … I’ve never said this to David, but I sometimes wish I had said a little bit more … had Dune been Elephant Man , our first film together, I would have interfered more, and I often feel slightly guilty about that … so our relationship was slightly different from this aspect. And also David is the last person in the world to be tied down to a storyboard [which was necessitated by the high number of process shots in the film]. That’s not David’s strength at all. (Dixon 150, 152)
And indeed, their relationship was altered, for although The Elephant Man decisively resuscitated Francis’s career, it wasn’t until 1999 that he teamed with Lynch again on what would be their last film together, the gently elegiac The Straight Story (1999). I was lucky enough to be on the set for the last day of shooting—the film was shot in something like 18 days on location in Iowa—and Francis, though not well, was busily supervising three separate crews for second unit work. Meanwhile, Lynch worked with the film’s star, Richard Farnsworth , playing real-life aging farmer Alvin Straight , who drives a sit-down lawn mower across several states—Alvin has no driver’s license—to reach his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton ).
Most of The Straight Story was shot using natural sunlight, with reflectors, and as with The Elephant Man, at the end of each day, Lynch and Francis could agree “that’s the stuff that’s going in the movie.” The film takes every opportunity to present the world as it really is, bathed in sunlight and shadow, and it is pretty much straight from the camera, with only a few optical effects—mostly dissolves and fades. Nighttime lighting for the film was equally utilitarian, using “practical” on-the-set lighting—Coleman lamps, bare light bulbs, and the like—so that the finished film has a real connection to the actual world and is presented more or less as a compressed documentary of Alvin’s journey.
During the filming of The Straight Story , Francis told me this would be his last film as a director of cinematography; from then on, he would do commercials and “what they laughingly call master classes” at universities. The world of the cinema was changing into something more plastic, less authentic, more processed, and Francis didn’t like it one bit. If one looks at Francis’s work in the Civil War saga Glory , which is a much less successful effort than The Straight Story , one can again see Francis stripping things down, making the images as clear and direct as he can, using natural light whenever possible, to create an authentic vision of the time and place for contemporary viewers. But with the dawn of the special effects era, Francis decided it was time to call it a day.
And this was well before the fully digital era, which both of us could nevertheless see clearly on the horizon. In 1999, computer-generated effects were already a reality, although they were used sparingly in fantasy, action, and adventure films, and practical cinematography—shot on actual film, of course—was still the norm for mainstream cinema. But with the shift to digital cinematography and the rise of comic book cinema, the temptation to amp up the proceedings with lavish computer-generated spectacle proved irresistible to both directors and audiences, to the point that we are now so far removed from the real that I would posit we have entered a new age of movies—the era of synthetic cinema .
What precisely is “synthetic cinema”? It’s filmmaking that’s motivated by the profit motive alone, devoid of any genuine artistry, designed solely to make money. Going back to the dawn of cinema, one might cite Alfred Clark’s The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895), made for the Thomas A. Edison, Inc , as perhaps the first truly synthetic film, containing as it does the “special effect” of Mary, Queen of Scots’ severed head (actually the head of a “bloodied” mannequin) triumphantly held up by the executioner before the camera at the film’s conclusion, thus creating perhaps one of the first splatter films. The Execution of Mary Stuart runs a mere 18 seconds in length, but the major point I wish to make here is that no discernable artistry is involved; it’s simply a commercial entertainment designed to shock and titillate the public.
On the other hand, a film like Georges Méliès ’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) displays considerable artistry, thought, and imagination, and though it, too, is a commercial proposition, it’s clear that a great deal of thought went into the settings, the costumes, the acting, and the special effects. One would be hard pressed to find a film more divorced from reality than A Trip to the Moon, with its obviously artificial sets, heavy reliance on camera trickery, and a sense of fantasy that is entirely removed from the real. But for all its counterfeit imagery—indeed, there isn’t a single scene in the film that isn’t obviously the work of stage craft—the film is more than just a grab for cash; it’s the work of a dedicated artist, whose films, incidentally, were almost immediately pirated for American audiences by Thomas Edison. And thus there’s a reality, a humanity to the film that Edison’s work lacks.
Sadly, Méliès , for all his skill behind the camera, was such a poor businessman that his films were eventually melted down for their residual silver content when Méliès was unable to pay the storage fees for his work, and ironically, survive only because of the pirated copies made by Edison and others. And then, of course, there were two early filmmakers who utterly embraced the real, Louis and Auguste Lumière , who made nearly a thousand one minute “actualities ”—short films of everyday life at the turn of the century, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory , Horse Trick Riders , Baby’s Breakfast (all 1895), giving us a vision of the past in one-shot, unadorned films that captured the authenticity of nineteenth century life. Famously, the Lumières declared that the cinema was “an invention without a future”—if only they could see the uses it’s being put to now.
Thus, the dynamic tension in film between artistry and commerce was established from the outset. Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) exists almost entirely in a phantom zone—not even the Kansas scenes in the beginning of the film have any claim on authentic signification—but again, Fleming, working with uncredited co-directors King Vidor , George Cukor , Richard Thorpe and Norman Taurog , created a film that is at once transcendent as it is wholly artificial—a commercial film that has a personal, collective vision, though it emerged from the realm of perhaps the most corporate studio in classical Hollywood history, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer .
Navigating through twentieth century cinema with an eye to the “real” becomes something like the project undertaken by the Canadian art collective The N.E. Thing Company , created by Iain and Ingrid Baxter . Starting in 1966 (the collective disbanded ...