"Cinematography is the heartbeat of cinema," British film historian George Turner once wrote. In an unprecedented tribute to outstanding directors of photography, TCM proudly presents the work of some of the movie world's most accomplished artists. Gregg Toland's work on Citizen Kane (1941), so central to that classic's vision that director Orson Welles shared his onscreen credit with Toland, is often considered the masterpiece of Hollywood cinematography. Working in black and white, Toland made revolutionary use of deep focus, in which every element of a scene has extraordinary sharpness and the viewer is not told "where to look."

Many cinematographers prefer the stylized effects of black and white to more realistic color photography. Stanley Cortez, in The Night of the Hunter (1955), explores the expressionistic possibilities of black and white in such scenes as one in which Robert Mitchum's shadow is cast by a street lamp onto a terrified child's bedroom ceiling. Black and white also brought a distinctive glamour to the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age; Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, for example, never looked better onscreen than in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) as photographed by Ted Tetzlaff.

Freddie Young's Oscar®-winning work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is a high point in the history of color cinematography; critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote that it creates "a mystique of its own through its vastness, variety, frightening grandeur." In a lighter tone, John Alton boldly brings the climactic ballet sequence in An American in Paris (1951) to life with spectacular splashes of color. Sven Nykvist, celebrated for his black-and-white images in his film for Ingmar Bergman, blends the qualities of color and black-and-white photography in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986) with landscapes shot in color but dominated by luminous shades of gray.

by Roger Fristoe