There are some mornings when you encounter the news and all you want to do is crawl right back into bed and call the whole day a mulligan.
Gordon Willis was the most important cinematographer of the last 50 years of cinema. I don’t know of any clearer or more concise way of putting it. If he’d only shot The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, a pair of films that fundamentally altered the way people used lighting and focus and the peculiar film stock of ’70s American filmmaking, he would be one of the great masters of his field, and his passing a day of mourning for all cinephiles. If he’d only shot the trio of paranoia thrillers with director Alan J. Pakula, Klute and The Parallax View and especially the technically audacious All the President’s Men, he’d be one of the great masters of his field. If he’d only shot his extraordinarily gorgeous quartet of black and white movies with Woody Allen – Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose – some of them lovingly grain-kissed, some of them hauntingly sharp and clear, all of them so bright and piercingly silvery and sleek that they practically glow, he’d be one of the great masters of his field.
But, in fact, he shot all of these, and other great and influential films besides. If the 1970s can fairly be said to have changed the way that American movies were made, that owes as much to Willis’s astonishing new rules for how movies could be photographed as to the contribution of any other individual. He taught us new ways of making images and new ways of reading images, and with his passing, we’ve lost one of the greatest geniuses the medium has known. Generations of cinematographers have labored in his shadows, and all of us who love cinema owe him our deepest debt of gratitude, now and forever.