Geoffrey Unsworth

Geoffrey Unsworth OBE, BSC (ca. 1914, Leigh, Greater Manchester – 28 October 1978, Britanny) was a British cinematographer who worked on nearly 90 feature films spanning over more than 40 years.

After working as a camera operator on films for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Unsworth made his debut as cinematographer on the documentary feature The People's Land in 1943.

Awards won by Unsworth

His film work brought him an impressive array of awards, including five British Society of Cinematographers awards, three BAFTAS and two Academy Awards. Unsworth was especially in demand as cinematographer in two very different genres, period pieces and science fiction. Among the highlights of his career, he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the visually innovative 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bob Fosse's dark musical exploration of the end of Weimar Germany, Cabaret. On a lighter film, such as Murder on the Orient Express his lighting and use of diffusion capture the danger and romance of the train while graceful integration of camera movement and optical effects contributes to the realism of the set while controlling the claustrophobia of the setting.

Superman

Unsworth's work reached its widest audience with one of his final projects, Richard Donner's Superman in 1978. Here he was responsible for integrating the work of a who's-who of cinematographers and visual effects designers, (including Zoran Perisic, an animation stand crew member from 2001, who extended Kubrick's front projection technique for Superman) with the plausibility and sense of grandeur befitting a (mostly) reverent take on a superhero. In fact the style he developed alongside director Donner was essentially that of a science-fiction period film; the glamorous, often highly diffused cinematography observed a panoply of images of Americana, suggesting an epic timeframe for the film's scenes, a mythic America somewhere between the 1930s of the original comics and the 1970s. The style of the sequences that did not involve extensive science-fiction had to match scenes displaying Superman's extraordinary powers.

One example of Unsworth's technique matching the epic style of the film with the verisimilitude of its more improbable aspects is seen in the flight sequences, where actors lie on a narrow platform (whose horizontal support, from the point of view of the lens, they obscured) in front of a large, curved front projection screen. Both the romantic interpretation of the scenes, and of a man's flight generally, made Unsworth's trademark filtered style utterly appropriate. Instead, especially considering the state of visual effects in the mid-1970s, the frames look surprisingly natural, so much so that the film's promoters were about to boast, "You'll believe that a man can fly." Unsworth was not named in the Special Achievement in Visual Effects Academy Award the film received, but as Director of Photography, and without a separate credit for special effects work, he would not have been eligible.

Death

Death struck Unsworth at the height of his skill and reputation. He died of a heart attack in France at the age of 64 while filming Roman Polanski's Tess in 1978. He had won an Academy Award for Cabaret in 1972, and he was posthumously nominated and awarded his second Oscar for Tess, along with Ghislain Cloquet. Cloquet alone was nominated, again successfully, for the César Award for Cinematography^[1].

Both Superman and The First Great Train Robbery were dedicated to Unsworth's memory. As alluded to in the Superman dedication, Unsworth was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

He was also admired for his charming manner at work. For instance, Margot Kidder was flattered when he arranged lighting for her shots and insisted on concentration by saying, "Quiet, I'm lighting the Lady." His wife, Maggie Unsworth, worked in the British film industry, often as a script/continuity supervisor.

Selected filmography

• The People's Land (1943)
• The Man Within (1947)
• Jassy (1947)
• Scott of the Antarctic (1948)
• The Blue Lagoon (1949)
• Trio (1950)
• Where No Vultures Fly (1951)
• The Clouded Yellow (1951)
• The Planter's Wife (1952)
• The Million Pound Note (1953)
• The Purple Plain (1954)
• The Seekers (1954)
• A Town Like Alice (1956)
• Hell Drivers (1957)
• A Night to Remember (1958)
• North West Frontier (1959)
• On the Double (1961)
• The 300 Spartans (1962)
• Becket (1964)
• Othello (1965)
• Genghis Khan (1965)
• Half a Sixpence (1967)
• The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• The Assassination Bureau (1969)
• The Reckoning (1969)
• Three Sisters (1970)
• Cromwell (1970)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
• Cabaret (1972)
• Baxter! (1973)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Abdication (1974)
• Zardoz (1974)
• Lucky Lady (1975)
• Royal Flash (1975)
• The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)
• A Bridge Too Far (1977)
• Superman (1978)
• The First Great Train Robbery (1978)
• Tess (1979)

References

External links

• BFI: British Film Institute website
• Geoffrey Unsworth at the Internet Movie Database
• Geoffrey Unsworth at the British Film Institute's Screenonline