Career Highlights: Cabaret, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Matter of Life and Death
First Major Screen Credit: The Ivory-Handled Gun (1935)
Biography
British cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth had an international reputation for his innovations and technical expertise. In 1932, he began in British film as a camera assistant; five years later, he was a camera operator on such distinguished films as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Baghdad (1940). By 1946, Unsworth had become a full-fledged cinematographer and quickly became one of the best in Britain. He was especially noted for his work with color film. He began working internationally in the early '60s. Among his technical innovations is a front projection technique he created for the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In 1972, Unsworth earned an Oscar for his filming of Cabaret. He died shortly after filming Superman (1978) and during the shooting of Tess (1979); the film was dedicated to his memory in the credits. He had also already shot some of the scenes for Superman II (1980), which were shot at the same time as those of Superman (1978). ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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.
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'sTess 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].
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.