Gordon Willis, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was a great cinematographer, one whose gifts found the perfect time and venue to mature, and ideal collaborators whose works he could lend them to.
The famous use of underexposure in the photography of The Godfather films imprinted a certain visual language in the minds of a mass audience, a sombre palette of muted colours and invasive blacks, where the mystique of family pride and historical survival always seems under assault by a hostile universe, by an inky moral rot, eternally poised between Manichaean extremes. Alan Pakula’s stringent modernist nightmares demanded and received Willis’ equal achievement, stripping these cinematic worlds down to glades of assailed humanity amidst implacable space, ruthless systems, and paranoiacally elliptical viewpoints.
Willis’ work for Coppola, for Pakula, and even for Woody Allen exemplified a stylistic hand who could build an image with a precise sense of effect – nostalgic or realistic, romantic or incisive, painterly or abstruse, mysterious or revealing, or, sometimes, many of these at once.
He could be as cold as Klee, he could be as warm as Velazquez. Willis’ works throughout the decade and beyond nonetheless confirmed his independent eye with a gift for oblique composition, and belonged to a generation of cinematographers including László Kovács, Vilmos Zsigmond, Vittorio Storaro, and Michael Balhaus, who inflected the era’s cinema with an expressivity that today has a legendary patina, for the sensual and aesthetic thrill of artisans in love with the very tactile nature of their art.
