James Wong Howe - Technical Innovations

Technical Innovations

Howe's earliest discovery was the use of black velvet to make blue eyes show up better on the orthochromatic film stock in use until the early 1920s. Orthochromatic film was "blue blind"; it was sensitive to blue and green light, which showed as white on the developed film. Reds and yellows were darkened. Faced with the problem of actors' eyes appearing washed out or even stark white on film, Howe developed a technique of mounting a frame swathed with black velvet around his camera so that the reflections darkened the actors' eyes enough for them to appear more natural in the developed film.

Howe earned the nickname "Low-Key" because of his penchant for dramatic lighting and deep shadows, a technique that came to be associated with film noir. Later in his career, as film-stocks became faster and more sensitive, Howe would continue to experiment with his photography and lighting techniques, such as shooting one scene in The Molly Maguires solely by candlelight.

Howe also was known for his use of unusual lenses, film stocks, and shooting techniques. In the 1920s, he was an early adopter of the crab dolly, a form of camera dolly with four independent wheels and a movable arm to which the camera is attached. For the boxing scenes of Body and Soul, in 1947, he entered the boxing ring on roller-skates, carrying an early hand-held camera. Picnic (1955) features a very early example of the helicopter shot, filmed by the second-unit cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, and planned by Wexler and Howe.

Although the film technique of deep focus is most associated with cinematographer Gregg Toland, Howe used it in his first sound film, Transatlantic, ten years before Toland used the technique on Citizen Kane. For deep focus, the cinematographer narrows the aperture of the camera, and floods the set with light, so that elements in both the foreground and background remain in sharp focus. The technique requires highly sensitive film and was difficult to achieve with early film stocks; Toland, Howe, and Arthur Edeson were among the earliest cinematographers to carry off the effect.