Cinema’s a tough industry for an artist. Sure, actors can become stars, and some actors might even gain notoriety for the artistry of their performances, but those two tracks don’t always merge. A select few directors might also be raised up on the pedestal of capital-A Artist. But most everyone else, no matter how towering a figure they might be in their field, is limited to a glance in a credit scroll, or a quick title card while people are still getting settled in their seats.

Witness Jack Cardiff: a painter of some considerable skill, a portrait photographer with a savant-like eye for how to light a face and among the most talented people in the history of the world at capturing stunning images on motion picture film, without a doubt at the top of the heap in the medium of Technicolor. Cardiff is a Rembrandt with a movie camera, yet when he received the lifetime achievement Oscar in 2001 — the first cinematographer to receive the award — how many of the millions watching knew his name, separate from the films whose look he defined?

Cameraman, Craig McCall’s documentary on Cardiff, opens with that Oscar ceremony, as Dustin Hoffman introduces the man by mentioning that for anyone in the crowd 70 or younger, Cardiff had been working since before they were born. Even if Cardiff hadn’t been such a remarkable cinematographer, he’d still be notable for the sheer longevity of his working career — which, by the time he died in 2009, had spanned just short of 90 years, from appearing as a child actor in silent films in 1918 through his last project as a cinematographer in 2007.

With that many years of “work” to concentrate on, McCall can be excused for going light on the “life” portion of the title. One also gets the sense from the film that in many ways, Cardiff’s work was his life. When not shooting on film sets, he was taking home movies and photographs of lead actresses. When not on the film sets at all, he would be in museums, studying in minute detail the way different painters used light in their compositions, then going home and creating staggeringly accurate reproductions of the styles of those painters himself. All of those extracurricular activities fed into Cardiff’s unique eye for color in the earliest days of color technology, when the three-film Technicolor process — which Cardiff compares to the Impressionists in terms of its inherent aesthetic — dominated the color movie landscape.

McCall’s documentary, while nothing out of the ordinary or innovative on its own, benefits greatly from the director’s decision to simply stay out of the way and let Cardiff’s work and his admirers speak for themselves. For the latter, McCall lines up an impressive array of talking heads — led by Martin Scorsese, who turns up anytime someone is needed to speak rapturously about film history, and whose absolute love of the medium, and stories of how he first fell in love with the work of a particular artist, never stop being infectious. Kirk Douglas turns up in a rare recent interview to hail the cinematographer, as does Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to director Michael Powell. It was Powell and his filmmaking partner Emeric Pressburger whose best films — A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes — were defined by Cardiff’s innovative, groundbreaking photography.

McCall spends a large portion in the middle of the film concentrating on these films in particular, as shining examples of the magic Cardiff could create with a camera. Visual innovation in cinema was later defined by special effects departments, but Cardiff did all of his tricks in the camera. And seeing so many of the varied techniques and results on display makes one a little sad that this kind of organic visual wizardry has largely fallen by the wayside. Digital effects have their own brand of magic, but things happen through Cardiff’s lens that simply can’t be imitated.

And it’s Cardiff’s lens that makes Cameraman such a joy to watch. Much like the other great film to be made about the art of cinematography, 1992’s Visions of Light, the key is to show as much of the art as possible and let it speak for itself. Many of McCall’s interviews with Cardiff occur in art museums, and it’s important not just to illustrate his connection with painters. It’s also indicative of the style of the movie. An art museum doesn’t need a whole lot of bells and whistles, it just needs the art, hung on walls. And if the artist is around to show you around and tell a few stories about the work, so much the better. Cameraman is like a museum of Cardiff’s work, and this friendly and modest English cameraman is kind enough to give us the grand tour.

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Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
Directed by Craig McCall
Running time: 86 minutes
Not Rated
Opens today at West End Cinema.