81 years old Gordon Willis- the  American cinematographer best known for his work on Coppola’s The God Father series as well as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan has worked with Allen on numerous projects.

His fellow cinematographer William Fraker has called Willis’s work”a milestone in visual storytelling”, while one critic suggested that “more than any other director of photography, Willis defined the cinematic look of the 1970s: sophisticated compositions in which bolts of light and black put the decade’s moral ambiguities into stark relief”.

When the International Cinematographers Guild conducted a survey in  2003 they placed Willis among the ten most influential cinematographers in history.

His collaboration with Woody Allen began with Annie Hall 1977. Willis described making films with Allen as being so comfortable an experience that it was like “working with your hands in your pockets”. On Annie Hall he contrasted the warmth of Annie and Alvy Singer’s romance in New York with the overexposure of the film’s California scenes, while in Allen’s Manhattan 1979 he was responsible for what has been called “a richly textured black-and-white paean to the beauty and diversity of the city itself”. Willis, whose idea it was to use anamorphic widescreen for the filming, said: “We both felt that New York was a black-and-white city”.

Willis also worked on the Allen films as follows: Interiors,  Stardust Memories,  A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,  Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose  and The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Allen said that working with Willis had helped to improve his technical skills, saying of him: “He’s an artist. He’s got a great sense of humor -he taught me a lot.”

His friend the cinematographer Conrad Hall named him “The Prince of Darkness” but Willis himself preferred to talk in terms of “visual relativity”, saying: “I like going from light to dark, dark to light, big to small, small to big”.

Discussing The Godfather he said:”You can decide this movie has got a dark palette. But you can’t spend two hours on a dark palette… So you’ve got this high-key, Kodachrome wedding going on. Now you go back inside and it’s dark again. You can’t, in my mind, put both feet into a bucket of cement and leave them there for the whole movie. It doesn’t work. You must have this relativity.” 

The director Francis Ford Coppola once said of Willis, “He has a natural sense of structure and beauty, not unlike a Renaissance artist”, while Willis was praised for his capacity to use “painterliness” to define “not just the look but the very meaning and feel of a film”. 

At a seminar on film-making he gave in 2003, Willis said, “It’s hard to believe, but a lot of directors have no visual sense. They only have a storytelling sense. If a director is smart, he’ll give me the elbow room to paint”. He added: “It’s the judgment they’re paying for.”In a later interview he explained that when he started out in films he “did things in visual structure that nobody in the business was doing, especially in Hollywood”, explaining: “I wasn’t trying to be different; I just did what I liked”.

When asked by the interviewer how he applied his style to different genres and to working with different directors, Willis answered: “You’re looking for a formula; there is none.

The formula is me.”Zelig; the  1983 American film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Allen and  Mia Farrow was photographed and narrated in the style of 1920s black and white newsreels which are interwoven with archival footage from the era and re-enactments of real historical events. Color segments from the present day interview real and fictional personages, including Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag.

Gordon Willis was nominated for Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Stardust memories the 1980 movie written and directed by Allen who considers this to be one of his best films in addition to The Purple Rose of Cairo and Match Point.

The film is shot in black and white particularly reminiscent of Fellini’s 8½shot in 1963, which it parodies. Allen denies that this film is autobiographical and has expressed regret that audiences interpreted it as such. 

The film sharply divided both audiences and critics, with many Allen fans proclaiming it his best picture or among his worst. Willis worked with Allen in – Interiors the  1978 drama film written and directed by Allen.

Vincent canby of The New York Times called the film “beautiful” and complimented Gordon Willis on his “use of cool colors that suggest civilization’s precarious control of natural forces”, but noted: “My problem with Interiors is that although I admire the performances and isolated moments, as well as the techniques and the sheer, headlong courage of this great, comic, film-making philosopher, I haven’t any real idea what the film is up to. It’s almost as if Mr. Allen had set out to make someone else’s movie, say a film in the manner of Mr. Bergman, without having any grasp of the material, or first-hand, gut feelings about the characters.

They seem like other people’s characters, known only through other people’s art.”

Fonte: http://www.istanbul74.com/2012/04/08/woody-allen-and-gordon-willis-collaborations/#!prettyPhoto