NG London/Film at the National Gallery/Essays: An Eye for Pictures by Jack Cardiff

Oscar winner Jack Cardiff's life long passion for art helped him become one of the most admired of all cinematographers, working on such 1940s Technicolor classics as 'Black Narcissus' and 'The Red Shoes', to action-adventure in 'The African Queen' and 'The Vikings', and literary adaptations from 'War and Peace' to 'Sons and Lovers', his first directing credit.

My parents were on the stage and we travelled to a different town each week, so I went to many different schools and learned nothing at any of them.

Having been born 'in a trunk' as it were, my earliest recollections (right from babyhood) were of the stage being prepared for performances. I used to watch the art director paint the backdrops and scenery and plan colour effects and lights. I was fascinated by two men up in the wings, one on each side of the stage, following the actors with a spotlight. I spent a lot of time with them and a stirring was born in me which I later recognised as an urge to create. Light and colour became my world.

I remember one day when I was about six years old, my father found me outside drawing on the pavement with my cap laid out for donations. He was furious with me and dragged me away, but I guess that was my earliest recollection of the emotion of creating something.

One day at one of the many schools I attended, the teacher said: 'Today we are going to see art.' She took us to the local art gallery. I had never seen a proper painting, as there were none in the digs we stayed in. I was absolutely stunned. I had never seen such colour, such dramatic interpretation. It was the beginning of a love affair with painting which remains alive and strong today.

I suppose I was much less than an apprentice when I first went behind the camera. I was a runner, whose main job was to supply the German director with Vichy water because he had a problem with flatulence. I was thirteen years old.

Pieter de Hooch, 'A Woman drinking with Two Men', probably 1658. London, The National Gallery.

Rembrandt, 'Anna and the Blind Tobit', about 1630. London, The National Gallery.

Van Dyck, 'Portrait of Giovanni Battista Cattaneo', about 1625-7. London, The National Gallery.

Maes, 'The Idle Servant', 1655. London, The National Gallery.

Vermeer, 'A Young Woman standing at a Virginal', about 1670-2. London, The National Gallery.

Not having been to any kind of film school, I hadn't the foggiest knowledge of photography or film technique. All that happened to me was that I was subconsciously soaking up the whole fascinating, mad ethos of film making, just by being there and keeping my wits about me. Actually, I had been a child actor from the age of four, and even at that tender age I was able to experience what goes on on a film set. The huge kleig lights, the noise in those days of silent films, the director bellowing through a megaphone, the makeup for orthochromatic film, Leichner No. 5 stage make-up, all these are reminiscent of my early days in the theatres and music halls.

From my early teens I constantly analysed the light around me - even subconsciously. I would see how a light coming through a window would make so many moods in a room, reflections off walls, shadow variations - everywhere. There's a whole world of changing light conditions all around us. The idea is that when you start to light a set you must know how it should be, and however necessary it is to leave realism behind sometimes - perhaps in order to flatter a woman's face - you must never forget the supposed source of the light. You only have to see paintings by the great old masters - de Hooch, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Vermeer - to see that however flamboyant their paintings are, they obeyed the cardinal rules of light and saw how all the various moods of light could orchestrate different emotions. Hitchcock was like Rembrandt. He had the knack of making light look emotionally dramatic with romantic emphasis. My work on 'Black Narcissus' was inspired by Vermeer.

And a study of Impressionism can take you even further. Apart from studying the sheer beauty of colour and its wonderful changing patterns through the day, the Impressionists put colour in new places, even the shadows - they wiped earth colours off their palettes - and although Renoir once claimed that black was the queen of colours, it was only used occasionally as an emphasis. Look at a woman's black hair in an Impressionist painting, and see how many colours are woven into it. The photographic equivalent of their broad and sometimes fuzzy brushstrokes is soft lighting and diffusion.

What is most interesting today is that the new young directors pay a great deal more interest to the lighting of their films. In the past, directors I have worked with like Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Huston, King Vidor and Michael Powell didn't express more than a limited amount of knowledge of lighting. They might say: 'Jack, I would like an atmosphere of happiness in this sequence,' (or poverty, or mystery, etcetera) and they'd say, 'I don't know how you'll do it but that's what I'd like.' And here's where my study of light in paintings helped to inspire me.

Drawing. Drawing things. How did it all begin? There's a theory that I love. Just imagine, many, many thousands of years ago - not long after Homo erectus time - perhaps a man noticed that one of his mates standing nearby was casting his shadow on a rock face and, picking up a piece of charcoal from a fire, traced a line round the shadow. Voila! The first drawing ever made. He had to be fast. Apparently speech didn't exist then, so he couldn't say: 'Hold it Humphrey, don't move, I want to draw you.' Perhaps he made a few grunts - anyway, he did it - and that was the first work of art in this world.

After that, drawing caught on, mostly bison on the walls of caves, and pretty soon colour came in (like Technicolor did in films) and they painted in black, red and violet. I've seen pictures of most of these cave paintings, and they are obviously rudimentary (after all, they were painted at least 20,000 years before Rembrandt) but, here and there, one sees one or two that stand out and are strikingly good, showing that some cave man actually had talent. This is fascinating to me. Could we suppose that this precious gift talent has always existed; that even all that time ago there was a kind of talent gene, a DNA unit of genealogical heredity that has permeated through the ages until today?

Take African art for instance. Developed countries have for centuries had schools of art with students studying the whole history of visual design and plodding through the science of painting lore - anatomy, perspective, form and volume. Yet natives in the African jungle, away from any form of civilisation, living in the most primitive environment possible and without ever having had a single lesson of any kind, took pieces of a tree and with a crude knife carved out the most extraordinary sculptural fantasies of human faces which are now in museums and which inspired Picasso and Braque. There was creative talent for you!

Well, let's come out of the jungle and concentrate on our main theme - the relationship between painting and photography. There's a mind-boggling span between the two and their relationship is enormously one-sided. Photography can only go back a couple of hundred years and movies just over a hundred, whereas painting, of course, goes back many thousands of years. The Egyptians painted on the walls of tombs and these have survived perfectly under the sands of Egypt. Ironically, many of the paintings from the golden age of Greece made much later have not survived, and the works of great painters like Apollodorus and Apelles have perished for ever, leaving nothing behind. Well, not quite. In 1937 I was photographing Pompeii and marvelled at the beauty of the wall paintings in the villas. Later I realised that these paintings could well be copies of the Greek masters of so long ago.

There's an interesting parallel between the birth pains of both painting and photography. Fresco painting in the 14th and 15th centuries was diabolically difficult. Pigments were applied on lime plaster while still wet and poor old Giotto and Masaccio had to work at full speed with decisive execution. Once dry, the pigments were permanently bonded and mistakes could only be rectified by chipping plaster away and laying on fresh plaster! Obviously very little tonal modelling could be done in such a brief time and results were pretty flat. Similarly, with the birth of photography in movies the orthochromatic film stock was extremely slow and the lenses nowhere near as fast as they are today. So an enormous amount of light was needed. Some studios had glass roofs so that the daylight could power down. Huge lamps flooded the sets and so, like early fresco painting, the photography in films was pretty flat too. But through the years painters and film people struggled on in parallel, until with the arrival of the oil medium, there was a vast improvement in painting, and in films, panchromatic film came in, along with faster lenses, and cameramen were able to paint with light, as it were.

Very early on, I realised the obvious - it was light that was all important. Whether it was a painting of a landscape or a bowl of fruit, the effect of light, its choice of direction, its contrast and its subtle reflections made all the difference.

Caravaggio, 'The Supper at Emmaus', 1601. London, The National Gallery.

Italian, 'Saint John the Baptist', probably 1640-60. London, The National Gallery.

Rembrandt, 'A Bearded Man in a Cap', 1650s. London, The National Gallery.

Turner, 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey', 1829. London, The National Gallery.

Turner, 'The Evening Star', about 1830. London, The National Gallery.

I made a habit of analysing light permutations everywhere: in houses, on a bus or tube or in the countryside, and even today I subconsciously watch changing light effects everywhere. Sometimes I see a light that isn't right and can't rest until I've worked out the source of the reflection. This has been a great help to me in lighting films. I have never stopped looking at paintings, of course, and I am constantly studying lighting conditions. Sometimes people ask me how to start when you have to light a set - say a room, for instance. The first thing I consider is where the main light would be coming from if it were a real room. For instance, there is usually a window, and if the set doesn't have a window, I have to work out where the light would have come from. Even if the window isn't yet in the picture you must never forget the main source of light. If it's night and there are standard lamps in the room, you always light as if from their direction.

It sounds absurdly simple, but we have so often seen in films a strong light apparently coming from a wall opposite the window. One often sees on TV an actor standing two feet from a wall with a strong backlight apparently coming through the wall. The audience probably won't be able to analyse the phoniness of lights coming from unrealistic sources, but bad lighting can subconsciously diminish an audience's involvement in the story.

I've always advised young cameramen beginning their careers to study painting thoroughly, particularly Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, of course, and definitely Turner. Turner would have been a wonderful cameraman. He knew all about the many dramatic moods of light and organised them according to the mood he required. He created light to suit him. I've seen in some of his seascapes a massive deep shadow right across the sea in the foreground. What made the shadow? Only Turner knew, but the effect is marvellous.

Before you say I'm contradicting myself, advising faithfulness to the correct sources of light, then saying that Turner created light sources to suit himself, I want to stress that all good painters do obey the laws of light but some - like Turner - marshalled the basic light sources and then exaggerated the contrasts in highlights and shadows to obtain the desired effect.

And that's what a cameraman does on film lighting. Of course a cameraman has to cheat reality sometimes, but the source of light he invents still has to be logical to the laws of light.

A film cameraman has a problem that a painter never has. A painter just paints one picture, whereas a cameraman composes 24 pictures a second. A still photographer can arrange lights and place his sitter in exactly the right position, but a cameraman must light people walking all over the place, perhaps going upstairs or outside to a car. But he must - or should - always have the correct sources of light in his mind.