00:09A film is a story written in light.
00:12We think of The Godfather as the saga of the Corleone family.
00:17But it's also a series of beautiful and arresting and memorable and meaningful images.
00:23And the man who made those images and put them together was Gordon Willis,
00:27one of the great cinematographers in American movies who died at the age of 82.
00:33This is A.O. Scott, film critic at The New York Times.
00:36Now, if you look at what he does just right at the beginning of The Godfather movies,
00:41what's already happening is a theme is being established, a visual motif,
00:46the play of dark and light, of shadow and brightness.
00:50So when we're in the young manhood of Vito Corleone on the Lower East Side
00:54and in Little Italy and Manhattan, you can feel the closeness and the crampness of the tenement.
01:02Or, you know, you go to Havana on New Year's Eve right before the revolution
01:07and you can feel both the kind of the bright, gaudy lights of the celebration
01:11and also that deep, humid darkness.
01:17So Gordon Willis worked with a lot of other important filmmakers in the 1970s
01:23and on movies that are still memorable.
01:26The Parallax View, The Paper Chase, All the President's Men.
01:30But probably his most fruitful and lasting collaboration in the late 1970s
01:36through most of the 1980s was with Woody Allen.
01:38And Willis and Allen went on to collaborate on a number of films
01:42and you can really see an extraordinary range of visual style.
01:45But the real high point of their collaboration, I think,
01:48and just one of the most visually beautiful and satisfying movies
01:53of the second half of the 20th century is Manhattan.
01:56Woody Allen's love letter to his city
02:00that is just given such an amazing glow
02:04and such a burnished, complicated, rich feeling
02:09by the images that Willis makes.
02:13Both the interiors of apartments
02:16and the beautiful exterior shots,
02:18including that just famous, iconic shot of the Queensborough Bridge.
02:28So Willis was really the last of a breed
02:31and you really see what film is and what it can do
02:36when you look at those first shots in The Godfather.
02:39What you're looking at there is cinematography,
02:42is filmmaking at its very highest aesthetic level.
02:46And if by chance an honest man like yourself
02:48should make enemies, then he would become my enemies.
02:54And then they would fear you.
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