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MOVING PICTURES
To Hal Mohr, cinematography was a technological challenge: a test in which cameras and men tackled visual problems not just as a job of work, but for the sheer, extravagant fun of succeeding at the impossible. While masters like Lee Garmes, William Daniels, and Charles Rosher concentrated on the fine art of painting with light, Mohr and a few others-Gregg Toland was one-drove their machines to impossible lengths, refining the mechanics of the camera apparatus to visualize on screen the wildest imaginings of their director-collaborators.
Although Mohr excelled as a cinema portraitist (THE WEDDING MARCH, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, and the Technicolor PHANTOM OF THE OPERA are among the most beautiful Hollywood films of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties), it was pushing the camera to its farthest limits that especially attracted him. For example, he shot BULLETS OR BALLOTS and THE GREEN PASTURES with a deep-focus device of his own invention five years before KANE. But, from the beginning, camera movement was his particular fascination. Impressed by the moving shots in the Italian CABIRIA, he devised perhaps the earliest tracking equipment to be used in any American studio for his film PAN'S MOUNTAIN in 1914. But like many an independent production even today, it was not bought for distribution and remained unseen.
His most astonishing feats of camera motion, however, were accomplished in the late Twenties in the wake of the great German films. Mohr worked with many of the great European imports at this time, including Michael Curtiz, whose dazzling first American film THE THIRD DEGREE he shot in 1926 (see The Silent Picture#18 for an interesting analysis of this neglected work). But it was in his films with Paul Leni (one of the less heralded masters of German expressionism) and Paul Fejos (a Hungarian research biologist turned filmmaker) that we find his most astonishing work-little known films that, perhaps even more than Murnau's SUNRISE, CITY GIRL, and TABU, were the most forceful examples of Hollywood expressionism.
The following article attempts to shed some light on these little seen, seldom discussed works by providing some hard background data as well as first-person recollections of their creation. Mr. Mohr's comments are excerpted from an interview with him I conducted on June 11,...