Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Cinematography
GREGG TOLAND
b. Charleston, Illinois, 29 May 1904, d. 26 September 1948
Although he shot more than sixty films, including
Kidnapped (1938) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) for
Darryl F. Zanuck, Wuthering Heights (1939, for which he
won an Academy AwardÒ ), The Little Foxes (1941), The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and The Bishop’s Wife
(1947) for Samuel Goldwyn, The Outlaw (1943) for
Howard Hughes, and Intermezzo (1939) for David O.
Selznick, it is for a single effort, in collaboration with a
newcomer to Hollywood, that Gregg Toland’s name is
most frequently associated with extraordinary achievement
in cinematography: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).
Toland asked Welles to use him on the picture, since he
wanted to learn by working with a man who did not know
anything about cinematography.
With deep-focus, high-keyed illumination technique
specially adapted for this project, Toland provided Welles
with stunningly sharp images. Especially notable are the
election speech scene (with its exceptionally high contrast
and provocative shooting angles), Kane stumbling past the
mirrors at Xanadu (with tautly controlled lighting that
produces explosive mirror effects), and the warehouse
finale (reprised by Steven Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost
Ark, 1981), shot with great depth of field and a moving
camera. With its simultaneous dramatic action in front,
middle, and rear planes of focus, Citizen Kane became a
landmark of cinematographic vision in Hollywood film.
Welles also wanted ‘‘lateral depth of focus’’ and so Toland
used wide-angle lenses with very small apertures; all of this
required very intense illumination and led to high-contrast
images.
Toland entered the motion picture industry as an
office boy and became a lighting cameraman before he
was twenty. He worked intensively with William
Cameron Menzies but avoided being trapped in a studio
choose a lens. Lenses range between the very short focus
wide-angle type (for instance, 8mm through 30mm)
through the mid-range ‘‘normal’’ (50mm), to the very
long focus telephoto. The longer the lens, the more the
focused image is collapsed into a single plane. In the
climactic scene of The Graduate (1967), Benjamin
(Dustin Hoffman) runs down a suburban sidewalk
contract; then he became invaluable to Goldwyn, who
because he wanted Toland free for The Bishop’s Wife
refused to loan him to Howard Hawks for Red River
(1949). The extraordinary intensity of Toland’s
collaborations with John Ford on The Long Voyage Home
(1940) and The Grapes of Wrath stemmed from the
men’s shared alcoholism and Ford’s admiration for
Toland’s ability to work with great decisiveness. On
Citizen Kane, Toland was continually offering Welles
what he had learned with Ford—unnecessary editing
could be avoided by playing scenes, wherever possible, in
a single shot.
Just before his death, Toland had perfected an f.64
lens that could provide depth of field to infinity with
‘‘perfect’’ focus. He is memorialized in the American Film
Institute’s documentary, Visions of Light: The Art of
Cinematography (1992).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940),
Citizen Kane (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), The Best
Years of Our Lives (1946)
FURTHER READING
Bazin, André. Orson Welles: A Critical View. Foreword by
François Truffaut. Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991.
Bogdanovich, Peter. ‘‘The Kane Mutiny.’’ In Focus on Citizen
Kane, edited by Ronald Gottesman, 28–53. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1995.
Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John
Ford. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Kael, Pauline. The Citizen Kane Book. New York: Limelight,
1984.
Murray Pomerance
toward the camera, turning at the last moment to race
off-camera into a church to stop a wedding. Shot here
with a very long lens, Benjamin seems to float in the
frame. Although we see his legs pumping and his face
picking up an expression of agonized exhaustion, he does
not seem to approach us, as he would if photographed
with a normal lens. The aesthetic effect is that, race as he
288 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM