Cinematographer

Born: August 5, 1935;

Died: April 11, 2017

MICHAEL Ballhaus, who has died aged 81, was one of the great lighting cameramen of contemporary cinema, responsible for 16 of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films and seven by Martin Scorsese, as well as a slew of others as varied as Air Force One, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon.

He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography three times: for James L Brooks’s comedy Broadcast News (1987), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and Scorsese’s 2002 epic Gangs of New York. He was also responsible for popularising, if not inventing, two of the most imitated camera techniques in film-making: the 360º close-up, in which the camera circles the actor, and the simultaneous dolly-back and zoom, where the camera’s focus closes in even as it physically reverses from its object.

But he was undoubtedly celebrated for one sequence above all: the “Copa shot” from Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990). The picture, revered as one of the greatest crime movies ever, had numerous bravura performances, terrific dialogue and flashy, stylish, violent direction. But the most memorable scene for many was a two-and-a-half minute tracking shot of the gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) entering a New York nightclub through a service entrance, passing through a busy kitchen on their way to the main hall.

The sequence, with the steadicam operator Larry McConkey following the pair, involved fiendishly complicated choreography and needed eight takes, but it summed up the clandestine glamour of the mob lifestyle. Yet the whole thing came about as Ballhaus’s improvised response, after the crew was refused permission to film at the main entrance to the building.

Ballhaus had a reputation for being able to solve the logistics of any shot a director could imagine, which he attributed to his work with the notoriously demanding Fassbinder, who worked very quickly, but to exacting visual standards. “If you can get along with Fassbinder, you can get along with any director,” Ballhaus later observed.

Michael Ballhaus was born on August 5, 1935 in Berlin; his father Oskar and his mother Lena Hutter were actors. An aunt was married to the director Max Ophüls and as a young man, Ballhaus was an extra on Lola Montès, Ophüls’ last film, where he watched the interplay between the director and the cinematographer Christian Matras. “That’s when I first thought film-making would be something wonderful that I would love to do,” he said.

Ballhaus trained as a cameraman, and took from Ophüls a love of dolly-shots and sweeping camera movements. He worked in television, and studied the work of the great Swedish lighting cameraman Sven Nykvist, who shot Ingmar Bergman’s films. For more than a decade, his collaborator was Fassbinder, with whom he first worked on Whity (1971), usually turning out two, and occasionally three, films a year.

He first used the 360º shot in Fassbinder’s Martha (1974), though it was its use in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), circling Michelle Pfeiffer draped across a grand piano, which brought it to a wide audience. After Fassbinder’s death, aged 37, in 1982, Ballhaus made his first Hollywood picture, Baby It’s You, which was also the first studio film for the independent director John Sayles.

His first picture with Scorsese came two years later. The director admired his work, but was worried about whether he would be able to make After Hours, which had a budget of just $4 million and was scheduled over 40 night-shoots. Ballhaus breezily pointed out that it amounted to 15 set-ups a night, something he’d often had to do with Fassbinder. The same year he shot (in black and white) Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon, not a film anyone admired, though it was notable not only for the photography, but the first screen appearance of Kristen Scott Thomas.

In 1986 he shot pool tables from every conceivable angle for Scorsese’s sequel to The Hustler by Robert Rossen, The Color of Money, and also worked as director of photography for its star, Paul Newman, when he directed The Glass Menagerie. The following year he shot three wildly different films: the comedy Broadcast News, Peter Yates’s noir thriller The House on Carroll Street and Scorsese’s controversial Last Temptation of Christ.

His next four films, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Frank Oz), The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves), Working Girl and Postcards from the Edge (both Mike Nichols) demonstrated his light touch and flair for comedy. After GoodFellas, he worked steadily on a wide range of pictures; for Scorsese the sumptuous costume drama The Age of Innocence (in which Ballhaus, who shot beautiful women particularly well, again filmed Michelle Pfeiffer to stunning effect), the quite different period piece Gangs of New York and the contemporary gangster film The Departed (2006).

His most notable films for other directors demonstrated his range: Francis Ford Copolla’s highly stylised and misunderstood Dracula (1992), Robert Redford’s unshowy, under-rated Quiz Show (1994), the thrillers Outbreak and Air Force One for Wolfgang Peterson, Barry Levinson’s legal drama Sleepers and the excellent political drama Primary Colors (1998), again with Nichols. A rare low point was the atrocious Wild Wild West (1999), a steampunk catastrophe featuring a giant metal spider driven by a scenery-chewing Kenneth Branagh, which was produced by Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser, Jon Peters.

After The Departed, Ballhaus retired from film-making due to glaucoma, though in 2013 he worked on 3096, a German drama directed by his second wife.

He married, in 1958, Helga Betten, an actress who appeared in several of Fassbinder’s films. They had two sons, (Jan) Sebastian, a director, and Florian, who is a cinematographer. She died in 2006; in 2011 he married Sherry Hormann, who survives him with his sons.

ANDREW MCKIE