Wen | Lady Grace
01
At the end of the 19th century, the United States built the first transcontinental railway in its history, the North Pacific Railway, and a large number of Chinese laborers went to the United States to participate in this project.
After the completion of the railway, many Chinese remained in foreign countries, including a Cantonese named Huang Hao, who settled in Pasco, Washington, opened a grocery store, and took his wife and children to the United States for reunion.
Huang Hao's son is named Huang Zongxia, because of his skin color, there is no little friend to play with him, and he is often ridiculed, and his father bought him a Kodak simple cheap camera when his son was 7 years old to relieve his loneliness.
Little Huang Zongxia loves this camera, and gradually developed a strong interest in photography, don't look at him short and fat, but he is a clever ghost, in order to use the camera to shoot portraits, Huang Zongxia often takes some candy from the family grocery store to bribe his peers, and he mixes his circle of friends.
When Huang died as a teenager, his father tragically died, and he had to turn to his uncle in Oregon, where he became a boxer.
However, Huang Zongxia had bigger dreams, he wanted to become a pilot, so he ended his boxing career and ventured to Los Angeles. However, this dream is not very easy to achieve, Huang Zongxia in order to survive, worked a lot of odd jobs, but can only barely make ends meet.
Huang Zongxia
One day, Huang Zongxia met a friend he had made when he was a boxer before, learned that he had become a photographer, and at the recommendation of this friend, Huang Zongli met the famous photographer Alvin Wikov.
Wikov did not intend to hire Huang Zongxia at first, and said to him: "You are too small to carry the camera, very heavy." You have to take both the camera and the camera. Huang Zongxia replied, "I think I can." ”
In the end, Weikov hired Huang Zongxia, but let him be the cleaner of the camera storage room, but Weikov promised to be the first to let Huang Zongxia top if there was a vacancy in the future. In this way, Huang Zongpei got the job with a weekly salary of $10 and stepped into the film industry.
After working in the storage room for three or four months, Huang Zongxia was promoted to field reporter, and his main job was to hold the field note board on the set and shout "Action" before filming.
The job is boring and boring, but the advantage is that Huang Zongli can be exposed to all kinds of photographic equipment on the set, and he is a person who loves to study, and usually speculates and practices the shooting techniques of hand-cranked cameras.
In 1919, the well-known director Cecil M. When B. Demir was filming Man and Woman, there was a scene that required the heroine Gloria Swanson to appear with the lion, which was very dangerous and had to be done once.
Stills from Man and Woman
Cecil temporarily decided to add 4 camera positions to capture the lens from different directions, when the camera assistant was not enough, Cecil asked Huang Zongxia if he would operate the camera, Huang Zongxia replied that there was no problem, so he became the fourth camera camera assistant, and the self-taught photography technology came in handy.
Opportunity is always favored by those who are prepared, 20-year-old Huang Zongpei has since bid farewell to his handyman career and became a photography assistant, but his salary has not risen, so he uses his leisure time to shoot portraits of celebrities to earn some extra money.
Actress Mary Miles Minter had pale blue eyes, but limited by the photographic techniques of the time, her beautiful eyes looked hollow in black and white shots.
Huang Zongxia covered the camera with a black velvet cloth, using the shadow of light to shoot Mary's pale blue eyes with a dazzling effect, Mary was very happy, everywhere for Huang Zongxia's publicity, more and more Hollywood stars began to come to this Chinese photographer with mysterious ability to take pictures.
Under the strong recommendation of Mary, Huang Zongxia starred in "The Drum of Destiny" and "Songling En'en Vengeance" as a cinematographer, which gradually attracted the attention of Hollywood.
Mary Miles Mint
02
After truly becoming a cinematographer, Huang Zongpei's legendary life began.
Cecil needed a close-up of a canary singing in a movie, but everything was in place and the canary just wouldn't open his mouth.
It turns out that the male canary will bark, while the female canary originally does not bark, but the staff does not have this common sense, and prepares a female bird.
Go find another one, and it's too late, but Cecil is in a hurry. Huang Zong was in a hurry, he stuffed a piece of chewing gum into the bird's mouth, the small thing was frightened, and the gum could not be spit out, and the mouth was closed there.
Cecil hurried to capture it, it was still the silent film era, and the scene looked like a canary singing, without any sense of violation.
This small man Chinese even the birds can handle it, and the director Cecil expressed his satisfaction and immediately decided to give Huang Zongxia a salary increase.
From the small matter of using his candy to get closer to his peers as a child, you can know that Huang Zongxia is a flexible person, but if you think that he has established himself in Hollywood with "little cleverness", it is a big mistake.
Huang Zongxia is a recognized master in the industry, he is a technical master who has repeatedly pioneered in the film and television industry.
In the early days, silent black-and-white films were mostly based on depicting people's local expressions or actions, but in Huang Zongxia's masterpiece "Thin Man", clear and tense large depth-of-field pictures can be seen everywhere, and he gives vivid details to black-and-white films through these lenses, bringing refreshing visual enjoyment to the audience.
In the 1930s, Huang Zongxia was the first photographer to use deep focus technology in his films, and "light" was a great achievement of Huang Zongxi's innovative photography technology, so he was praised by posterity as a "master of light and shadow".
Stills from "The Thin Man"
In 1946, when shooting the boxing film "The Man Who Sold the Spirit Flesh", in order to keep up with the boxing speed of the actors, in the era before the birth of sports photography equipment, Huang Zongli stepped on a pair of skates and held photography in the boxing ring, which he thought could perfectly capture the actor's agile body language.
Huang zongli was the first photographer to shoot a film with a handheld camera, and the roller skating device he later invented was the early prototype of today's photographic railcar.
Stills from The Man Who Sold The Spirit Flesh
People who like to watch movies should not be unfamiliar with the "Darling" released in 2018, which uses a lot of fisheye lenses in order to highlight the sense of humor and absurdity, which is actually a trick that Uncle Huang played decades ago.
Stills from "The Darling"
In 1966, when filming the thriller suspense film "Second Life", Huang Zongxia creatively used 9 mm fisheye lenses in many places, using a strange sense of space to express the changes in the spirit of the characters.
The US media praised this as a "revolutionary experiment".
Stills from Second Life
Huang Zongpei was the first Chinese member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASE), and his photographic style and skills have influenced many descendants, such as the American master of photography John Arenzo, whose handheld photography technique was given by Huang Zongli.
On October 17, 2003, the International Society of Cinematographers in the United States named "the world's eleven most influential photographers", and Huang Zongxi ranked fourth.
Ang Lee, who won the Oscar for best director twice, many people think that he is the first Chinese to receive a small gold person, but in fact, Huang Zongpei is the first Chinese to win the Oscar.
Ang Lee's current record is 5 to 2, while Huang Zongxia has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography 10 times in his lifetime, and won two awards in 1956 for "Rose Tattoo" and 1964 for "The Wild Iron Man".
Huang Zongxia is a photographer and Ang Lee is a director, it is not fair to compare their Oscar nominations, here is just to show through the data, Huang Zongxia and Ang Lee are also worthy of our pride in the "Chinese light".
03
Huang Zongchen was one of the "top ten most influential cinematographers" in the history of world cinema in the 20th century, and he became famous in the 1930s, but he was not less ridiculed by his peers, when Hollywood photographers ridiculed Huang Zongxi: Which yellow race would shoot movies?
What was even more distressing to Huang Zongxia was that he fell in love with the American female writer Sannora Babbu, but at that time, the law in the United States prohibited intermarriage between foreign races, so Huang Zongxia and Sanora could not become a legally recognized couple.
It wasn't until California repealed the law in 1949 that Mr. Huang found a judge willing to witness their marriage that he and Sonora were officially married.
Huang Zongxia and Sannora
From a studio cleaner to a master photographer, Huang Zongxia has established himself in a foreign country with strength, but he has been snubbed and excluded for many years because of his Chinese status, but Huang Zongxia has never forgotten that he is Chinese.
In the 1940s, Huang zongxia was often mistaken for Japanese, and later every time he went out, he pinned a small badge on his chest that read, "I am Chinese."
After the end of World War II, Huang Zongxi's contract with Warner Bros. Pictures expired, and he returned to China on a freestyle basis, intending to direct and shoot a film of the same name based on Mr. Lao She's famous work "Camel Xiangzi".
However, due to various reasons, the film was not successfully filmed in the end, which became the regret of Huang Zongxia's life.
Huang Zongxia participated in more than 130 films in his lifetime, and his career lasted from 1919 to 1970, and in his later years he was invited to shoot the film "The Godfather", but he was already sick at that time and declined the invitation.
For the last six years of his life, Huang Zongxia had been battling illness, and he died of cancer on July 12, 1976, at the age of 76.
The upcoming 28 August marks the 122nd anniversary of Mr. Huang Zongxia's birth, and I would like to commemorate this "poet with a camera" and pay tribute to a Chinese with both moral integrity and ability!