THE CAMERAMAN.(William Wyler )

Flashback: 1936, Hollywoodland. An ambitious young director named William Wyler has made his way from Alsace to Southern California, where he plans to contribute a few new frames to the collective American dream--the movies. Already, "forty-take Willie," as more than one disgruntled star has called him, has put John Barrymore through his paces for the 1933 Elmer Rice-scripted weepie "Counsellor at Law." Now he has joined forces with the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn to begin the next phase of his career. For his first Goldwyn feature, "These Three"--penned by Lillian Hellman--Wyler has been paired with a cinematographer he's never worked with before, the thirty-two-year-old Gregg Toland. Like many other directors of the era, Wyler regards cinematographers as little more than glorified mechanics. In the past, he has often directed the camerawork himself. "I was in the habit of saying, 'Put the camera here with a forty-millimeter lens, move it this way, pan over here, do this,' " Wyler remarked, in Jan Herman's 1996 biography, "A Talent for Trouble." This approach doesn't work with Toland: after several days, he asks Goldwyn to transfer him off Wyler's set. When Wyler, bruised, demands an explanation, he learns that, with Toland, "you didn't tell him what lens to use, but what you wanted. And he would help you by suggesting the best way to photograph it." The two men reconcile, and go on to make six films together, including "Wuthering Heights" (1939) and "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946). "We discussed every move," Wyler said. "He was an artist."

In the contemporary handheld-camera and reality-TV world, the idea of attaching a sophisticated lens to the pro-cess of seeing has become passe: few, given the seemingly universal artlessness that characterizes our news of the world today, have any interest in cinema as language. Still, Toland--who, by the time of his death, in 1948, at the age of forty-four, had filmed sixty-seven features, ranging from "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) to "Song of the South" (1946)--remains essential to the grammar of filmmaking. "He thought like a cutter," the director Steven Soderbergh, who shot his last seven features himself, told me. "Which is to say, he did the hardest thing ever for a filmmaker: keeping the whole movie in your head, so that there's continuity of vision when you get in the editing room." Harris Savides, the cinematographer responsible for "Elephant" (2003) and for the extraordinary two-minute closeup of Nicole Kidman in "Birth" (2004), said, of "Intermezzo" (1939), which Toland filmed, "It's one of the most beautiful movies ever shot. The matureness of the mise en scene--it's great photography without showing off." He added, "If we shot black-and-white now, maybe we could catch up to what Toland was doing then." "Have you seen 'The Long Voyage Home'?" Soderbergh asked of John Ford's 1940 black-and-white feature about men at sea, which Toland also filmed. "It looks like it was shot tomorrow."

Many of the techniques that Toland helped pioneer have since become standard practice. Before Toland, for instance, most Hollywood fare had actors shot straight on, sitting or moving around naturalistic sets. By the mid-thirties, when Toland began producing his most resonant work, he was shooting actors with an impressionistic flair--filming them from below, with the ceiling pressing down on them, or positioning them in front of mirrors. He also developed the first lighting cues that could accurately imitate the flickering warmth of candlelight. For "The Long Voyage Home," he devised a system to reflect the ripples of water onto the faces of the sailors.

For his second project with Wyler, the 1937 movie "Dead End" (also written by Hellman), Toland was given the task of simulating daylight on a soundstage. (Wyler wanted to shoot on location, but Goldwyn, anxious to retain control of the movie, wouldn't allow it.) To replicate the high-contrast look of bright sunlight, he bunched together eight strong arc lamps on one large parallel pole. Other cinematographers might have given the "Dead End" set two looks at most: one for day, and one for night, with no chiaroscuro. Toland, however, wanted to show how lighting could--literally--shed light on the movie's dark characters. In the film, we meet Francey (Claire Trevor), a faded, spent prostitute whose former lover, a gangster named Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), has returned to New York's East Side, in the hope of ...