Freddie Francis, Cameraman

“I don’t know where this cinematographer Freddie Francis sprang from. You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

With Douglas Slocombe and Jack Cardiff, both born in the 1910s, Freddie Francis completes the Holy Trinity of English cinematography, his career stretching from the dawn of the British New Wave (Room at the Top, The Innocents) and the heyday of Hammer horror to—after a lengthy interlude to focus on his own work as a director—eye-popping collaborations with Martin Scorsese, Karel Reisz, and David Lynch. With a new 4K restoration of Lynch’s The Elephant Man now available—Francis’s first credit as DP after a 17-year hiatus, and a triumphal comeback—we’re seizing the opportunity to take an awed look at an array of films showing off Francis’s abundant gifts as a generator of onscreen atmosphere, equally adept at clammy Gothic grisaille, drab kitchen-sink realism, and lush, semi-tropical delirium.