Joseph Biroc

Joseph Francis Biroc, ASC (February 12, 1903 – September 7, 1996) was an American cinematographer. Born in New York City, he entered the film industry in 1918 as a laboratory technician in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and moved to Los Angeles in 1927, where he worked as a camera operator at RKO Pictures. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, filming the Liberation of Paris in August 1944.^{[citation needed]} He later worked as a freelance cinematographer at various studios and frequently collaborated with the director Robert Aldrich.

In addition to his film work, which included It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), Biroc worked on various television series, including Adventures of Superman.

Biroc won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Towering Inferno (1974), which he shared with Fred J. Koenekamp, having previously been nominated for Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). He also won two Primetime Emmy Awards, one for the television film Brian's Song and one for the series Casablanca. In 1988, he received the American Society of Cinematographers' Lifetime Achievement Award for his body of work.^{[failed verification]}

Joseph Francis Biroc was born on February 12, 1903, in New York City. He developed a passion for film in childhood. He recalled seeing his first film in 1910 on a vacant lot five blocks from his home, and said he knew from then that he wanted to spend his life making movies.

At the age of fifteen, with his uncle's help, Biroc began his career as a film laboratory technician with Paragon Labs in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1918. The apprenticeship began a series of jobs at various laboratories, which was then a standard route for aspiring cinematographers.

He worked at Craftsman Labs in New York from 1920 to 1923, then briefly for Goldwyn Pictures in Culver City, California, in 1923. He then returned to New York and took a job as a film printer for Famous Players–Lasky, where he was soon promoted to assistant cameraman. After Famous Players–Lasky shut down in 1927, Biroc moved to Los Angeles to work for United Artists, before moving to RKO as a camera operator. At RKO he served as an assistant to the cinematographers Leo Tover, Robert De Grasse and Edward Cronjager, and worked on films including Cimarron (1931), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), A Woman Rebels (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937) and Five Came Back (1939), though he received no screen credit, as RKO rarely credited camera operators. His last work before World War II was Bombardier (1943).

In 1943, Biroc became a motion picture cameraman in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He filmed the Liberation of Paris in August 1944.^{[citation needed]} In 1945 he filmed conditions at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany while attached to George Stevens's Special Motion Picture Coverage Unit. He rose to the rank of captain and later major.^{[citation needed]}

Biroc received his first screen credit as a cinematographer on It's a Wonderful Life (1946), on which he worked alongside the cinematographer Joseph Walker. He was later the cinematographer on Bwana Devil (1952), described as the first American feature-length colour film shot in 3-D.

In 1952, Biroc began his association with the producer-director Robert Aldrich, starting with an episode of The Doctor and continuing with films such as World for Ransom (1954), Attack (1956), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Longest Yard (1974). He also shot material for network television early on, including musical shorts featuring Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, which was unusual for cameramen at the time. For much of the 1950s he worked mainly in television, in both black and white and colour, and he ended his career in the 1970s and 1980s working on television films, specials and miniseries.^{[citation needed]}

Biroc wrote several articles on his working methods for American Cinematographer, including accounts of shooting the miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), in which sets were built with full ceilings so that they would resemble real locations, and of his work with the director Wim Wenders on Hammett (1982), where he described his approach as basic lighting and photography in the manner of earlier decades.

Biroc died on September 7, 1996, in Woodland Hills, California, aged 93. He was survived by a sister, Agnes Kronmeyer of Cranford, New Jersey, and four grandchildren.

Refs:

• Biroc, Joseph. "Hollywood Launches 3-D Production". American Cinematographer (Hollywood), August 1952.
• Biroc, Joseph. "Photographing Washington: Behind Closed Doors". American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1977.
• American Cinematographer (Hollywood), July 1981.
• Focus on Film (London), no. 13, 1973.
• Patterson, R. "On Hammett". American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1982.
• Basinger, Jeanine. The It's a Wonderful Life Book. 1987.
• American Cinematographer (Hollywood), March 1989.
• Obituary. American Cinematographer (Hollywood), November 1996.
• Obituary. Cinefantastique (Forest Park), vol. 28, no. 6, 1996.