Rudolph Maté

The cameraman behind Dreyer's spiritual masterpieces who reinvented himself as a Hollywood director of noir and spectacle. (1898-1964)

Born

1898

Died

1964

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Director
Camera Department

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Decades active

Awards

In short · Shot for five decades — 87 credits.

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Biography

Rudolph Maté was born in Kraków, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and learned cinematography in the great creative laboratories of Weimar Germany, Austria, and France. Early on he worked alongside major European filmmakers, and his reputation was made through his collaboration with the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer.

For Dreyer he photographed two of the most revered films in the art's history. On "The Passion of Joan of Arc" he shot the trial in relentless, harrowing close-ups, faces filling the frame in stark clarity, so that spiritual agony became almost unbearably intimate. Then, on the eerie "Vampyr," he conjured a fog-drenched, dreamlike world of drifting shadows and dissolving reality, using fabric over the lens and diffused light to make a nightmare feel like a memory. These films alone would have secured his place among the great cinematographers.

Driven west by the darkening politics of Europe, Maté brought his refined eye to Hollywood, where his talent was recognized with a remarkable run of five consecutive Academy Award nominations, for pictures including Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent," "That Hamilton Woman," the baseball elegy "The Pride of the Yankees," the desert war film "Sahara," and the Technicolor musical "Cover Girl." He also shot the glittering, dangerous world of "Gilda," helping define Rita Hayworth's smoldering image.

Restless for more control, Maté made an unusual move for a cinematographer and became a director in the late 1940s. He proved genuinely capable, helming the taut, feverish noir "D.O.A.," whose dying-man premise remains widely imitated, along with the science-fiction spectacle "When Worlds Collide" and the historical epic "The 300 Spartans." His directorial work was uneven but never dull, always the product of an eye trained in Europe's finest tradition. He died in 1964, one of the rare figures who mattered enormously on both sides of the camera.

Filmography · 87 of 87

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