Den britiske filmfotografen Jack Cardiff har gått bort. Han ble 94 år gammel. The Guardian skriver at «his stunning, painterly work on the films of Powell and Pressburger means we have lost a pioneering great.» Han begynte å jobbe i filmbransjen på 1920-tallet, og etter hvert oppdaget Michael Powell og Emeric Pressburger Cardiffs talent. Cardiff har fotografert filmer som A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus,  The Vikings og The Barefoot Contessa. På 1980-tallet fotograferte han flere actionfilmer. Han har også regissert flere filmer, deriblant Sons and Lovers som ble tatt ut til Cannes film festival i 1960.

«The cinematographer is traditionally one of the most revered professionals on any film set, but Cardiff is one of the very few to achieve a kind of authorial brand-recognition, and this I think must surely stem from his inspired work on those Powell masterpieces. Particularly, perhaps, Black Narcissus, in which the Himalayas were plausibly, fascinatingly fabricated in Britain: an entire created world, a pre-CGI simulacrum of reality, was conjured up in a movie studio at least partly as a result of Cardiff’s painterly control of light and colour.

The richness of that palette: the flowers, the sky, Deborah Kerr’s discreet maquillage – all contrasting, stunningly, with the deathly pallor on the face of Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth as she finally abandons herself to hysteria, despair and revenge on those fictional heights. Without the «look» of that film, the story would have meant far less, and that look had just enough exquisite unreality to draw attention to the genius of the man who had crafted it.»