Los Angeles Times
>From Times Staff and Wire Reports
July 16, 2004

ROME — Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, who made innovative use of color and darkness in such films as Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic "Blowup," has died. He was 79.

Di Palma died July 9 at his home in his native Rome. His family said he had been ill a long time, but did not specify the cause of death.

"Carlo was and always will be a great artist," Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said at Di Palma's funeral Monday. "The greatest Italian directors always wanted Carlo to accompany their images, to help them transmit images with light, with color, with black and white, or rather, with blacks and whites, the hundreds [of shades]."

Last year, the European Film Academy presented Di Palma a special award for "outstanding contribution to international film."

The son of a motion picture camera repairman, Di Palma studied at Rome's center for cinematography and began working in film in 1942. He was focus operator on director Roberto Rossellini's "Rome, Open City" in 1945 and Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" in 1948.

Di Palma, who was sometimes credited as Charles Brown, earned his first director of cinematography credit in 1950. It was in 1964 that he gained international acclaim with his innovative cinematography for Antonioni's "Red Desert."

Di Palma told The Times during a 1977 visit to Los Angeles that he had to persuade Antonioni to use color for his first time on that film, and even did tests to convince the director that color could be used to transform reality.

"I felt this would be the most important picture of my life," Di Palma told The Times' Kevin Thomas. "For the first time there would be the color of feelings on the screen."

Irene Bignardi, a leading Italian film critic who wrote a memorial tribute in the newspaper La Repubblica, described Di Palma's use of color in that film as "wholly new and totally unconventional," and said the result was "poetic and abstract."

Two years after "Red Desert," Di Palma worked on "Blowup," Antonioni's first English-language film and still one of the director's most popular. The picture told of an emotionally isolated fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who finds that he may have inadvertently captured a murder on film.

In the 1960s and '70s, Di Palma worked on some of the great Italian comedies, such as "Divorce, Italian Style" with Marcello Mastroianni, set in Sicily; Mario Monicelli's "Girl with a Pistol," which starred Monica Vitti; and "For Love and Gold," also by Monicelli.

Di Palma's collaboration with Allen started in 1986, with "Hannah and Her Sisters," and continued for 10 more films over 10 years.

In "Shadows and Fog" — Allen's 1992 homage to German expressionism — Di Palma made a small European community mysterious and dark. In the 1994 film "Bullets over Broadway," he gave 1920s New York the red-brown color of autumn.

Di Palma also worked on the Allen movies "Radio Days," "September," "Alice," "Husbands and Wives," "Manhattan Murder Mystery," "Mighty Aphrodite" and "Everyone Says I Love You." Their last collaboration was "Deconstructing Harry" in 1997.

Di Palma dabbled briefly in directing, beginning with "Teresa the Thief" in 1973, which was featured at the 1975 Los Angeles International Film Exposition. The Times' Thomas called the film "a rich, bittersweet comedy overflowing with an irresistible Italianate passion for life that at the same time made an unsparing indictment of the inhumanity of society and its institutions."

DiPalma is survived by his wife, film distribution executive Adriana Chiesa; and a daughter, Valentina.

Carlo Di Palma, 79; Innovative Cinematographer
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