The cinematographer Michael Chapman, who has died aged 84, had a ringside seat for many of the towering works of postwar American cinema, including Raging Bull (1980), based on the life of the middleweight champion Jake LaMotta (played by Robert De Niro). That film, which brought Chapman the first of two Oscar nominations, was one of four he made with Martin Scorsese; it was preceded by Taxi Driver (1976), the concert movie The Last Waltz and the documentary American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (both 1978).
“His relationship with the camera and the film that was running through it was intimate, mysterious, almost mystical,” said Scorsese, who called him “a great artist”.
In Raging Bull, Chapman delineated sharply the different areas of LaMotta’s life. In the ring, he used elaborate camera moves, swooping and rushing, to achieve an operatic, adrenalised effect, while a plainer style was adopted for street scenes and tense pow-wows in cramped clubs and apartments. His work exhibited breadth and grandeur but he could never be accused of prettifying a shot. “It shouldn’t be beautiful,” he said of his craft. “It should be appropriate.”
Chapman and Scorsese made Raging Bull in black-and-white to evoke the Life magazine photography and TV boxing broadcasts of their youth. “In our memories, boxing was a black-and-white sport,” Chapman explained, “so it seemed perfectly reasonable to shoot it in black-and-white.”
It was Taxi Driver, though, that he considered his crowning achievement. For all its grittiness, this study of a lonely, embittered sociopath (also De Niro) was hallucinatory rather than realistic. “It pretends to be documentary but in fact it’s quite theatrical,” Chapman said, pointing to the use of enigmatic dissolves, heightened colour and unmotivated camera movement, such as the unusual moment when the camera drifts away from De Niro while he is talking on the phone and stares blankly down a deserted corridor.
The film’s meagre budget demanded a certain ingenuity. Chapman and Scorsese squeezed into the back of a cab driven by De Niro to roam New York at night, shooting whatever took their fancy. For the climax, in which the camera seems to float across a flophouse ceiling while it surveys the aftermath of a massacre, Chapman cut into the floor of the apartment above so that the camera could track sideways as it peered at the carnage below.
Born and raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Chapman was the son of a teacher father and librarian mother. “I was devoted to movies as a child,” he said, singling out newsreels as a particular inspiration. In those bulletins, he saw “airplanes flying, bombs exploding, battleships firing huge cannons. Extraordinarily powerful images of a world far away.” Following his education at the Andover Academy and Columbia University, where according to Chapman “there was a system at that time where you could basically take whatever you wanted and get your degree. I suppose I was an English major or a history major in some vague way”, he was employed as a brakeman on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. “It was a very chic thing to do in the late 1950s,” he recalled. “Echoes of Kerouac and Ginsberg and all that.”
After a brief stint in the army, he married Myriam Brun in 1961. Her father, the French émigré cinematographer Joseph C Brun, objected to his daughter marrying “a beatnik ne’er-do-well” and took Chapman on as an assistant on several pictures, including Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), a lurid, New York-set thriller cited subsequently by critics as an influence on Taxi Driver. He worked his way up to camera operator on projects with Gordon Willis, the esteemed cinematographer who became his mentor, among them Klute (1971) and The Godfather (1972).
Chapman’s first credit as director of photography was Hal Ashby’s salty buddy movie The Last Detail (1973) starring Jack Nicholson, which had a rough-and-ready visual style. “The actual light in the actual locations was far more emotionally evocative than anything I could do at that stage in my career,” he said.
Jaws (1975) marked his final credit solely as camera operator. He shot the abrasive Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel as a budding pianist trapped in a life of crime, an inspired remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both 1978), the lesbian athletics drama Personal Best and the comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (both 1982). For the latter, another innovative experiment in black and white, his footage was intercut with excerpts from Hollywood classics to make it appear as if the film’s star, Steve Martin, was bantering with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner.
He worked on a second Martin vehicle, The Man With Two Brains (1983), as well as the vampire romp The Lost Boys (1987), Scrooged (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990). He also directed three movies: All the Right Moves (1983), a sports drama starring Tom Cruise, the Cro-Magnon yarn The Clan of the Cave Bear (1985), described by Time Out magazine as “Reader’s Digest prehistory”, and The Viking Sagas (1995), which he also wrote. He was reunited with Scorsese in 1987 on the pop promo for Michael Jackson’s single Bad.
A second Oscar nomination came his way for The Fugitive (1993), a big-screen adaptation of the popular 1960s TV series. Following his final cinematography credit, on the children’s fantasy Bridge to Terabithia (2007), he taught film at the North Carolina School of the Arts.
He is survived by his second wife, the screenwriter Amy Holden Jones, and by their children, Emma and Patrick, as well as by Jonathan and Andrew, his sons from his previous marriage.
• Michael Crawford Chapman, cinematographer, born 21 November 1935; died 20 September 2020
