Among the most lauded and influential of cinematographers, the late Carlo Di Palma got his start as a camera operator for Vittorio De Sica and Gillo Pontecorvo and made his mark through collaborations with Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, and, most crucially, Michelangelo Antonioni. Having inspired a generation of lensers with his work on such seminal sixties films as Red Desert and Blow-Up, he later forged a comparably rich partnership starting in the 1980s with Woody Allen on some of his most beloved films (Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Husbands and Wives). On the occasion of the Film Society’s theatrical run of a new documentary on the influential DP, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life (directed by Fariborz Kamkari and produced by Di Palma’s wife, Adriana Chiesa), we revisit an assortment of rarities and masterworks that display the cinematographic richness of Di Palma’s career.

Acknowledgements: La Cineteca Nazionale; Istituto Luce Cinecittà; Adriana Chiesa Di Palma

See another Carlo Di Palma/Michelangelo Antonioni collaboration at Film Forum as their one-week run of a restored Blow-Up begins July 28.