In other words, it's a job that requires an unusual amalgam of technical prowess and visual artistry -- in addition to management and diplomacy skills, not to mention knowledge of equipment, lighting, film stock and postproduction processes. That may or may not explain why directors of photography don't surface much in media coverage of new pictures. Actors, directors and screenwriters are interviewed all the time, but no one ever thinks to talk to cinematographers, maybe because they're perceived as eggheads who just want to talk about lenses and film speeds.

When you sit down and actually talk to one, you realize that cinematographers mostly just want to talk about movies -- not just about the techniques used in making them, but also about the ways their visual textures and moods can affect us so deeply and so mysteriously. You can get a sense of that simply by watching Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuel's superb 1992 documentary "Visions of Light," a beautifully detailed thumbnail history of cinematography. "Visions of Light" isn't noteworthy so much because it explains precisely what cinematographers do (you'd probably need 10 two-hour documentaries for that) but because it captures so perfectly what the legacy of their profession means to them.

The cinematographers featured include just about everyone's favorites: Conrad Hall ("In Cold Blood"), Vilmos Zsigmond ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller"), Lászlá Kovács ("Shampoo"), Haskell Wexler ("In the Heat of the Night"), Vittorio Storaro ("The Conformist") and Néstor Almendros ("Days of Heaven"). It's telling that many of them seem more interested in talking about their colleagues' work than their own, and especially about the work of the great directors of photography who came before them -- people like Gregg Toland ("Citizen Kane"), James Wong Howe ("From Here to Eternity") and Russell Metty ("Touch of Evil").

For people who spend so much of their time considering how things are going to look on film, cinematographers seem surprisingly good at talking. "Most of the directors of photography I know and associate with are more like Renaissance men than people from any other parts of the business that I know," says Steven Poster, whose own credits include two very distinctive-looking recent releases, "Donnie Darko" and "Stuart Little 2." "We need to be able to take a space or a room or a large expanse and create the type of lighting that will indicate a mood and allow the actors to move within that space and be lit at any given spot that will tell the story."

At the same time, cinematographers are also busy being managers. "We're managing relationships, we're managing budgets, we're managing equipment," Poster says. "And we're managing egos of many other people. It's a multifaceted job. What we really are is Tom Sawyers getting people to whitewash our fence, so we can be off doing the art that we love to do. That's our little secret."

We've all been trained to be skeptical of anyone who's involved in the making of Hollywood films who actually uses the A-word. Given the state of the movie industry today, it's easier for most moviegoers to be cynical about Hollywood than charitable toward it. We've convinced ourselves -- and unfortunately, too often the movies themselves have proven us right -- that movies are made by committees whose sole aim is to make money, instead of by people with eyes and ears, brains and hearts.

Cinematographers seem to be the antidote to Hollywood cynicism -- not because they don't have to finesse their share of studio pressure (there are certainly times when they do), or because they claim that every movie they work on is going to be a lasting contribution to the canon (they don't), but because they believe so wholeheartedly in doing the best work they can on each given project.

After a screening of the recent stinker "The Recruit" (shot by Stuart Dryburgh), I remarked to a colleague how good it looked. "It's amazing how much TLC goes into crap," he said, and he's right. Forget plots that don't work or performances that fall flat: Someone still had to figure out the best way to capture the je ne sais quoi of a particular car chase, or to light, say, a bridge in a way that captures the essence of bridge-ness.

Beyond that, flexibility has to be part of the cinematographer's art. Every collaboration between a director and a cinematographer is different; what's more, cinematographers may do two or three pictures a year, working in different styles with different directors. Poster likens the process of making a movie to entering a marriage, complete with a courtship, a honeymoon period, the actual work of the marriage and an eventual breakup. Even if you work with the same director on another picture, the new marriage will have different characteristics.

In writing about movies, most critics consider the director to be the guy or the gal holding the bag -- not necessarily because they believe the director is the sole and exclusive author of the work but because it's a kind of shorthand. If you're trying to describe what action was taken to make a movie move or feel or read as it does, you need a noun to go with your verb, and in most cases, the director is your noun. As a colleague of mine once explained it, the director's vision is the one through which all other visions are filtered, which is as good an explanation as I've ever come across.

I suspect that directors get most of the credit for the success of a picture (or lack thereof) precisely because movies are such a collaborative process. Sometimes it's easy to separate the strands of who deserves blame or praise; but in many cases a great moment on film that we automatically give a director credit for may very well be the result of some sort of communication, spoken or un-, between a director, his or her D.P., a production designer, a costume or makeup person and any of the actors involved -- all of whom are working off a script by one or more screenwriters, who may also be on hand. And don't forget about producers, people whose degree of hands-on involvement in a picture can vary from not much to a whole lot.

It always feels corny to talk about the magic of movies, but cinematographers don't seem at all uncomfortable with the word. "It seems like magic to us, too, to actually do it," Bailey says. He compares looking at a finished film with what a composer like Gustav Mahler might have felt when he finally heard one of his complex, conflicted and infinitely layered symphonies played by actual musicians. "How awesome it must have been! In filmmaking, there are so many dozens, if not hundreds, of people involved in making a film who, in the right environment, where the producers and the directors give them the opportunity to really express themselves and put themselves into it, can create this incredible thing. When you go and see the finished film, it has an existence of its own, somehow beyond you. It's so much different than, say, writing a book or a play."

Meanwhile, film -- the medium in which cinematographers have been working for some 100 years, a medium that in its relatively short history has given most of us more joy and pleasure than we can possibly measure -- is dead. Or at least, people like George Lucas would have us think so.

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