Life Through a Lens: Memoirs of a Cinematographer

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

After a lifetime career as a professional cinematographer with multiple
credits on hundreds of British, American, and Canadian films, Osmond
“Bordie” Borradaile at age 80 wrote his memoirs for the amusement of
his family and friends. Believing the manuscript could interest a much
wider audience, his daughter-turned-editor, with the assistance of many
who knew and worked with him, decided to find a publisher. The result is
this lively and entertaining account of the life and work of an
innovative and world-renowned Canadian motion picture cameraman who
received numerous awards and accolades including an Oscar nomination,
the Order of Canada, and, shortly before his death in 1999 at age 100, a
citation as a Chevalier de La Legion d’Honneur.

Bordie proudly but humbly acknowledges how, from the time of his birth
in Winnipeg in 1898, his parents’ interests in art, photography,
travel and the outdoors shaped his lifelong attraction to photography
and cinematography in exotic locations. Literally starting at the bottom
(sweeping the cutting room floors of Lasky’s Feature Play Company), he
begged and pestered his way upward to film wrapper to cameraman to
assistant director to director of photography, with spongelike
absorption of the technical and aesthetic aspects of his chosen
profession. In describing his extensive travels and the projects he
filmed, Bordie achieves an accessible narrative style with lots of
behind-the-scenes insights, humorous asides, and folksy accounts of such
celebrities as Emperor Haillie Selassie, Robert Flaherty, Charles
Laughton, Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow, Cecil B. DeMille, Cary Grant,
the Korda brothers, Gloria Swanson, Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde, and
the Duke of Edinburgh. He also describes his fascination for solving the
many technical and artistic challenges he faced in getting just the
right light with just the right film stock and equipment for location
shots in features like The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Drum, Elephant Boy,
Four Feathers, The Forty Ninth Parallel, and I Was a Male War Bride.

By all accounts, Bordie led a remarkable life; thanks to his daughter,
we have a memorable record of it.