Eventually, prior commitments elsewhere forced Almendros himself to leave and Haskell Wexler completed the film. Wexler, a veteran of the studio system and in particular a disciple of pioneering cinematographer Conrad Hall, took a more pragmatic approach to the project. Although he was reluctant to betray Almendros' vision of the way Days of Heaven should look, he was willing to explore alternative methods for achieving that look, and so filled out the gorgeous but fragmentary existing footage with more conventional shots filtered to match.
In doing so, Wexler followed in the studio tradition that allowed generations of filmmakers to portray the little world of the sound stage in such a way that it not only resembles the outside world but also appears to surpass it in scale or grandeur. Almendros had shifted the responsibility (and the budget) of the filmic project to the staging of authentic situations that could then be documented under ideal circumstances; Wexler knew that the only important things were what the camerea saw and what made it into the can.
Focusing on the technique of "day for night" (as explored in the earlier sequence on Conrad Hall's body of work) is a good way to encapsulate the essential difference between the two approaches. Almendros waited for his hour, while Wexler shot whenever he could and adapted his shooting environment to get the effects he wanted. In a similar way, studio cinematographers had brilliantly fought technical and budget constraints to give filmgoers the illusion that brightly lit sequences were happening at night -- or for that matter, that black-and-white images reflected the chromatic universe.
Now, of course, the digital effects environment (itself a creation of the blockbuster-driven evolution of the film industry glimpsed...
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