magasa的小站Laura Truffaut on Nestor Almendros
by Laura Truffaut, she is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of California-Berkeley.
I first met Nestor Almendros in the summer of 1969, on the set of The Wild Child, his initial collaboration with my father. He had recently filmed My Night at Maud's for Eric Rohmer--one of his first ventures as cinematographer of a feature-length movie. For my father, The Wild Child meant a return to black and white, not so much the medium of the early New Wave as that of the origins of cinema itself. He explained to me later that he had been disappointed by his previous cinematographer, who, after doing good work on Stolen Kisses, had become overwhelmed with the job of photographing two stars (Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo) on Mississippi Mermaid. According to Nestor's modest account in his autobiography, my father hired him because he assumed wrongly, on the basis of My Night at Maud's, that he was 9 great specialist of black and white. At any rate, with their common dislike of gimmicky photography, their penchant for simplicity, and finally the shared conviction that cinematography, like cinema itself, must obey "moral" as well as aesthetic considerations, they were bound to work well together.
Through the Seventies, my father worked with Nestor intermittently, but he was always the cinematographer of choice for period movies: Two English Girls, The Story of Adele H. From 1976's The Man Who Loved Women on, they collaborated steadily. At the same time, Nestor continued to work with Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder, and went on to receive recognition and ultimately great success for his work in American films.
Both Nestor and my father saw their successive collaborations, I think, as the components of a body of work, to which they could refer again and again. For instance, they prepared for Adele H. by screening Two English Girls. Nestor would also use his other work as a point of reference; for instance, his Poil de Carotte, a little-known 1971 remake of the Duvivier classic, was very important to him as a breakthrough period-piece.
I wish I could say that my friendship with Nestor dated from those early days on The Wild Child. Unfortunately, on this first extended visit to a movie set I was only 10 years old, and more absorbed in the work of the costume designer and the makeup artist. It was not till seven years later, and a long sojourn on the set of The Man Who Loved Women, that I got to know Nestor better. The film was made on location in Montpellier, away from Paris. This encouraged a familylike atmosphere among the crew--something my father always sought. Besides work, there was time and leisure for discussions, and that is how I was able to appreciate Nestor, at work and off.
An 18-year-old freshman, I was struggling with a big decision: whether to pursue my studies in literature and classics, or to drop out and go for a career in film. Nestor embodied both alternatives. He was a technician and artist who was not only fluent in several languages but well-read in them; too, and deeply curious about subjects he did not know well. And he loved to share his insights about art and film. In short, someone not so far removed from the modern Renaissance man we hear so much about, but rarely encounter.
As much as I loved watching Nestor work on the set, I also knew that this was an exceptionally civilized shoot, and that I could not count on too many of those in the course of a career. More importantly, I knew that I needed a talent of my own, a contribution to make to movies. You can't just work in film because you like the atmosphere. So I did the right thing: I stayed in school but maintained a friendship with Nestor Almendros .
Visually, what Nestor was trying to achieve on The Man Who Loved Women was a monochromatic, sepia look. The same can be said of The Green Room, two years later, which my father would have preferred to shoot in black and white. By 1978, color had become an economic imperative, just as black-and-white photography had been in the early days of the New Wave. Nestor's challenge, then, was to convey the monochromatic universe of a man obsessed with the memory of the dead.
Although The Green Room was inspired by Henry James, its visual effects had another source: the opening credits of the American TV show Kung Fu, which was shown in France in the early Seventies. Every week, as we saw the same flashback sequence featuring an altar of candles, my father would enthusiastically announce that one day he would show this many candles on screen. The Green Room's shrine to the departed ultimately supplied him with his opportunity.
These visual thematics gave Nestor an opportunity as well: they allowed him to tackle the challenge of "natural" lighting as creatively as in his other period movies. In the meantime, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon had become a box-office hit in France and, more importantly, audiences who had never before paid much attention to the art of cinematography were now praising the camerawork on that film, as well as the "authentic lighting by candlelight." Nestor, himself an early proponent of natural light aesthetics, resented the oversimplification and took pains to reproduce similar "natural," "candlelight" effects.
Even after having achieved recognition--and an Oscar--for his stunning work on Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, he was annoyed with the public's criteria for what constituted great cinematography. While he did receive a nomination for Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer, he knew that an apartment's interiors, however exquisitely lit, did not stand a chance against any exotic setting, and this confusion, this inability to distinguish between beautiful photography and beautiful places, hurt him. That is why he was moved to write on his craft and to organize the book--A Man with a Camera--in function of each film he had worked on.
After the two monochromatic efforts, a fuller spectrum of colors resurfaced in The Last Metro ('80). By then, Nestor had received his Oscar and was working more and more in the U.S. Compared to big American productions, The Last Metro, even with its prestigious casting, had a modest budget. Nestor took a pay cut in order to work on the film, which offered him the chance to photograph Catherine Deneuve's beautiful, camera-beloved face. This was not insignificant for Nestor; I vividly recall his pleasure at having worked with Meryl Streep on four different movies over his years in Hollywood.
After taking a break from each other (1981's The Woman Next Door was shot by another lighting cameraman), my father and Nestor teamed up for what turned out to be their last collaboration, Confidentially Yours ('83). This time around, my father was able to find financing for a movie filmed in black and white, thanks to the successes of Scorsese's Raging Bull and Woody Allen's Manhattan, which had disproved the distributors' notion that black and white would be the kiss of death for a commercial, mainstream movie.
I happened to visit the set of Confidentially Yours, a film noir comedy that borrowed its aesthetics from Hollywood studio films of the Forties. Although there are exterior scenes in this, as in The Green Room and The Last Metro, the dominant effect in all these films is of an enclosed space. And for good reason: all three stories feature at least one character in hiding either from the authorities or from life itself. Of these last films, only The Last Metro was shot in a studio. But even on the others, the crew would in essence reconstitute a ministudio on location, which reinforced the sense of intimacy, and occasionally of claustrophobia, emanating from the films themselves. As my father (starting with The Story of Adele H.) was becoming more and more attracted to linear stories focusing on one or two characters, Nestor's photography on their collaborations shifted away from the emphasis on natural daylight so prevalent in The Wild Child and Two English Girls, to a more stylized and closed-up universe of rooms, cellars, and stairwells. The conspicuously low number of exterior shots in these final efforts of the Truffaut-Almendros team served a psychological purpose, but it also testifies to a theory my father had come to--that too much sky seen in the actors' background invariably ruined the credibility of a period movie. Nestor humored him, although his work on Days of Heaven and The Marquise of O. clearly shows that he did not subscribe to the same theory!
An exile by necessity, Nestor Almendros enjoyed his cosmopolitan lifestyle. Cinematography was, however, becoming a more and more stressful occupation, because of the pressure that came with big Hollywood budgets, but also because Nestor's eyesight was being affected by the strain of his work. I think this explains why he started to write in 1980, and then to direct. He made two documentaries, Improper Conduct and Nobody Listened, both on the subject of Fidel Castro's repressive policies toward homosexuals and intellectuals. The subject was close to his heart, since he himself had left Cuba and his family as a victim of that repression. Moreover, in the post-1968 political climate of Paris and New York, stories such as his had not found a welcome ear in leftist circles, and he felt even more strongly that he needed to speak out and somehow make a dent in Castro's image among the Parisian and New York left.
Although the subject matter of Improper Conduct was so close to his own life, Nestor chose never to appear in the film. But besides its definite aesthetic qualities, the film bears his mark by virtue of its implicit thread: how imprisonment and exile affect personal lives, culminating in the closing interview of a prize-winning playwright reduced to performing puppet-shows in the States. Nestor understood perfectly that the need for an artist to start over, though something that had proven lucky for him, could truly damage lives and careers in other cases.
His films were well received and led to his siting on a number of boards and festival juries dealing with documentaries and political films--a position he seemed to enjoy quite a bit. Better than anyone, he understood to what absurd lengths a totalitarian regime would apply censorship. In 1971's Bed and Board, Antoine Doinel's wife was a Nureyev fan and kept a portrait of him at her bedside; the film was consequently banned from distribution in the USSR. Ten years later, when the script of Confidentially Yours required a defection scene in a police station, Nestor was the only person on the crew who remembered the Nureyev incident and its impact on the film's profit, and he insisted that the defector be Albanian rather than, say, Russian, because Albania would never import a Western film anyway!
After my father's death in 19884, Nestor, who maintained an apartment in New York, ended up spending more of his time there, focusing on the American side of his career. He worked for the first time with both Scorsese (New York Stories) and Mike Nichols (Heartburn), and even filmed a Calvin Klein commercial. He published a U.S. edition of his book and wrote articles for FILM COMMENT and other film magazines, displaying but a fraction of his knowledge of film, art, and literature. He remained a faithful friend to me and to other members of my father's extended family, his assistant Suzanne Schiffman and the legendary Helen Scott. And he always took pains to personally supervise the process when movies like Adele H. were being transferred from celluloid to video or shown on television.
At the same time he was working less, he was also more famous. The last time we talked was just after the shooting of his final film, Robert Benton's Billy Bathgate. This time around, the pace of filming had proven too harsh for him and he sounded bitter about the pressure that a Hollywood studio budget put on everyone connected with the film. He felt that few works of real quality could come out of such an oppressive work schedule, and he seemed determined, despite his great friendship with Benton, never to work on a big studio production again. This disenchantment with Hollywood coincided with his illness--an intercession that allowed this indefatigable man never to have to face retirement.
Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Jan 1994
 |
I first met Nestor Almendros in the summer of 1969, on the set of The Wild Child, his initial collaboration with my father. He had recently filmed My Night at Maud's for Eric Rohmer--one of his first ventures as cinematographer of a feature-length movie. For my father, The Wild Child meant a return to black and white, not so much the medium of the early New Wave as that of the origins of cinema itself. He explained to me later that he had been disappointed by his previous cinematographer, who, after doing good work on Stolen Kisses, had become overwhelmed with the job of photographing two stars (Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo) on Mississippi Mermaid. According to Nestor's modest account in his autobiography, my father hired him because he assumed wrongly, on the basis of My Night at Maud's, that he was 9 great specialist of black and white. At any rate, with their common dislike of gimmicky photography, their penchant for simplicity, and finally the shared conviction that cinematography, like cinema itself, must obey "moral" as well as aesthetic considerations, they were bound to work well together.
Through the Seventies, my father worked with Nestor intermittently, but he was always the cinematographer of choice for period movies: Two English Girls, The Story of Adele H. From 1976's The Man Who Loved Women on, they collaborated steadily. At the same time, Nestor continued to work with Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder, and went on to receive recognition and ultimately great success for his work in American films.
Both Nestor and my father saw their successive collaborations, I think, as the components of a body of work, to which they could refer again and again. For instance, they prepared for Adele H. by screening Two English Girls. Nestor would also use his other work as a point of reference; for instance, his Poil de Carotte, a little-known 1971 remake of the Duvivier classic, was very important to him as a breakthrough period-piece.
I wish I could say that my friendship with Nestor dated from those early days on The Wild Child. Unfortunately, on this first extended visit to a movie set I was only 10 years old, and more absorbed in the work of the costume designer and the makeup artist. It was not till seven years later, and a long sojourn on the set of The Man Who Loved Women, that I got to know Nestor better. The film was made on location in Montpellier, away from Paris. This encouraged a familylike atmosphere among the crew--something my father always sought. Besides work, there was time and leisure for discussions, and that is how I was able to appreciate Nestor, at work and off.
An 18-year-old freshman, I was struggling with a big decision: whether to pursue my studies in literature and classics, or to drop out and go for a career in film. Nestor embodied both alternatives. He was a technician and artist who was not only fluent in several languages but well-read in them; too, and deeply curious about subjects he did not know well. And he loved to share his insights about art and film. In short, someone not so far removed from the modern Renaissance man we hear so much about, but rarely encounter.
As much as I loved watching Nestor work on the set, I also knew that this was an exceptionally civilized shoot, and that I could not count on too many of those in the course of a career. More importantly, I knew that I needed a talent of my own, a contribution to make to movies. You can't just work in film because you like the atmosphere. So I did the right thing: I stayed in school but maintained a friendship with Nestor Almendros .
Visually, what Nestor was trying to achieve on The Man Who Loved Women was a monochromatic, sepia look. The same can be said of The Green Room, two years later, which my father would have preferred to shoot in black and white. By 1978, color had become an economic imperative, just as black-and-white photography had been in the early days of the New Wave. Nestor's challenge, then, was to convey the monochromatic universe of a man obsessed with the memory of the dead.
Although The Green Room was inspired by Henry James, its visual effects had another source: the opening credits of the American TV show Kung Fu, which was shown in France in the early Seventies. Every week, as we saw the same flashback sequence featuring an altar of candles, my father would enthusiastically announce that one day he would show this many candles on screen. The Green Room's shrine to the departed ultimately supplied him with his opportunity.
 |
These visual thematics gave Nestor an opportunity as well: they allowed him to tackle the challenge of "natural" lighting as creatively as in his other period movies. In the meantime, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon had become a box-office hit in France and, more importantly, audiences who had never before paid much attention to the art of cinematography were now praising the camerawork on that film, as well as the "authentic lighting by candlelight." Nestor, himself an early proponent of natural light aesthetics, resented the oversimplification and took pains to reproduce similar "natural," "candlelight" effects.
Even after having achieved recognition--and an Oscar--for his stunning work on Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, he was annoyed with the public's criteria for what constituted great cinematography. While he did receive a nomination for Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer, he knew that an apartment's interiors, however exquisitely lit, did not stand a chance against any exotic setting, and this confusion, this inability to distinguish between beautiful photography and beautiful places, hurt him. That is why he was moved to write on his craft and to organize the book--A Man with a Camera--in function of each film he had worked on.
After the two monochromatic efforts, a fuller spectrum of colors resurfaced in The Last Metro ('80). By then, Nestor had received his Oscar and was working more and more in the U.S. Compared to big American productions, The Last Metro, even with its prestigious casting, had a modest budget. Nestor took a pay cut in order to work on the film, which offered him the chance to photograph Catherine Deneuve's beautiful, camera-beloved face. This was not insignificant for Nestor; I vividly recall his pleasure at having worked with Meryl Streep on four different movies over his years in Hollywood.
After taking a break from each other (1981's The Woman Next Door was shot by another lighting cameraman), my father and Nestor teamed up for what turned out to be their last collaboration, Confidentially Yours ('83). This time around, my father was able to find financing for a movie filmed in black and white, thanks to the successes of Scorsese's Raging Bull and Woody Allen's Manhattan, which had disproved the distributors' notion that black and white would be the kiss of death for a commercial, mainstream movie.
I happened to visit the set of Confidentially Yours, a film noir comedy that borrowed its aesthetics from Hollywood studio films of the Forties. Although there are exterior scenes in this, as in The Green Room and The Last Metro, the dominant effect in all these films is of an enclosed space. And for good reason: all three stories feature at least one character in hiding either from the authorities or from life itself. Of these last films, only The Last Metro was shot in a studio. But even on the others, the crew would in essence reconstitute a ministudio on location, which reinforced the sense of intimacy, and occasionally of claustrophobia, emanating from the films themselves. As my father (starting with The Story of Adele H.) was becoming more and more attracted to linear stories focusing on one or two characters, Nestor's photography on their collaborations shifted away from the emphasis on natural daylight so prevalent in The Wild Child and Two English Girls, to a more stylized and closed-up universe of rooms, cellars, and stairwells. The conspicuously low number of exterior shots in these final efforts of the Truffaut-Almendros team served a psychological purpose, but it also testifies to a theory my father had come to--that too much sky seen in the actors' background invariably ruined the credibility of a period movie. Nestor humored him, although his work on Days of Heaven and The Marquise of O. clearly shows that he did not subscribe to the same theory!
An exile by necessity, Nestor Almendros enjoyed his cosmopolitan lifestyle. Cinematography was, however, becoming a more and more stressful occupation, because of the pressure that came with big Hollywood budgets, but also because Nestor's eyesight was being affected by the strain of his work. I think this explains why he started to write in 1980, and then to direct. He made two documentaries, Improper Conduct and Nobody Listened, both on the subject of Fidel Castro's repressive policies toward homosexuals and intellectuals. The subject was close to his heart, since he himself had left Cuba and his family as a victim of that repression. Moreover, in the post-1968 political climate of Paris and New York, stories such as his had not found a welcome ear in leftist circles, and he felt even more strongly that he needed to speak out and somehow make a dent in Castro's image among the Parisian and New York left.
Although the subject matter of Improper Conduct was so close to his own life, Nestor chose never to appear in the film. But besides its definite aesthetic qualities, the film bears his mark by virtue of its implicit thread: how imprisonment and exile affect personal lives, culminating in the closing interview of a prize-winning playwright reduced to performing puppet-shows in the States. Nestor understood perfectly that the need for an artist to start over, though something that had proven lucky for him, could truly damage lives and careers in other cases.
 |
His films were well received and led to his siting on a number of boards and festival juries dealing with documentaries and political films--a position he seemed to enjoy quite a bit. Better than anyone, he understood to what absurd lengths a totalitarian regime would apply censorship. In 1971's Bed and Board, Antoine Doinel's wife was a Nureyev fan and kept a portrait of him at her bedside; the film was consequently banned from distribution in the USSR. Ten years later, when the script of Confidentially Yours required a defection scene in a police station, Nestor was the only person on the crew who remembered the Nureyev incident and its impact on the film's profit, and he insisted that the defector be Albanian rather than, say, Russian, because Albania would never import a Western film anyway!
After my father's death in 19884, Nestor, who maintained an apartment in New York, ended up spending more of his time there, focusing on the American side of his career. He worked for the first time with both Scorsese (New York Stories) and Mike Nichols (Heartburn), and even filmed a Calvin Klein commercial. He published a U.S. edition of his book and wrote articles for FILM COMMENT and other film magazines, displaying but a fraction of his knowledge of film, art, and literature. He remained a faithful friend to me and to other members of my father's extended family, his assistant Suzanne Schiffman and the legendary Helen Scott. And he always took pains to personally supervise the process when movies like Adele H. were being transferred from celluloid to video or shown on television.
At the same time he was working less, he was also more famous. The last time we talked was just after the shooting of his final film, Robert Benton's Billy Bathgate. This time around, the pace of filming had proven too harsh for him and he sounded bitter about the pressure that a Hollywood studio budget put on everyone connected with the film. He felt that few works of real quality could come out of such an oppressive work schedule, and he seemed determined, despite his great friendship with Benton, never to work on a big studio production again. This disenchantment with Hollywood coincided with his illness--an intercession that allowed this indefatigable man never to have to face retirement.
Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Jan 1994
I prefer to see sth about Adjani on Almendros................
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