Néstor Almendros

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Néstor Almendros Cuyás (born October 30, 1930 in Barcelona , † March 4, 1992 in New York , NY ) was a Spanish cameraman and documentary film director.

life and work

Néstor Almendros grew up with his mother in Spain. In 1948 he moved to Havana to live with his father, who had fled there from the Franco regime. He studied philosophy and literature until 1955, and also worked as a journalist. For example, in 1956 he traveled to Mexico for the left-liberal Cuban weekly magazine Bohemia to write a report on the group of revolutionary Cuban exiles there, where he also met Fidel Castro . He later took film courses at New York City College and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. After the Cuban Revolution, Almendros began making documentaries for the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). He soon ran into problems with censorship, left Cuba for good in 1961 and finally settled in Paris.

Almendros is best known for his long-term collaboration with the directors François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer . Since the late 1970s , Almendros was also more and more active in the USA. From this period, the visually outstanding film In der Glut des Südens (directed by Terrence Malick ) is particularly worth mentioning, for which Almendros was awarded the 1979 Oscar for best camera work. In the following years he was nominated again for the Oscar for the films Kramer versus Kramer , The Blue Lagoon and Sophie's Decision . Almendros always tried to get along with the natural light in the respective scene. He has written a book about his work, A man with a camera , in which he discusses all of his films from the cameraman's perspective. He has also made commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein . In 1992 Almendros died at the age of 61 from the immunodeficiency disease AIDS .

Néstor Almendros prices

Two international film awards bear his name in honor of Néstor Almendro:

  • The award sponsored by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch and the Film Society of the New York Cultural Institute Lincoln Center for the winner of the annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival founded by Almendros, which is dedicated to the cinematic treatment of human rights issues.
  • The award for young cameramen donated by the Professional Association of Italian Cinematographers (AIC) and the L'Aquila Cinema Institute .

Filmography

Director

  • 1950: Una confusión cotidiana , Cuba (short film) together with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
  • 1953: Un monólogo de Hamlet , Cuba (short film)
  • 1953: Sabá , Cuba (short film)
  • 1956: The Mount of Luna , USA (short film)
  • 1959: 58-59 , USA (short film)
  • 1960: Escuelas Rurales , Cuba (short film)
  • 1960: Ritmo de Cuba , Cuba (short film)
  • 1960: Gente en la Playa , Cuba (short film)
  • 1961: La tumba francesa , Cuba (short film) together with Orlando Jiménez Leal
  • 1969: El Baston , France (short film)
  • 1983: Conducta impropia / Mauvaise conduite , France
  • 1987: Nadie escuchaba / Nobody listened , USA

camera

Quote

Documentaries have always particularly attracted me. They are a form of filmmaking that allows you to film things as they happen - without interfering. The camera lies in wait, like a hunter, waiting for images produced by reality. Then came a time when I lost interest in this type of documentary, the cinéma vérité, because I recognized its limitations. When you wait for something important to happen, either nothing happens or something completely irrelevant. You can lurk behind your hidden camera for twenty days, like I did for my Cuban film GENTE EN LA PLAYA, and in the end all you got was the surface of things ... That's why I turned to fiction to tell a story and to work with actors. In other words, I started making the kind of films that I despised as a young man. (Nestor Almendros in A Man with a Camera , translation quoted from)

literature

  • Roald Koller: Conversations with Eric Rohmer and Nestor Almdendros. Film review 1/1976. (to work with Rohmer)
  • Néstor Almendros: A man with a camera. Faber and Faber 1984. ISBN 0571135897
  • Thomas Brandlmeier: Natural light. The cameraman Nestor Almendros . In: film service . Volume 58 No. 3/2005, pp. 54-57, ISSN  0720-0781

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nestor Almendros Award ( Memento of the original from March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the Istituto Cinematografica dell'Aquila, accessed on March 27, 2012 (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.icaq.it
  2. ↑ AFK Uni Karlsruhe ( Memento from May 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Almendros, Néstor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Almendros Cuyás, Néstor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish cameraman and film director
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona
DATE OF DEATH March 4th 1992
Place of death New York , NY , USA