Nothing but Light: Lensed by Néstor Almendros

Of the first feature he shot as cinematographer, Éric Rohmer’s 1967 La Collectionneuse, Almendros—who was born in Barcelona and lived a time in Cuba before landing in Paris—would say: “The film had to have a ‘natural’ look, whether we wanted it to or not, because we had only five photoflood lamps.” Almendros would eventually rise to the top of his profession, winning an Academy Award for his work on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, but even with greater resources at his command he never sought to improve on the effects of light as encountered in the real world, and in the films he shot—for Rohmer, Malick, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, and others—one is introduced not to an idealized beauty, but the beauty of what is. A tribute to one of the supreme artists of the viewfinder, whose death from AIDS-related complications in 1992 was an inestimable loss for world cinema.