Page 7 - Fujifilm Exposure_24 Stephen Fry_ok

FRENCH
FRENCH
WITHOUT
WITHOUT
TEARS
TEARS
AN INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE LHOMME AFC
N ow in his early seventies, Pierre Lhomme is one of France’s most distinguished and respected cinematographers. Nominated six times for Best Cinematography in France, Lhomme received the César twice, for Camille Claudel (1988) and for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), which also won him British recognition with BAFTA and BSC awards. He also received the cinematography prize from the
Commission Supérieure de la Technique de l’Image et du Son and from the Chalon sur Saone Film Festival.
He has been particularly associated with the films of Merchant-Ivory starting with Quartet in 1981. He also lit Maurice, Jefferson In Paris, Cotton Mary and, most recently, Le Divorce, starring Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Matthew Modine, Stockard Channing and Thierry Lhermitte.
There is a large file of articles from French magazines that discuss “la lumière de Pierre Lhomme”. These are devoted entirely to examining the nuances, or an analysis of the intensity of his lighting on the nearly 70 films he has photographed over more than forty years.
In 2000, the French Library of Film in Paris – La Bibliotheque de Film, known as BIFI – mounted an event paying tribute to Lhomme and his work.
In short, he’s a lighting legend in his own time yet someone who still claims modestly, “I am just a typical, ordinary French cameraman.” This is absolutely not true. I remember watching Camille Claudel for the first time projected at the Film Museum in Munich in 1990, and wondering if a new technique had been invented to make the print so rich.
The night scenes revealed such detail, texture, and depth and there was so many shades that went from gray to black on the screen, I thought my eyes were deceiving me. The lighting almost sculpted the characters – chiseled them in the frame, as it were – which perfectly coincided with the story of August Rodin and his relationship with prodigee Camille.
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