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Raoul Coutard - The evolution of cinematography (131/179)

167 views · Published 29 August 2017 · 2:15 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Film & Animation

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To listen to more of Raoul Coutard’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYde0bcy2eo&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFz94HTVkL-hi8sRSrIWv0iD

French cinematographer Raoul Coutard (1924-2016) was originally a war photographer. He made his debut as a director of photography in the film 'La Passe du Diable' and became a leading figure in French New Wave cinema. [Listener: Bernard Cohn; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT:  No, there have been loads of trends. So first of all, there was the cinemascope trend. So the colour trend was quite long, because first of all, as I was explaining earlier, colour was a difficult product to manipulate because there was no elasticity, there were problems, the film wasn't very quick, there were colour balance problems. And at first, we had big problems with the colour because all the projector lamps were in 2800 when it needed lamps in 3200. So we had to wait for everything to improve to be able... On top of that, since at the time television was in black and white, they weren't interested in buying colour films, they didn't care. I mean, the little they bought or the little we could sell... So it's true that for the public colour films had more aura but it was five times more expensive to make a colour film than it was to make a black and white one, in addition to all the other complications. So colour didn't happen straight away.

So there was... So the first trend was when we went from the academic format, that is 1.33, which is the format of a coventional television set, three-quarters, to the 1.66 format which was a more stretched out. So it was to imitate scope but it wasn't as large as the scope, which is practically double in size. Later on, there was a Russian film called 'The Cranes are Flying', where there was something quite good; in fact, there were loads of great things in that film; which was the use of very large focal lengths, close-ups. We went from a 25, a distant shot, and then bam, we ended up with a close-up. So that really got the filmmakers excited. But afterwards we went back to cinemascope, later on there were a few attempts to make colour films. And then there were the systems that I talked about earlier, where we do flash. So it was... but all that was inspired by trends. I mean, someone only needed to say, 'I'm making film using flashes'. And there was anguish: so what do we flash? Because the question was: do we flash the negative or flash the positive?

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