Notes on the Cinematographer

Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create

Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.

be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.

Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

One recognizes the true by its efficacy, by its power.

Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images and photography.

Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance.

There must, at a certain point, be a transformation. If not, there is no art.

The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, not the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theatre, the novel, painting capture with theirs).

The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images.

A whole made of good images can be detestable.

An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.