Néstor Almendros

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

Life and work

Néstor Almendros grew up with his mother in Spain. In 1948 he moved to Havana to his father, who had fled from the Franco regime there. Until 1955, he studied philosophy and literature, he also worked as a journalist. For example, he traveled in 1956 to the Cuban left-liberal weekly magazine Bohemia to Mexico to write a report about the local group of revolutionary Cuban exile, where he met Fidel Castro. Later, he took film courses at New York City College and at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. After the Cuban Revolution began Almendros, documentaries for the Instituto Cubano de Arte de Industria Cinematográfica ( ICAIC ) to turn. But he soon got problems with censorship, left Cuba in 1961 final and finally settled in Paris.

Almendros has become known primarily for his long-standing collaboration with the directors François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer. Since the late 1970s, Almendros was also more and more active in the United States. From this period, especially the visually outstanding film in Days of Heaven (Director Terrence Malick ) is worth mentioning, was honored for the Almendros in 1979 with the Oscar for best cinematography. In subsequent years, he was nominated for the films Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon and Sophie's Choice again each time for an Oscar. Almendros was always trying to get along with the natural light at the respective venue. He has written a book about his work, in which he discusses all of his films from the perspective of the camera man, and also shot commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Almendros died in 1992 at the age of 61 years on the immune deficiency disease AIDS.

Néstor Almendros - prices

In honor Néstor Almendros carry two international film awards its name:

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

Filmography

Direction

Camera (selection)

Quote

Documentaries have always been particularly attracted me. They represent a form of filmmaking, which allows one to shoot things as they happen - without intervening. The camera lies in wait, like a hunter, waiting for images that produces the reality. Then came a time when I lost interest in this type of documentation, the cinéma vérité, because I recognized their limitations. If you wait that something important has happened, either nothing happens or just something completely trivial. It is twenty days lurking behind his hidden camera, as I have done it for my Cuban film GENTE EN LA PLAYA, and at the end you have only taken the surface of things .... That's why I have turned to the feature film, a story to tell and to work with actors. In other words, I have begun to turn the kind of films that I have despised as a young man. ( Nestor Almendros in A Man with a Camera, translation cited by )