“I think that a film is good when you come out of the cinema totally stunned. You have no idea what hit you; you don’t remember if you have had dinner or where you parked your car; you want to be alone to think about it. That is the definition of a great film for me.”
When the French New Wave’s seminal figures are discussed, the most frequently mentioned names are directors: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol. But we should not forget the man who was one of the principal cinematographers of the era, giving the movement its expressive, open aesthetic. He is Raoul Coutard.
Born in Paris in 1924, Coutard had been interested in studying chemistry, but his life ended up taking another path as he became a stills photographer and combat reporter working for, among other publications, Life. He spent several years on assignment in Vietnam during the French Indochina War, which would later help shape his shooting of director Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1965 Vietnam war film, La 317ème section. Upon Coutard’s return to Paris, influential French New Wave producer Georges de Beauregard introduced him to a young director named Jean-Luc Godard. The director was about to make Á Bout de souffle (1960), wanting to shoot the movie, Coutard later recalled, “as if we were reporting a story.” Coutard’s background in photojournalism made him a perfect match for Godard’s vision.
The two men went on to make 17 films together, including some of the most quintessential movies of the New Wave: Le Mépris (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), and Week End (1967). Moving from the liberating handheld camerawork of Á Bout de souffle to the dazzling CinemaScope visuals of the Technicolor tragedy Le Mépris, Coutard took to Godard’s freewheeling, improvisational style, utilizing location shooting to give the filmmaker’s pictures a bracing sense of endless creative possibility.
Coutard’s work with Godard would be enough to put him in the pantheon, but he also collaborated with Truffaut, whose Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962) represented the more traditional New Wave filmmaker at his most playful and experimental. In addition, he lensed Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), a sumptuous love story that made spectacular use of its gorgeous star, Anouk Aimee. But Coutard wasn’t simply a phenomenal photographer of the French New Wave. He also teamed up with Greek political director Costa-Gavras for his scintillating Z (1969), a canny hybrid of documentary realism and thriller conventions.
Coutard would go on to direct three of his own films, the most notable of these being 1970’s Hoa Binh, about children caught in the crossfire of the Vietnam War. The drama won the prize for Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But Coutard continued to be a cinematographer as well, working with a new generation of innovative French filmmakers such as Philippe Garrel on 2001’s Wild Innocence.
Now retired, Coutard can look back fondly at a career that emphasized the use of natural light to create vivid, iconic images. And while he doesn’t like to simplify the impact of the French New Wave—insisting that each director had his own unique gifts—when asked in a recent interview about which of his own films he considered the greatest, his answer was very much in keeping with the New Wave’s pioneering, rule-breaking spirit. “I think that a film is good when you come out of the cinema totally stunned. You have no idea what hit you; you don’t remember if you have had dinner or where you parked your car; you want to be alone to think about it. That is the definition of a great film for me.”
Raoul Coutard shot several such films and no doubt inspired countless others.
01 Alphaville
02 Le Mépris
03 Z
04 Bande à part
05 Pierrot le Fou
