Nestor Almendros, 1987. Photo by Michelle Bogre.
Nestor Almendros sat across the table from writer Bob Fisher at a Cuban restaurant near the Spanish cinematographer’s mid-town Manhattan apartment. Fisher was interviewing him for one of the very early “On Film” ads that at the time ran in Hollywood’s two main trade magazines, as well as American Cinematographer and International Photographer. The restaurant had closed hours before, but the genteel owners who knew Almendros as a neighbor and a steady customer had not kicked them out; the Cubans sat quietly listening to the filmmaker’s impassioned discussion. Finally, Nestor told Bob that he had to go home to get ready for the first day’s filming on the Martin Scorsese episode of New York Stories. Fisher apologized for keeping him up so late. Almendros replied, “Oh, Bob, I’ve never been able to sleep the night before starting a new movie.” Earlier that evening he had told Fisher that he thought that after his death he would be remembered for photographing Days of Heaven, when it was the intimate dramas such as Kramer vs. Kramer that he was most proud of. This sounds like the Nestor I knew, an artist whose visual style was often so subsumed into the movie’s overall dramatic narrative structure that it nearly disappeared. He told me (I was his camera operator on the Terence Malick film for which he won the Oscar) that one reason he felt he had received so much attention for his work on Days of Heaven was because it had so little dialogue.
Continue reading ‘Kodak’s “On Film”: A Brief History’
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