National Post (National Edition)
Photos captured French film New Wave
BEHIND THE SCENES
Raymond Cauchetier, a self-taught photographer who helped promote and even define the French New Wave, taking pictures on the set of Breathless, Jules and Jim and other landmarks of 1960s cinema that captured the movement's rebellious spirit, died Feb. 22 at a hospital in Paris. He was 101.
The cause was COVID-19, said Julia Gragnon, a Parisian gallerist who oversaw a retrospective of his work last year at La Galerie de l'Instant.
Cauchetier started his photography career in the early 1950s, taking pictures for the press service of the French air force in Saigon. Wielding a Rolleiflex camera — partly because it dried easily whenever he accidentally dropped it in the Mekong — he travelled across Southeast Asia photographing rice farmers, rickshaw drivers, the temples of Angkor Wat and the First Indochina War.
He later photographed a convoy of Cold War-era rockets in Moscow, talking security officials into letting him return home with the film rolls; criss-crossed Cambodia taking pictures for a tourism project at the behest of former king Norodom Sihanouk; and spent two decades photographing Romanesque art across Europe, trying to document 12th-century church sculptures before they were damaged by pollution or dismantled by thieves.
But he remained indelibly linked to the French New Wave, the cinematic movement that upended world cinema with its unconventional editing, bold visual style, use of portable equipment and deeply personal subject matter. Launched by movies such as François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (both 1959), the New Wave became increasingly prominent with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), which starred Jean-Paul Belmondo as a gruff car thief and Jean Seberg as his short-haired American love interest.
Cauchetier was hired as the film's set photographer, a position that typically involved taking posed pictures of actors at the beginning or end of each scene to help with continuity and publicity.
He instead shot Belmondo and Seberg in action, making carefully framed, richly textured photographs that captured moments of play and spontaneity. His pictures also showed Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard at work, offering future film historians a rich trove of behindthe-scenes images.