Raymond Cauchetier, photographer of the French New Wave, dies at 101
Raymond Cauchetier, a selftaught 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 River — he traveled 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; crisscrossed 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 makeup, continuity and publicity.
Taking a photojournalist’s approach to the job, 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 behind-the-scenes images.
“In assembling his movie-centered still-photo dossiers, he created perhaps the greatest and most revealing photographic documents ever made of films in progress,” film author Richard Brody wrote in a 2015 New Yorker article. “Cauchetier is the auteur of set photographers.”
Cauchetier photographed Godard pushing Coutard in a wheelchair, enabling the cinematographer to shoot a low-budget tracking shot; another photo showed the director with a canvas-covered trolley cart equipped with a hole for the camera, which Godard used to shoot on the busy Champs-Élysées.
In one of his best-known images, he photographed Seberg kissing Belmondo on the cheek, while the actor gripped a cigarette and gazed into the distance. Although it was inspired by a sequence in “Breathless,” the image never appeared in the film.
“That day, to avoid the crowds, Godard shot from up high on the fifth-floor of a building,” Cauchetier told the Guardian in 2015. “You could just make out this minuscule couple parting with a chaste kiss in front of a newspaper stand. I went down afterwards and said I wanted to do a close-up of a kiss because it summed up their characters so well. They obliged. It lasted five seconds.”
Cauchetier took so many photos that he was fired by the producer of “Breathless.” But he reunited with Godard on the 1961 comedy-drama “A Woman Is a Woman,” capturing intimate moments between the director and star Anna Karina — clutching her wrist while seated at a Paris cafe; sharing a kiss while Godard doffed his fedora — in the months before the couple married.