Bruno Nuytten

Bruno Nuytten: The Man Who Made Shadow Do the Work

Isabelle Adjani wanted a film about Camille Claudel, and she wanted the cinematographer Bruno Nuytten to direct it. He had told her he would never direct anything. She described his gift in a sentence that has outlasted most of the reviews: "His reason to be, it was the shadow. From the shadow, he made the light exist." He gave in. *Camille Claudel* opened in France on 7 December 1988, sold 2.7 million tickets, took five Césars including Best Film, won Adjani the Silver Bear at Berlin and an Academy Award nomination, and remains the film by which Nuytten is known — which is a slight injustice, because the two decades of work behind the camera that preceded it are the greater achievement.

A Series of Rejections

Bruno Nuytten was born on 28 August 1945 in France. He acted in amateur theatre as a teenager, but what he actually wanted to be was a cartoonist, and his education was a sequence of closed doors. He prepared for the entrance examination to the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and failed it. He applied to IDHEC, France's official film school, and failed that too. He considered the celebrated film school at Łódź in Poland and was put off by the compulsory Polish language course. He finally studied at INSAS in Belgium between 1967 and 1969, and left before finishing in order to take the BTS qualification he needed to be allowed to work in France at all.

That is not the biography of a prodigy. It is the biography of somebody who got into the industry sideways and learned it on set, as an assistant to the cinematographers Ghislain Cloquet, Claude Lecomte and Ricardo Aronovich.

The Chameleon

What Nuytten became, within a very few years, was the most adaptable director of photography in French cinema — and adaptability was the point, because the directors he served had violently incompatible ideas about what an image is for.

His own instinct ran towards strong contrast and a moving camera. With Marguerite Duras, on *La Femme du Gange* (1974) and *India Song* (1975), he threw that instinct out entirely: fixed frames, contrast flattened to nothing, an image designed to refuse the eye anywhere to go. He found Duras childlike in her approach to the medium, which made the collaboration "very interesting," because the two of them were discovering techniques together rather than executing a plan. With Andrzej Żuławski, on *Possession* (1981), he went the opposite way — expressionist, hand-held, the camera in a state of nervous collapse alongside the actors.

In between came the mainstream of French film. He shot André Téchiné's *Barocco* (1976), *La Meilleure Façon de marcher* (1976) and Téchiné's *Les Sœurs Brontë* (1979); he worked with Téchiné, he said, without much need for words. He shot *Les Valseuses* in 1974, Alain Corneau's *Fort Saganne* (1984), the American production *Brubaker* (1980), and for Claude Berri both *Tchao pantin* (1983) — on which Berri gave him complete freedom — and the enormous double feature *Jean de Florette* and *Manon des Sources* in 1986. He won the César for Best Cinematography in 1977 and 1984, with further nominations in 1980, 1982, 1985 and 1987, and a BAFTA.

Camille

Adjani co-produced *Camille Claudel* as well as starring in it, opposite Gérard Depardieu's Rodin, with Madeleine Robinson as Claudel's mother and Laurent Grévill as her brother Paul. The film follows the sculptor from her emergence, through the affair with Rodin, into the erasure and confinement that ended her working life. It holds 92 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Nuytten's remark about making it is one of the strangest things a director has said about a shoot, and worth reading twice: "I had become Camille Claudel and Isabelle Adjani had become Rodin." He is describing an inversion of the film's own subject — the artist who is consumed and the artist who consumes — and locating himself, the debut director working on his star's project, in the consumed position.

He directed three more times: *Albert Souffre* in 1992, a raw contemporary drama; *Passionnément* in 2000 with Charlotte Gainsbourg; and *Jim, la nuit* in 2002. None repeated the success. He and Adjani had a son, Barnabé Saïd-Nuytten, born in 1979; since 1996 he has been married to the director Tatiana Vialle, with whom he has two children, Tobias and Galathée, and he is stepfather to the actor Swann Arlaud.

Teacher

The later career turned pedagogical and institutional. Nuytten became a professor at La Fémis, the French national film school — the successor to the IDHEC that had once refused him — wrote technical articles for *Le cinéma pratique*, ran conferences for the Ciné-club de Melun, lectured at Université de Paris III, and founded an advertising production company in Switzerland. In 2015 the cinematographer Caroline Champetier made *Nuytten/Film*, a documentary about him.

Why Bruno Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a specific and unusual capacity, and Adjani has already stated it more precisely than any critic: he made the light exist out of the shadow. What that means technically is that Nuytten lit for the dark part of the frame rather than the bright one. Most cinematographers decide where the light will land; Nuytten decided where it would not, and let the visible image emerge as the residue. It is a slower, riskier method — on film stock, which kept its "secrets" until the rushes came back days later, it required holding an image in the head with no way to check it — and it is why his frames have depth where flatter work has only exposure.

The stranger achievement is the self-effacement. A stylist with two Césars might reasonably be expected to impose a look. Nuytten did the opposite: he built a career out of subordinating his own instinct for contrast and movement to whatever the director in front of him needed, producing images for Duras that deliberately deny everything he was good at, and images for Żuławski that unravel. That is not a technician's flexibility; it is a reading of what each film is actually about, arrived at largely without discussion — with Téchiné, he simply understood. His own stated principle is about the audience, not the frame: "there has to be mutual trust between a filmmaker and his audience," and he insists he watches films as a viewer rather than an inventory of technique.

The counter-case is that his directing career, on which the popular reputation rests, amounts to one triumph and three films almost nobody saw, and that *Camille Claudel* was substantially Adjani's project — she chose the subject, produced it, and took the acting honours while Nuytten's own name is on none of the film's five Césars. He is careful to reject the painterly comparison himself, noting that a cinematographer works with technology and under a director, unlike a painter who starts from a blank canvas and completes a narrative in a single frame. On his own account the word for him is craftsman and collaborator, not genius. The evidence supports something in between: a great cinematographer who directed one great film.

Legacy

Nuytten's fingerprints are on more of the French cinema of the 1970s and 1980s than almost any director's — Duras's most austere experiments and Berri's biggest popular hits, Żuławski's hysteria and Téchiné's control, all lit by the same man, none of them looking alike. That is the legacy: proof that a cinematographer's authorship can consist of disappearing accurately. And by teaching at the school that had once turned him down, he handed the method to the generation after him.

Achievements

• César Award for Best Cinematography
• BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography — 1988
• Worked as film director, screenwriter and cinematographer