Great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who died this week aged 92, was the eyes of the French New Wave: after beginning his career in photojournalism and reportage, he worked with Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut on some of the films that made their name, including À bout de souffle for the former and Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim for the latter.
You might also say he was the wheels of that movement – he was pushed in a wheelchair by Jean-Luc Godard to achieve the fluid, free-flowing dolly shots in their groundbreaking collaboration À bout de souffle, and created the tracking shot to end them all, prowling alongside a bloody and never-ending traffic jam, inWeekend.
He had met Godard in the late 1950s. “The first time I saw Jean-Luc Godard, he was . . . shaggy-haired, smoking his pipe, withdrawn behind his dark glasses, silent,” Coutard recalled. “At second contact, the preparation for À bout de souffle, he was more talkative . . . Little by little we found we needed to abandon the conventional, and even go against the rules and the accepted ‘cinematographic grammar.’”
more here.