Born: 16 September 1924, Paris, France.

Career: 'I was born in Paris in the 4th arrondissement. My mother was a Parisian, and my father came from Mayenne. He worked as an accountant in the Pharmaceutical Company Roche. I never dreamed of working on a movie, I always wanted to be a chemist. I was enrolled in a chemist school, but due to financial reasons, I was not able to attend the classes and I was therefore transferred to studying photography. In 1945 I was engaged in an expedition in the Far East, where war was waged with the Japanese, after which we left for Indochina.' He worked as still ph in Vietnam for 11 years: 5½ years with the French Expeditionary Forces and 5½ years as a freelancer for the magazines 'Life', 'Paris Match', 'Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique' and 'Radar'. In 1953-54 he ph his first short doc in Laos for 'La section d'action psychologique' of the Ministry of Information. With Jean-Michel de Kermadec he made a doc on the city of Cholon [near Saigon]. Ph commercials dir by Edouard Molinaro, a.o.

Appeared in the doc's 'Cinéma de notre temps: La nouvelle vague par elle-même' [1964, André S. Labarthe & Robert Valey; 52m], 'Léaud l'unique' [2001, Diane Baratier; 59m] & 'Raoul Coutard: de Saigon à Hollywood' [2006, Matthieu Serveau; 58m]. His ph of 'A bout de souffle' is discussed in the book 'Reflections - Twenty-One Cinematographers at Work' by Benjamin Bergery.

Awards: As doph: Preis der deutschen Filmkritik [1961] for 'À bout de souffle' & 'Tirez sur le pianiste'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1968] for 'The Sailor from Gibraltar'; 'César' Award [1978] for 'Le crabe-tambour'; Cannes IFF 'Grand Prix Technique' from the CST [1982] & 'César' Award nom [1983] for 'Passion'; Venice FF 'Special Prize' [1983; shared] for 'Prénom Carmen'; 'Genie' Award nom [1991; shared] for 'Bethune: The Making of a Hero'; ASC International Award [1997]; Marburger Kamerapreis [2001]; 'Manaki Brothers' Film Camera Festival, Bitola, 'Golden Camera 300 for Lifetime Achievement' [2003].

As dir: Prix Jean Vigo [1970] & Cannes FF 'Best First Work' & 'Palme d'or' nom [1970] for 'Hoa-Binh'.

'In writing about Coutard's work one should perhaps start by saying that there is no such thing as the typical Coutard 'look', since he shuns any particular style, preferring to adapt his images to suit each film and its director. Of course, definite Coutard trademarks - the hand-held camera, imaginative employment of natural light - spring to mind immediately one thinks of his name, but these are the tools with which an artist plies his trade and by themselves do not constitute an inimitable style (as anyone who saw some of the countless slavish imitations spawned in the wake of 'A bout de souffle' will testify - if they've recovered from the eye strain they suffered struggling to follow what looked like the adventures of a trampoline family on the dark side of the moon). All this is not to denigrate Coutard's many splendid achievements, the best of which are unforgettable; the harsh fluorescent hell of Alphaville; the vividly beautiful landscapes of Pierrot's worlds, both real and imaginary; the delicate, almost magical lighting for Lola's gentle fairy tale. In recent times, however, Coutard's credits have been limited to rather undistinguished commercial ventures. It would indeed be ironic if the cameraman whose name is synonymous with the 'Nouvelle Vague' of the early 60's should become a key member of the establishment in the 70's.' [David J. Badder in 'Film Dope', #8, October 1975.]

*****

'If François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could be said to be the parents of French new wave cinema, Raoul Coutard was its midwife. He was director of photography on 17 Godard films, as well as four by Truffaut, and there is little doubt that the look of the nouvelle vague in the 1960s would have been very different without Coutard.

In 1956 Coutard, a 35-year-old veteran of the French Indo-Chinese conflict and a Paris Match war photographer, became a director of film photography without ever having held a movie camera. He was asked to "do the photos" for a French-Italian romantic adventure set in Afghanistan - 'La passe du diable', directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer. "I agreed," Coutard tells me when we meet in Paris, "but if I had known that the job was actually director of photography and that the film was to be in CinemaScope, I would never have said yes."

The link with Godard was forged in 1959 by another seminal figure of the new wave - Georges de Beauregard. The producer-godfather imposed Coutard on Godard, even though the director had already chosen someone else to be his director of photography on 'A bout de souffle'.

Given the apparent visual harmony with which Coutard and Godard later worked, it is hard to believe what an ill-matched couple they were to begin with. For one thing, as Coutard puts it: "Jean-Luc is a fascist of the left, and I am a fascist of the right. But I had an advantage. Jean-Luc said, 'We will shoot this film as if we were reporting a story.' And since I was a photo-journalist, that suited me."

After the film's success, Coutard found himself being passed around among other new wave directors. "The new wave was a Cahiers du Cinéma mafia," Coutard says, referring to the film magazine that spawned a generation of critics-turned-directors. "If you were not in the Cahiers, you didn't get a look in."

Truffaut then chose Coutard (in preference to the celebrated cinematographer Henri Decaë) for 'Tirez sur le pianiste'. However, says Coutard, for all the film's anarchic look and subject matter, he found Truffaut to be a traditional director. "He was very thrown by this new working method," he says. Godard, on the other hand, would work on a day-to-day basis, scribbling dialogue on a big jotter pad and dictating it to the actors.

Coutard learned early on how to handle Godard's notorious tantrums: "If you went to him with a problem while he was thinking through a scene, he would fly into a terrible rage. So you waited until he was idle. With cameramen and directors, the problem is always one of communication. When you arrive, the director has already been working on the scenario - perhaps for months. He has his own vision , then you arrive with your vision."

After finishing 'Week End' in 1967, Godard made a dramatic announcement. "Jean-Luc rang and asked me to come over," Coutard says. "When I arrived at his apartment, he said to me, 'I've had a revelation. I am a Marxist-Leninist so I can no longer make films with capitalist money.' Actually, it is the leftists who rip you off. If you want to get paid, you work for a good capitalist company, like Gaumont, which we did."

For the next decade Godard worked on the margins of cinema. Then, in 1981, he and Coutard were back working together again, on the film 'Passion'. This was followed by 'Prénom Carmen' in 1983.

Shortly after this, the partnership ended, for good, because of a banal dispute. In 1985 Godard's new partner, film-maker Anne-Marie Miéville, rang Coutard and asked if he would take over as cinematographer on her new film; she had fired her director of photography. Coutard agreed, but said that since being fired was such a humiliating experience, as a matter of courtesy he would like first to talk to the dismissed cameraman to hear his side of the story - could he have a contact number? The information was refused and Coutard turned down the job, on principle.

Some months later, Godard rang inviting him to be director of photography on his next film, 'Détective'. Coutard agreed and was told to make contact with the office of the producer. But when Coutard rang, the office mysteriously claimed that nothing was known about his engagement and they refused to return his calls. One of the script writers was Anne-Marie Miéville. And that was the end of a historic association - one of the treasures of French cinema.' [From article by Peter Lennon in 'The Guardian', June 9, 2001.]

Click thumbnails for full-size image

1956        La passe du diable/The Devil's Pass [Jacques Dupont & Pierre Schoendoerffer] cs/c

1958        Ramuntcho [Pierre Schoendoerffer] c

1958        Pêcheur d'islande/Island Fishermen [Pierre Schoendoerffer] ds/c

1959        A bout de souffle/Breathless [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1959        Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player/Shoot the Pianist [François Truffaut] ds/b&w

1960        Les grandes personnes/Time Out for Love [Jean Valère] b&w

1960        Lola [Jacques Demy] fs/b&w

1960        Le petit soldat/The Little Soldier [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w; released in 1963

1961        Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim [François Truffaut] fs/b&w

1961        Une femme est une femme/A Woman Is a Woman [Jean-Luc Godard] fs/c

1961        Tire au flanc/The Army Game/The Sad Sack [Claude de Givray; superv by François Truffaut] fs/b&w; + small part

1961        L'amour à vingt ans/Love at Twenty [seg 'Antoine et Colette' dir by François Truffaut] fs/b&w; 5 seg; other ph: Mario

                    Montuori, Wolf Wirth, Shigeo Hayashida & Jerzy Lipman

1962        Vivre sa vie [: Film en douze tableaux]/My Life to Live [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1962        Et Satan conduit le bal.../And Satan Calls the Turns/Satan Leads the Dance [Grisha M. Dabat] b&w

1962        La poupée/The Doll/He, She or It! [Jacques Baratier] fs/c

1962        Als twee druppels water/De donkere kamer van Damocles/The Spitting Image/Inconnu aux services

                    secrets [Fons Rademakers] fs/b&w

1962        Les carabiniers/The Riflemen [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1963        Les plus belles escroqueries du monde/The Beautiful Swindlers [seg 'Le grand escroc' dir by Jean-Luc Godard]

                    fs/b&w; 4 seg (seg by Godard was cut from the film and shown separately); other ph: Jean Rabier, Tonino Delli Colli,

                    Jerzy Lipman & Asakazu Nakai

1963        Le mépris/Il disprezzo/Contempt [Jean-Luc Godard] fs/c; + small part

1963        La difficulté d'être infidèle/Bonne à tout faire [Bernard Toublanc-Michel] ?

1963        Les baisers [Charles L. Bitsch, Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Berri, Jean-François Hauduroy & Bernard Toublanc-Michel]

                    b&w; 5 seg

1963        La peau douce/The Soft Skin [François Truffaut] b&w

1964        Bande à part/Band of Outsiders [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1964        Une femme mariée [: Suite de fragments d'un film tourné en 1964]/A Married Woman [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1964        Un monsieur de compagnie/Male Companion [Philippe de Broca] c

1964        La 317e section/The 317th Platoon [Pierre Schoendoerffer] b&w

1965        Alphaville [ou une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution] [Jean-Luc Godard] b&w

1965        Je vous salue, Mafia/Hail, Mafia [Raoul Lévy] b&w

1965        Pierrot le fou/Crazy Pete [Jean-Luc Godard] ts/c

1965        The Sailor from Gibraltar [Tony Richardson] b&w

1966        The Defector/L'espion [Raoul Lévy] c

1966        Made in U.S.A. [Jean-Luc Godard] ts/c

1966        Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle/Two or Three Things I Know About Her [Jean-Luc Godard] ts/c

1967        La chinoise [ou plutôt à la chinoise] [Jean-Luc Godard] c

1967        L'horizon [Jacques Rouffio] c

1967        La mariée était en noir/The Bride Wore Black [François Truffaut] c

1967        Week End [Jean-Luc Godard] c

1968        The Southern Star/L'étoile du sud [Sidney Hayers] ts/c

1968        Z [Costa-Gavras] c; + small part

1969        L'aveu/The Confession [Costa-Gavras] c; + small part

1970        Êtes-vous fiancée à un marin grec ou à un pilote de ligne? [Jean Aurel] c

1970        La liberté en croupe [Edouard Molinaro] c

1970        L'explosion/The Hideout/Sex Explosion [Marc Simenon] c; + small part

1970        Les aveux les plus doux/The Most Gentle Confessions [Edouard Molinaro] c

1971        The Jerusalem File/Jerusalem, Jerusalem [John Flynn] c; addph: Brian Probyn

1971        Embassy/Target: Embassy [Gordon Hessler] c

1972        Le trèfle à cinq feuilles/Five Leaf Clover [Edmond Freess] c

1972        Le gang des otages/The Hostage Gang/The Hostages [Edouard Molinaro] c

1973        L'emmerdeur/Allez-vous perdre ailleurs/A Pain in the A... [Edouard Molinaro] c

1973        Voulez-vous tuer avec moi? [Michel Audiard] ?

1974        Comme un pot de fraises!/Like a Pot of Strawberries [Jean Aurel] c

1977        Le crabe-tambour/Drummer-Crab [Pierre Schoendoerffer] c

1979        Tout dépend des filles.../All Depends on Girls [Pierre Fabre] c; techn adv; ph: Alain Masseron

1981        Passion/Godard's Passion [Jean-Luc Godard] c

1982        Flash-back/Un jour ou l'autre [Olivier Nolin] c

1983        Prénom Carmen/First Name: Carmen [Jean-Luc Godard] c; cph: Jean-Bernard Menoud

1983        La diagonale du fou/Dangerous Moves [Richard Dembo] c

1983        La garce [Christine Pascal] c

1984        Du sel sur la peau [Jean-Marie Degèsves] c

1985        Un secret dans la tête [Olivier Nolin] status unknown

1985        Max, mon amour/Max My Love [Nagisa Oshima] p/c

1986        Fuegos [Alfredo Arias] c

1987        Bethune: The Making of a Hero/Dr. Bethune [Phillip Borsos] c; cph: Mike Molloy; prod continued & finished shooting in

                    November 1988

1987        Blanc de Chine/Chinese White [Denys Granier-Deferre] c

1987        Brennende Betten/Burning Beds [Pia Frankenberg] c

1988        Ne réveillez pas un flic qui dort/Let Sleeping Cops Lie/Never Wake a Cop [José Pinheiro] c

1988        Peaux de vaches/Thick Skinned [Patricia Mazuy] c; uncred ph

1989        Il gèle en enfer [Jean-Pierre Mocky] c

1990        La femme fardée [José Pinheiro] c

1990        Les enfants volants/The Flying Children [Guillaume Nicloux] c; cph: Jean Badal

1992        La vie crevée/Punctured Life [Guillaume Nicloux] c

1993        La naissance de l'amour/The Birth of Love [Philippe Garrel] b&w; cph: André Clément

1993        Faut pas rire du bonheur/Happiness Is No Joke [Guillaume Nicloux] c

1993        Le crime du Padre Amaro [Olivier Nolin] status unknown

1994        Le géographe Manuel [Michel Sumpf] b&w/silent (1st part) & c/sound (2nd part); cph: Denis Lenoir, William

                    Lubtchansky, Pascal Marti, Jacques Loiseleux, Dominique Chapuis, Agnès Godard, Renato Berta, Romain Winding, a.o.

1995        Le coeur fantôme/The Phantom Heart [Philippe Garrel] c; cph: Jacques Loiseleux

2001        Sauvage innocence/Wild Innocence [Philippe Garrel] s35/b&w

1956        Paradiso terrestre/Earthly Paradise [Luciano Emmer & Robert Enrico] c; doc/87m; cph: ?

1957        Than le pêcheur [Pierre Schoendoerffer] c; short/26m

1959        Ne tuez pas votre enfant [?] ?; short/?m

1959        Nicky et Kitty [André Mercier] ?; doc/13m

1959        Doit-on les punir? [Henri Calef] ?; doc/22m; cph: G. Raulet

1960        La chute [?] ?

1960        Petit jour [Jacques Pierre] b&w; mus short/16m; cph: Guy Suzuki

1960        Chronique d'un été/Chronicle of a Summer [: Paris, 1960] [Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin] b&w; doc/85m; cph: Roger

                    Morillière, Jean-Jacques Tarbès & Michel Brault

1960        Bourdelle, sculpteur monumental [Albert Navarra] 16mm/b&w; doc/18m; cph: Claude Beausoleil

1960        Singal, l'antilope sacrée [Raoul Coutard] ?; short/?m

1962        Vacances portugaises/Les égarements/Portuguese Vacation/Les sourires de la destinée [Pierre Kast] b&w;

                    short/57m

1964        L'avatar botanique de Mlle. Flora [Jeanne Barbillon] ?; short/14m

1964        Les voix d'Orly [Robert Lachenay] ?; exp short/8m

1965        Scruggs/A Game Called Scruggs [David Hart] b&w; short/54m; uncred cph: David Muir

1966        Riom le beau [Louis Guilbert] ?

1967        Tu es danse et vertige [Raoul Coutard] ?; short/?m

1967        Vive eau [Louis Roger] c; doc/13m

1968        Au péril de la mer [Louis Roger] c; doc/13m

1968        Rocky Road to Dublin [Peter Lennon] 16mm/b&w-c; doc/70m

1968        Concerto Brandebourgeois [François Reichenbach (FR)] c; mus short/12m; cph: FR

1970        Eici, l'aigo es d'or [Louis Guilbert] c; short/417mtr

1970        Jolly Green [Raoul Coutard] ?; doc/40m

1974        Le mouvement des eaux [Louis Guilbert & Jacques Rouxel] ?; doc/?m

1977        [Le défilé du] 14 juillet [Raoul Coutard] 16mm/c; doc/13m

1985        Parachute [Sabine Eckhard] b&w; short/13m

1985        Diabolique [Frédéric Schoendoerffer] cs/?; short/?m

1988        La piste aux étoiles [Guillaume Nicloux] ?; short/?m

1990        Nachbarschaft [Sabine Eckhard] c; short/9m

1990        Kaffeeklatsch [Sabine Eckhard] c; short/15m

1991        Maigret et les plaisirs de la nuit [José Pinheiro] tvm; ep of 'Maigret'-series

1991        Something's Wrong with You [Roger Walter] c; short/11m

1996        Jeden Tag Weihnachten/Chaque jour est Noël [Miko Zeuschner] c; student film/37m

1960        Singal, l'antilope sacrée [short; + ph] see Shorts etc.

1967        Tu es danse et vertige [short; + ph] see Shorts etc.

1969        Hoa-Binh/The Bamboo Incident [feature; + scrpl] ph: Georges Liron

1970        Jolly Green [doc; + ph] see Shorts etc.

1974        Une nuit en Lorraine [tvm/?m] ph: ?

1975        La ville étranglée [co-d: Jean Larteguy; tv-doc/?m] ph: ?

1976        La marche verte [doc/?m] ph: ?

1976        Les deux pieds sur terre [tv-doc/?m] ph: ?

1977        [Le défilé du] 14 juillet [doc; + ph] see Shorts etc.

1977        L'adjudant Chef X [tv] ph: ?

1979        La légion saute sur Kolwezi/Military Coup in Kolwezi/Operation Leopard [feature] ph: Georges Liron

1982        S.A.S. à San Salvador [feature] ph: Georges Liron