The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (6 page)

Nestor Almendros
(Nestor Almendros Cuyas) (1930–92), b. Barcelona, Spain
Almendros was a beloved citizen of world film, a tender gentleman, a man of several languages, and an invaluable aid to many diverse directors. His book,
A Man with a Camera
, is as worthwhile as the movies he worked on, and so is the documentary
Mauvaise Conduite
(83), about gay life in Cuba that he photographed, cowrote, and codirected with Orlando Jimenez Leal. Yet Almendros is in this book because he was a very good director of photography, self-effacing yet inventive, and happiest if he could serve good directors.

Few cinematographers have demonstrated what I would call a singular creative character—John Alton comes to mind, Gregg Toland, Raoul Coutard perhaps. These are cameramen without whom certain careers and even genres might not have been the same. Yet photography is not that difficult, and not even that influential or decisive—I suspect that music and even editing have more effect on what we feel about a film than photography. The image is so fundamental and so wonderful in and of itself, but it
is
a given: every day, all over the world, millions of people take wonderful or useful pictures. Is it so remarkable that a few hundred people do it for movies?

In other words, I do not want to exaggerate Almendros as cameraman. He served several directors very well—Truffaut, Rohmer, Barbet Schroeder, Robert Benton. But do we
know
by their look or feel that, say,
Mississippi Mermaid, The Aviator’s Wife, Reversal of Fortune
, or
Nadine
are
not
by Almendros? I trust not, for he
did
shoot
Nadine
(87). Equally, I find it hard to make claims for a consistent photographic personality in films as varied as
Places in the Heart, My Night at Maud’s
, and
Two English Girls
. I am moved by the look of those films, but not convinced that Almendros brought more than appropriate skill and understanding to them.

There are two films where the photography is more forceful:
Sophie’s Choice
(82, Alan J. Pakula), with the sickly-saintly paleness of Meryl Streep’s face as she recollects; and
Days of Heaven
(78, Terrence Malick), with many miracles of natural light on the prairie, a movie in which—to my mind—photography has seeped into areas abandoned by the director.
Days of Heaven
is photographed to death. It is to the great credit of Almendros that he so seldom earned that rebuke.

He went to Cuba in 1948 and became an active cineaste there, photographing and directing many short films in what was a time of creative ferment. He studied at the University of Havana, at New York’s City College, and at Centro Sperimentale in Rome, all in the 1950s. From the early sixties on, he worked as a cameraman in Europe and in America.

He did these for Truffaut:
The Wild Child
(69);
Bed and Board
(70);
Two English Girls
(71);
The Story of Adèle H
. (75)—with a good sense of the Caribbean;
The Man Who Loved Women
(77);
The Green Room
(78);
The Last Metro
(80); and
Confidentially Yours
(82).

Then for Rohmer: an episode for
Paris Vu Par …
(64);
La Collectioneuse
(66);
My Night at Maud’s
(69);
Claire’s Knee
(70);
Love in the Afternoon
(72);
The Marquise of O
(76);
Perceval le Gallois
(78); and
Pauline at the Beach
(82).

And for Benton:
Kramer vs. Kramer
(79);
Still of the Night
(82);
Places in the Heart
(84);
Nadine
(87); and
Billy Bathgate
(91).

Beyond those, Almendros worked on
The Wild Racers
(68, Daniel Haller and Roger Corman);
The Valley
(72, Schroeder);
La Gueule Ouverte
(74, Maurice Pialat);
General Amin
(74, Schroeder);
Cockfighter
(74, Monte Hellman);
Mes Petites Amoureuses
(75, Jean Eustache);
Maîtresse
(76, Schroeder);
Des Journées Entières dans les Arbres
(76, Marguerite Duras);
Madame Rosa
(77, Moshe Mizrahi);
Goin’ South
(78, Jack Nicholson);
The Blue Lagoon
(80, Randal Kleiser);
Heartburn
(86, Mike Nichols);
Nobody Listened
(87, which he cowrote and codirected with Jorge Ulla); and the “Life Lessons” episode for
New York Stories
(89, Martin Scorsese).

Pedro Almodóvar
, b. Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, 1951
1974:
La Caída de Sódoma
(s);
Dos Putas, o Historia de Amor que Termina en Boda
(s). 1975:
Homenaje
(s);
El Sueño
(s). 1976:
El Estrella
(s). 1977:
Complementos
(s);
Sexo Va
(s). 1978:
Folle, Folle, Fólleme, Tim; Salomé
(s). 1980:
Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom
. 1982:
Laberinto de Pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion
. 1983:
Entre Tinieblas/Dark Habits
. 1984:
Qué He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?/What Have I Done to Deserve This?
. 1985:
Trayler para Amantes de lo Prohibido
(s). 1986:
Mátador
. 1987:
La Ley del Deseo/Law
of Desire
. 1988:
Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
. 1990:
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!
. 1991:
High Heels
. 1993:
Kika
. 1995:
La Flor de Mi Secreto/The Flower of My Secret
. 1997:
Carne Trémula/Live Flesh
. 1999:
Todo Sobre Mi Madre/All About My Mother
. 2002:
Hable con Ella/Talk to Her
. 2004:
La Mala Educación/Bad Education
. 2006:
Volver
. 2009:
Broken Embraces
.

Almodóvar was one of the most welcome explosions of the eighties and a sign of the new Spain. Whereas Carlos Saura (nearly twenty years older than Almodóvar) made intensely measured and psychologically reflective films, with the innate secrecy of someone raised under the Franco regime, Almodóvar is excessive, garish, outlandishly inventive, and irrepressible. He is openly gay, devoted to sexual confusion, and eternally committed to the chance of love. His mode is satiric yet generous and free from moralizing. He has remarked on his debt not just to Hitchcock, Wilder, and Buñuel, but to Frank Tashlin. Indeed, there is a cartoonlike abandon and delirium in his best films and a complete faith in the torrential subconscious. But his generous, affectionate nature is all his own.

A frustrated provincial (he came from the area of La Mancha), he moved to Madrid in 1967 and worked for the telephone company. He joined an experimental theatre group, he wrote comic strips, and he was active in rock music. He began making short films on Super-8 at the time of Franco’s death.

Almodóvar must mean more in Spain than anywhere else, yet his generation has been insistent on throwing out the country’s past. Still, he has preferred to work in Spain, with a striking band of actors—notably Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas.
Women on the Verge
is his most successful film, the one in which gaiety, violence, and tragedy jostle together most dangerously.
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!
was a relative disappointment. An energy like Almodóvar’s needs to keep expanding or risk becoming mannered. So he may need to take on fresh, dangerous territory. America could prove a very fruitful inspiration, for he knows American culture, and he is ideally placed to smash our old, fixed dreams about what it is to be Hispanic. But
All About My Mother
was his largest and warmest film—a sweeping tribute to women, and one of those films to make you wonder if God didn’t mean the movies to be gay.

Almodóvar is now in what looks like his maturity:
Bad Education
is a terrific takeoff on film noir and real educational nightmares, while both
Volver
and
Broken Embraces
reflect the director’s realization that in Penélope Cruz he has not just an historic beauty but also an actress in the class of Loren or Moreau.

Robert Altman
, (1925–2006) b. Kansas City, Missouri
1955:
The Delinquents
. 1957:
The James Dean Story
. 1964:
Nightmare in Chicago
. 1967:
Countdown
. 1969:
That Cold Day in the Park
. 1970:
M*A*S*H; Brewster McCloud
. 1971:
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. 1972:
Images; The Long Goodbye
. 1974:
Thieves Like Us; California Split
. 1975:
Nashville
. 1976:
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson
. 1977:
3 Women
. 1978:
A Wedding
. 1979:
Quintet; A Perfect Couple
. 1980:
Health; Popeye
. 1982:
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
. 1983:
Streamers
. 1984:
Secret Honor
. 1985:
Fool for Love
. 1987: “Les Boreades,” an episode from
Aria; Beyond Therapy; O.C. and Stiggs
. 1988:
Tanner ’88
(TV). 1990:
Vincent and Theo
. 1992:
The Player
. 1993:
Short Cuts
. 1994:
Ready to Wear/Prêt-à-Porter
. 1996:
Kansas City; Jazz ’34
(s). 1998:
The Gingerbread Man
. 1999:
Cookie’s Fortune
. 2000:
Dr. T & The Women
. 2001:
Gosford Park
. 2003:
The Company
. 2006:
A Prairie Home Companion
.

In 1975, before I had seen
Nashville
, I wrote, “Altman seems less interested in structure than in atmosphere; scheme and character recede as chronic, garrulous discontinuity holds sway.” The tone was critical, and when I fell asleep in
Nashville
and then faced the unquestionable disaster of
Buffalo Bill
, I felt confirmed in my opinion of a director who could not tell stories but allowed us to assume or hope that he was interested in something else. As this is written, I remain uncertain about everything except the absence of a flawless film in Altman’s work. But going back to
Nashville
, some of the earlier films, and the first half of
3 Women
made me reflect. Whether from confusion or density, Altman is that rarity in American cinema: a problem director, a true object of controversy, and a man whose films alter or shift at different viewings like shot silk.

M*A*S*H
is still Altman’s only substantial hit, and one of his most overrated films. The willful looking away from war’s slaughter in favor of the preoccupations of camp life is original and arresting, but the movie is callous and flippant (so often, Altman wearies of his own experiments). The treatment of the Sally Kellerman and Robert Duvall characters is brutal, while the final football game is a feeble retreat to unenlightened conventions. That a cozy TV series could spin off from the movie reveals its compromises. Still,
M*A*S*H
began to develop the crucial Altman style of overlapping, blurred sound and images so slippery with zoom that there was no sense of composition.

That is what makes
Nashville
so absorbing—once you’re awake. The notion of twenty-six roughly equal characters moving in random turmoil and coincidence is the ideal material for his style: he aspires to film not just eccentric groups but seething masses. It remains enigmatic how organized or purposeful
Nashville
is, but there is an attitude to individuals and society in it—of helpless, amused affection, only occasionally spoiled by Altman’s weakness for cheap shots and druggy attitudinizing. The feeling of real time and space stretching to contain the actions of so many people, without moralizing, is both beautiful and demanding. The ending is a trite concession to the way commercial movies must end with some sort of resolution, but along the way there are countless moments of felt but uncaptioned human interaction that few American films have been wayward enough to notice. The mosaic, or the mix, permits a freedom and a human idiosyncrasy that Renoir might have admired.

In hindsight, I think
California Split, The Long Goodbye
, and
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
benefit from this style and lead it toward
Nashville
. But as soon as he concentrated on a few people, Altman looked an evasive fumbler, unable to focus character or to shape his films. As alternatives, he pursued improvisation and a sort of decorative dismay.
The Long Goodbye
is an ingenious variation on a known genre, yet it has an empty soul: so great is the attention to pretty reflections and the crazed fragmentation of the theme song. All its playfulness leaves one frustrated, for Altman backs away from tragedy or real comedy: a sort of alert, floating drift is his essence, and it works best when people are involved for whom depth can be avoided.

Images
is a forbiddingly half-baked showing off and horrid warning of what Altman may believe he’s striving for.
Thieves Like Us
has an authentic period flavor and a touchingly offhand treatment of the love story, but it is ruined by grotesque overemphasis and is far less an achievement than its model, Nicholas Ray’s
They Live by Night. 3 Women
starts off like a breakthrough, but then succumbs to florid illusions of poetry, dream, and the mystical sisterhood of glum women.
Buffalo Bill
is a mess, too cute or too feckless to give the supportive irony that Paul Newman’s rather brave performance requires.