I met him only once, in 2001, when he granted me an interview that turned into a long and amicable talk at his home in Paris (concluding with directions to the nearby Polane bakery). Its worth scrolling down IMDbs list of films hes worked on; arguably, no cinematographer in the history of cinema has photographed a more significant set of movies.
Lubtchansky's last project, Jacques Rivette's “Around a Small Mountain", was one of the pearls of last years New York Film Festival and will be released here later this year. He worked, in all, on fourteen of Rivette's films, starting in 1976; on eleven films with Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet, going back to 1977, including some of the best (such as “Antigone and Sicilia!"); on Philippe Garrel's two latest films, “Regular Lovers" and “The Frontier of Dawn"; on Franois Truffauts “The Woman Next Door"; on three films by Agns Varda, going back to 1965 (!), including “Daguerrotypes"; on Claude Lanzmanns “Shoah" as well as Lanzmanns first film, “Israel, Why", from 1972; and a batch of works by Jean-Luc Godard, starting with some 8mm.
Cintracts, from 1968, including the vast and pioneering video projects of the mid-seventies, “Six Fois Deux" and France/Tour/Dtour/Deux/Enfants; “Every Man for Himself", Godard's second first film, from 1979; and “Nouvelle Vague", from 1990, one of Godard's best--and most beautifully photographed films.
It is, of course, in regard to his collaborations with Godard that I interviewed Lubtchansky; he spoke to me unstintingly, with great emotion and with precise technical detail, of his work with Godard, starting as his assistant-cameraman on “Masculine Feminine", in 1965; of how Godard went to him in 1974 for technical lessons and how Godard included Lubtchansky's children and Lubtchansky's home in the works of the mid-seventies; of his unusual cooperative work with the cameraman Renato Berta on “Every Man for Himself"; of the bitter conflicts that took place then, his refusal to work with Godard for a decade, his happy return on “Nouvelle Vague", and the tensions that led to Lubtchansky's decision not to work with Godard again.
Lubtchansky told me frankly about the bad along with the good, and did so ruefully but unapologetically; he made clear his deep personal implication in his work with Godard, which is exactly what Godard has so often sought (and has often claimed not to have gotten) from his collaborators; yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this fusion of the personal with the professional, Lubtchansky's refusal to detach himself, his identity, his emotional being from the work at hand--and, as it turned out, from the conflict that arose--that made it intolerable for him to continue working with Godard.
As a cinematographer, Lubtchansky may not have brought about as manifest a technical revolution as did Gregg Toland and Raoul Coutard, but he played a crucial role in the work of the most historically-informed and classical-minded of modernist filmmakers, by infusing traditional cinematic craftsmanship with a decisively modernist spirit.
In his intimate, heuristic, thorough, and open-ended devotion to movie-making as both an art and a way of life, Lubtchansky took a leading role in another aspect of cinematic revolution--the realization, in practice, of the ideals of personal filmmaking that fueled the French New Wave and that, perhaps, only an actual social revolution, that of 1968, could have brought to fruition.
If these ideals continue to inspire filmmakers around the world, its due largely to the films on which Lubtchansky worked, which validate and honor those ideals and provide enduring proof of their artistic vitality.
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