William Lubtchansky AFC 1938-2010

France has lost a great cinematographer and the AFC a generous colleague and friend in the death of William Lubtchansky at the age of 72. He was universally recognised as an avant-garde cinematographer at the heart of the French New Wave.
Lubtchansky who had worked with leading directors including Francoise Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Philippe Garrel, died in Paris of heart failure on May 4th. He was one of the founders of the AFC who describe him on their web site as “not only a master of his craft but also a generous, touching, funny, amazing, human being.”
 

In a wonderful phrase they go on to describe him as “a faithful companion of directors Jacques Rivette, Claude Lanzmann, Otar Iosseliani, Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.” He also worked with Marcel Camus and Peter Brook.
“No cinematographer in the history of cinema has photographed a more significant set of movies,” writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker.

He worked on fourteen of Jacques Rivette’s films starting in 1976 and a year later began his collaboration with Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet on eleven films including some of the best such as “Antigone” and “Sicilia”. He shot Philippe Garrel’s “Regular Lovers” and “The Frontier of Dawn”, Truffaud’s “ The Woman Next Door”, three films by Agnes Varda starting in 1965 including “Daguerreotypes” , Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” as well as his first film “ Pourquoi Israel ?” . His works with Jean-Luc Godard included the pioneering video projects in the seventies, “Six Fois Deux” and “France, Tour, Detour, Deux, Enfants”. Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague” is recognised as the director’s most beautifully photographed film.

” As a cinematographer” Brody concludes his article,” 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 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 the cinematic revolution-the realisation, in practice, of the ideals of personal filmmaking that fuelled 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 it is largely due to the films on which Lubtchansky worked, which validate and honour those ideal and provide enduring proof of their artistic vitality.”
William Lubtchansky leaves his wife, Nicole, and children Natasha and Irina (also a cinematographer) and grandchildren. He shot over 100 feature films and will be greatly missed.

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