JOSÉ LUIS ALCAINE

The man and the artist who has illuminated a number of cinematographic milestones in our film industry; the man whose extraordinary vision has given the Spanish cinema of the last fifty years expressiveness, volume and colour; whose camera has portrayed the emotions of leading actors within and beyond our borders, and who was even responsible for photography in the last film by “mad doctor” Brian de Palma or Iranian Asghar Farhadi, and holds five Goya statuettes, a National Cinematographic Prize and a Gold Medal from the Academy in his collection of awards … truth to tell, he virtually works using only one eye. During an interview in the mid-nineties with Carlos F. Heredero, José Luis Alcaine told him that he can hardly see with his right eye, a “lazy eye”. Alcaine gazes at the world (cinema) with his left eye.

Born in Morocco in 1938, the explosive light of north Africa was stamped on his retina forever. Even though the 1950s during the last century were the years of his sentimental education, the Tangiers which was his home for 23 years enabled him to wallow in a cultural freedom that was unthinkable in Spain. This meant he could read the British Journal of Photography at an early age and the first Cahiers du cinéma magazines, and experience the films made by Antonioni, Eisenstein and Godard at the film club his father had set up. Apart from transmitting his enthusiasm for the seventh art to him, his father had a small photography shop, where from an early age he took his first steps in the alchemies of light and learned the secrets and sensitivities of colour grading by developing tourist photos. He still talks to this day about the light-related findings in A Farewell to Arms (Charles Lang, 1932), Citizen Kane (Gregg Toland, 1941) or Witness for the Prosecution (Russell Harlan, 1957) with the same passion as when, in his teens, he could mentally recreate the chiaroscuros of M (1931) without even having seen the film, although he had memorised the script.

From the light of Tangiers to the greyish ambience of Madrid in the 60s, as a student at the Official School of Cinematography, where he travelled along the academic learning curve in a bid to break with it, and invent his own language. Juan Julio Baena, the school’s cameras lecturer, told him to devote himself to something else, and that films were not for him. Fortunately he did not pay any heed, and in fact his first jobs consisted of using the light to mould the feature films his fellow students were making in their profession: Francisco Betriú, Manuel Summers, Josefina Molina, Francisco Regueiro … Even in a film as apparently bare as the extraordinary documentary Después de… (Cecilia Bartolomé, 1983), he introduced a visual style by using wide-angle lenses which placed the individual being interviewed in a community, a group, or against a social backdrop. He always understood that a photo is also a narration, ideology, political intention. Because light is what films are all about.

Obsessed with Velázquez’s Las meninas painting, his enormous preoccupation with volume, the relief of figures created by light, is a photographic constant in his work. As is the need for the gazes of actors. He never wanted to direct because his habitat, his comfort zone, is during the shoot, and directors only shoot films every three or four years. Throughout his filmography, during which cinema (and ways of capturing the image) has changed so much, he has been involved in almost two hundred shoots, obeying the maxim of never doing the same as he did in the previous film. He considers himself a perpetual apprentice, an experimenter who pioneered the use of shoot-through umbrellas (which he designed himself) to diffuse light, and also the use of adjustable fluorescent lights before anyone else began to use them, in the eighties. He coined the term “siesta light” for this midday light which streams in through the corner of the windows and bounces off the ground to create multiple shadows.

A cursory glance at his filmography is all it takes to stroll through half a century of the history of our cinema, films that moved on to New Spanish Cinema in the latter years of Franco’s régime, which the filmmakers of democracy moved into subsequently. His left eye has found a way of filming the madnesses of passion in Vicente Aranda throughout his filmography, the rural dreaminesses of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (Demonios en el jardín and El caballero Don Quijote), the poetic combings of Víctor Erice (El Sur), the subjective atmospheres of Pilar Miró (El pájaro de la felicidad), the naturalism of Montxo Armendáriz (Tasio, the historical truth of Fernando Fernán-Gomez (El viaje a ninguna parte and Mambrú se fue a la guerra), the eternally free light of Cecilia Bartolomé (Vámonos, Bárbara), the chromatic musicality of Carlos Saura (Sevillanas and ¡Ay, Carmela!), the panoramic impressionism of Fernando Trueba (El sueño del mono loco and Belle époque), the grotesque spaces of Alfonso Ungría (Gulliver), the turgid sensuality of Bigas Luna (Jamón, jamón and Huevos de oro) and, of course, his extensive relations with Pedro Almodóvar, in two phases.

Since his first project with him on Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, Alcaine confessed that to a certain extent Almodóvar’s aesthetic pursuits take the opposite direction to his training as a photographer, because the La Mancha director “does not focus on light, but rather colour”. It may have been for this reason that they took a fifteen-year break after Átame. But they were back with La mala educación to weave explosions of colour for the phantasmagorical melodramas of 20th century Almodovarian maturity. One of his battles, his demands, is that the screenplay must state the exact time of day in each scene, to give credibility to the light. It was not until the Madres paralelas shoot that he was finally able to condense all he has learned, his vision of photography, forcing the spotlight down to extreme depths, capturing the passage of time through changes in light. It comes as no surprise that it was the man from La Mancha with whom he reached the ultimate level in his poetry.

Alcaine has studied the luminous and chromatic behaviour of shadows like a meteorologist studies atmospheric phenomena, with the veiled intention of predicting their effects. His paradigmatic film, photographed by David Watkins, is Marat Sade (1966, Peter Brook). It was this film he went back to whenever he needed to validate the fundamentals of his work. A number of principles which have led him to draw up his own theories on the relationship between painting and films, particularly in his studies of El Bosco’s El jardín de las delicias and Picasso’s Guernica. One of his most recent tasks was to supervise the restoration of El puente(1977) by Filmoteca Española, which he photographed almost forty years ago for Juan Antonio Bardem. The necessary information was in his memory and the instinct of his left eye to enable him to return to the tones which the passage of time had spoiled on the original negative. With the humbleness of the great, over four intense weeks his indications restored the necessary density to the images.