I translated and posted some excerpts from Philippe Rousselot’s book on cinematography, on my blog on theasc.com

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link

http://bit.ly/ascRousselotSBook

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Vous pouvez le commander ici
You can order it here

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My translation of the excerpt on the back cover gives an indication of Philippe’s finesse:

There is in Louisiana a kind of highway on stilts that crosses lake Ponchartrain, more than 40 kilometers in a straight line above the water. Early in the morning, late in the evening, it’s part of a roundtrip to a shooting location; thirty minutes at hundred kilometers per hour. And the first question of the day comes, looking at the light and the sky reflecting in the water: “How do you shoot this landscape? In which way? Where to put the camera, what movement to give it, where to place the vanishing point, the horizon line, what filter, what lens to use? How to describe what you can’t yet see, like the opposite shore hidden by the curve of the earth, which makes this bridge on the water stretch forever?”

All these questions are foreign to the film, to the working day that’s beginning, but are part of a daily practice, subterranean and semi-conscious, a practice of “giving an account” of fugitive impressions like the fragments of landscapes seen on the way in. An exercise which consists in seeing things inside a rectangle, in evaluating contrasts, color relationship, harmonies and clashes.

Before anything else, the cinematographer is an archivist.

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