"Since I lack imagination," Almendros wrote in his marvelous book, A Man With A Camera, "I seek inspiration in nature, which offers me an infinite variety of forms." Almendros, who died in 1992, shot seven films for Eric Rohmer, nine for Francois Truffaut, and four for Robert Benton. He worked with Alan Pakula on Sophie's Choice, Martin Scorsese on his Life Lessons episode in New York Stories, and won his Oscar for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. I can't think of a single explosion in any of the films he shot, not a single matte painting, not one special effect that was not done "in the camera." Perhaps he was just lucky to work in a time before digital enhancement, before the 12-second attention span, before special effects became more interesting to look at than the human face. But there is something more-he was always true to a light's source, true to the emotion evoked by the cast and color of light as it changed through the day. He rejected the typical lighting schemes of the '40s and '50s, which called for key lights, backlight, fills and highlights. He preferred to first capture or augment existing light, then shape and bend it. He respected light's truth-telling element, the way it can expose and conceal.

It is in the films he shot for Rohmer that his veracity is at its most simple and elegant. Almendros was one of the first cinematographers to work exclusively with bounced light, which merely complimented the daylight or reinforced incandescent lamps one would normally have in an apartment. In Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969), which he shot in black and white, he kept the lamps in the frame and had white panels placed off-screen to reflect additional light onto the actors. The apartment was painted white with black furniture. For the night scenes he used the existing street lamps, usually working at the widest possible lens aperture. This approach, a simple rendering of character and setting, never distracted from the purity of performance and theme that Rohmer looked for.

Almendros was well-suited to the director's moral rigor, his delineation of the choices men and women must make to live right. Born in Spain in 1930, Almendros fled Franco's regime 18 years later and landed in Cuba, where he organized Havana's first film society. When Batista became dictator, he left to study filmmaking in New York, where he made his first impressive short, a direct cinema documentary on the last 10 minutes of 1958. Shot in Times Square, he used the light of theater marquees to illuminate faces, capturing figures in silhouette. When Castro staged his coup, Almendros returned to Cuba to make documentaries.

Almendros tells how he used mirrors to illuminate the interiors of peasants' huts, how he caught the sun's reflection and bounced it off the white-washed walls. He shot film and watched film, but he grew frustrated with the rigid and nationalized Cuban film industry. In 1961 he was ostracized by colleagues for voting Truffaut's The 400 Blows as the year's best film. Fed up, he exiled himself to France where, eventually, he ended up working with the very director he defended.

His first feature was La Collectionneuse, which he shot in color for Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder. Working with five photoflood lamps, the sun, and whatever practical lights they had, he boldly pushed the limits of his film stock, at times shooting with only a bedside lamp to illuminate a face. He intentionally overexposed backgrounds, used his mirror idea for interiors, and stayed true to the warmish skin tones created by incandescent bulbs and sunsets. These were revolutionary techniques at the time.

Truffaut's films were often about obsession, and about the incessant writing and recording of one's thoughts. Almendros, obsessed with truth, was the perfect collaborator. In The Man Who Loved Women (1977), his earth-toned palette gave the film-ostensibly a comedy-an underlying edge of darkness, in which the protagonist's incessant memoir-keeping isolated him. In the claustrophobic world of The Last Metro (1980), Almendros accentuated the dim interior lighting of the 1940s by dipping the 25-watt bulbs in a yellow bath, and he painted the street lamps blue because at the time blue light could not be picked up by enemy radar. The light in that film closes down the world of the characters.

Almendros shot three features for Bar-bet Schroeder who, before he took his enormous bellyflop into the overcrowded pool of Hollywood hacks, actually made some interesting films. It is hard to believe that Schroeder, the director of Kiss of Death and Desperate Measures-two artless disasters-was a founding producer of films of the French New Wave. As the director of Maitresse (1975), Schroeder unflinchingly told the story of a dominatrix (Bulle Ogier) in love with a petty crook (Gerard Depardieu), complete with explicit scenes of real flagellation. To solve the problem of shooting in a windowless S & M chamber, Almendros placed lamp-shaped flourescents in the frame and attached flourescent tubes to the walls, which not only created an envelope of light, but also suited the bizarre faux-deco set design of the underground lair.

Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven (1978).

Almendros's first American film was Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (1974), which is one of the great forgotten films of that rich movie dec. It's an oddly sweet-natured depiction of an anachronistic, backwoods Southern sport; illegal and violent, but with a tent show code of conduct, and an idiosyncratic cabal of itinerant characters that elevate it to the level of something like a Sunday softball game. Almendros authentically rendered what he called "the tacky but extraordinarily photogenic image of contemporary America." There is an archetypal depth to his compositions, an immediate sense of melancholy in the way the sun glints off the roof of a Ford pick-up, or in the string of trailers haphazardly littered around a Georgia barn, or in the orange shag of a cheap motel carpet. Cockfighter is rural cinematic anthropology, much like one of those Les Blank shorts, in the way it authenticates and confers nobility on the eccentric.

Almendros was just two years away from Days of Heaven, and he still adhered to his simple philosophies of light's true source, and to his disdain of technical gadgetry. Twenty years ago, of course, even the gadgets were crude compared to the computer-generated thrills of today. "Nothing is worse than the abuse of technical devices: diffusers, telephoto lenses, slow motion," Almen- dros wrote. "When they have nothing in- teresting in front of the camera, many directors resort to tricks." Does this sound like any of the movies you've seen lately?

Take a look at Cockfighter's key scene, in which Warren Oates shoots off his mouth, and then watches as his rooster is killed in an impromptu match with a rival cock. Is there a more truthful, more violent, more extreme slow-mo close-up of a single, life-shifting moment in all of film? It copies Peckinpah in the opening scene of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), where a chicken gets its head blown off, but Hellman/Almendros's scene is pure cinema, not elegy. And it tells me that when Almendros uses a trick, he makes it count. He pulled out all the stops for Days of Heaven (1978).

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls Days of Heaven a movie "that is photographed to death," and there is some truth to that. Whenever Malick's narrative grows thin, he cuts to another gorgeous shot: horses framed against a moon blackened by smoke; the Victorian mansion bobbing in a yellow ocean of wheat. But I've thought the film's strength was its elemental purity. It is a myth, and myths are simple, but myth-making is a grand business, and must be rendered like a force of nature.

"My job was to simplify the photography, to purify it of all the artificial effects of the recent past," said Almendros. To that end, he and Malick studied the silent films of Griffith and Chaplin, they used real firelight to illuminate faces, they recreated the arid loneliness of Andrew Wyeth and the inviting interior warmth of Edward Hopper, they achieved all of their special effects in the camera. For the stunning shot in the locusts sequence where the insects ascend to the sky, they dropped peanut shells from helicopters and had their actors walk backwards while running the film in reverse through the camera. When it was projected everything moved forward except the locusts!

Almendros tells of his struggles with his union crew, of how he would walk through the sets turning off lights, of how he would push the sensitivity of his negative, of how he went against standard wisdom by shooting actors from below against a white, burned-out sky. He and Malick must have been quite a sight, striding through the wheat, crafting these issues/29/images of wrath and beauty, pushing all known limits. "Nature's most beautiful light," Almendros wrote, "occurs at extreme moments, the very moments when filming seems impossible." Days of Heaven was a movie made in those precious minutes between sunset and nightfall.

Almendros continued working in America and France, made more films for Truffaut, then a few for Robert Benton. Kramer vs. Kramer (1978) secured his reputation as a great lighter of faces; Places in the Heart (1984) was dense with atmosphere and hope, and Sally Field has never looked more honest in a role. His final film was Scorsese's Life Lessons (1989). Hard- ly an appropriate exit for Almendros, it is still a virtual Cliff's Notes of his proven techniques: the huge windows in the artist's loft, the candles in the birthday scene, the revolving spotlights on Steve Buscemi and the audience in the subway station.

He will always be remembered as a cinematographer of absolute truth. He discovered beauty in the sepulchral darkness of the human face, and disquiet in the still life of a landscape. The next time I have to sit through a Hollywood blockbuster (or, let's face it, even an indie with a budget) and endure that in- evitable onslaught of pyrotechnics, blue strobes, noirish shafts of hard light, overlit interiors and those dime-a-dozen smoke-filled slow-motion establishing shots, I will close my eyes and mourn the passing of Nestor Almendros, a true master of light. MM