Darius Khondji, directeur de la photographie Série-Collection : La Vie en 8 mm, ma passion pour le cinéma

Bruno Ulmer
2003 - 26 min - DV Cam - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

Since "Delicatessen" (Caro and Jeunet, 1991), Darius Khondji has become one of the most innovative directors of photography and one of the most sought after. Each of his films – "Seven" (D. Fincher), "Beauté volée" (B. Bertolucci), "Evita" (A. Parker), "Alien, la résurrection" (J-P. Jeunet), "La Neuvième Porte" (R. Polanski), "Anything Else" (W. Allen) – reveals an extraordinary sensitivity and daring in the way of creating the picture. Khondji’s play of shadows, contrasts, saturation of colours, light, participate, to use his own words, in "the drama of the story".
His sensitivity and passion for the play of shade and light go back to his childhood. At the age of 12 he made his first film in 8 mm, a fiction as a tribute to his hero of the time, Dracula. The "Khondji style" was born of those first teenage experiments : movements in the half-light, play of colours... In reference to the masters that he discovered in the French cinema, Misogushi, Nicholas Ray, Buñuel, etc., Darius Khondji developed his own aesthetic research, repeatedly filmed in 8 mm and super 8, summoning his family, his friends, including Louis Becker, son of Jean and grandson of Jacques Becker...
Often with a child’s clumsiness, but with certainty, he kept experimenting, playing with the sensitivity of his amateur cameras to track down rays of light, to try to film the darkness, to seize the contrast of backlighting. Darius Khondji invites us to look at all his childhood films, brought together and shown for the first time in this documentary, to follow the path of his passion for the cinema, to understand how, behind his signature that today serves the greatest film directors, hides a teenager’s fascination for light.