Camera: Boris Kaufman

In January, we are paying homage to the cameraman Boris Kaufman (1897 – 1980) whose career spanned French poetic realism of the 1920s and Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and 60s, and whose name is associated with three great directors: Jean Vigo, Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet. Kaufman was born in Bialystok, at the time part of the Russian Empire and now in Poland, in 1897. He went to Paris in the 1920s to study philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, while his older brothers were making film history in Moscow. With their manifestos and films, Dziga Vertov (Denis) and his cameraman Mikhail revolutionized documentary filmmaking, calling for the "camera-eye" to be emancipated from the task of merely reproducing the alleged truth in front of the camera. Influenced by his brothers, Boris began making shorts in France in 1928 and two years later he started working closely with Jean Vigo. The two made some of the most beautiful works of poetic realism before the latter's premature death in 1934. Kaufman escaped Nazi-occupied France in 1941, making it to the US via Canada. His US breakthrough came in 1954 when he won the Best Cinematography Oscar for ON THE WATERFRONT. Kaufman's camera work is characterized by a great sensitivity for the singularity of each film; he finds images for poetry, realism and dreams. "It was always the same thing for me – I had to find the camera style that was most appropriate for the story's subject, and in harmony with it; to look at each new item from a fresh angle; to avoid the same patterns that I had used in earlier films."