Sven Nykvist 1922-2006.(In memoriam)

FEW, VERY FEW, movie cameramen achieve the celebrity of actors and directors, a fact that is perhaps a little surprising as so many still photographers have achieved world fame--Brassai, Steiglitz, Doisneau, Adams, Cazneaux, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Curtis, Leibovitz--the list goes on and on. Most people familiar with these talents would be hard-pressed to name three outstanding movie cameramen, although the success of Australian cameramen (John Scale, Don McAlpine, Russell Boyd, Peter James, Dean Semler and others) with international awards over the past ten years has probably created some awareness of the craft.

Sven Nykvist was the son of missionaries who spent most of their time in the Belgian Congo. He was brought up back in Sweden by relatives who were under instructions that young Sven was not to see movies because of the triple threat they presented in their endorsement of alcohol, tobacco and sex. Nothing, of course, is more alluring than the forbidden, so Sven studied photography then joined the film industry in Stockholm in his late teens. He worked his way up in the classic manner, from camera loader to focus puller and then camera operator. He attracted the attention of the director Ingmar Bergman and was offered the position of director of photography on The Virgin Spring in 1960. I remember seeing the film in Sydney in that year and was astonished not only at the plot line (so startling among the tame tales of that era) of rape and revenge in fourteenth-century Sweden, but by the striking black-and-white images, the flawlessly framed compositions, and the startling close-ups which seemed to be delving into the thoughts of the characters.

Despite an allegedly tempestuous relationship with Bergman (evidently a characteristic of Bergman's working method) Nykvist went on to photograph at least another fifteen films for him, including the remarkable Shame (1968)--set in a bleak futuristic post-apocalyptic society--and Persona (1966), which switched from the wintry landscapes of so many Bergman films to an emphasis on huge side-lit close-ups of the two leading women, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann.

Nykvist's black-and-white camerawork was so accomplished, the lighting so natural and so beautiful without ever seeming to be striving for effect, that I assumed he ...