Henri Alekan

One of France's most distinguished, and versatile, cinematographers, Henri Alekan became an assistant camera operator in 1929 and graduated to director of photography as a member of the French Resistance (he had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1940). He made his mark in black and white in the 1940s. Rene Clement's "Battle of the Rails" (1945), an expansion of Clement's short documentary, allowed Alekan to beautifully capture the acts of sabotage and fights between the railway workers and Germans. His lyrical precision and sober yet sensitive abilities achieved their apotheosis with Jean Cocteau's "La Belle et le bete/Beauty and the Beast" (1945), in which he created a poetic atmosphere that was a perfect harmony of images, using contrasts to create plays of light and shadows in ways that invoked artists like de Hooch and Vermeer.