The Light We Live In
WITH OVER 100 CREDITED FILMS, INCLUDING VÍCTOR ERICE’S , several of Pedro Almodóvar’s career highlights (including his breakthrough ), and 12 collaborations with Vicente Aranda, José Luis Alcaine has produced a cinematographic oeuvre that is a treasure of Spanish cinema. Born in Tétouan, Morocco, in 1938, Alcaine fell in love with Classical Hollywood cinema during his childhood in Tangier, where he discovered the European cinema that was censored by the Franco regime in Spain. Later, as a graduate of the Official School of Cinematography in Madrid, he was a pioneer in the use of fluorescent tubes for film lighting in the late ’70s. Reducing costs and expediting processes, this innovation reinforced his commitment to a restrained realism that could simultaneously embrace a certain exuberance of light and color. That delicate balance can be appreciated in Alcaine’s photography for Bigas Luna’s “Iberian Trilogy” and in the paintings, which was shot in Spain, the 79-year-old Alcaine spoke (in baroque, precise sentences) about his visual sense.
