Sven Nykvist

Sven Nykvist was born on Dec 03, 1922 in Sweden. Sven Nykvist's big-screen debut came with I mörkaste Småland directed by Schamyl Bauman in 1943. Sven Nykvist is known for Private Confessions directed by Liv Ullmann, Pernilla August stars as Anna and Max von Sydow as Jacob. Sven Nykvist has got 19 awards and 15 nominations so far. The most recent award Sven Nykvist achieved is Camerimage. The upcoming new movie Sven Nykvist plays is It All Came True which will be released on Apr 30, 1999.

Sven Nykvist was considered by many in the industry to be one of the world's greatest cinematographers. During his long career that spanned almost half a century, Nyvist perfected the art of cinematography to its most simple attributes, and he helped give the films he had worked on the simplest and most natural look imaginable. Indeed, Mr. Nykvist prided himself on the simplicity and naturalness of his lighting schemes. Nykvist used light to create mood and, more significantly, to bring out the natural flesh tones in the human face so that the emotion of the scene could be played out on the face without the light becoming intrusive.Nykvist entered the Swedish film industry when he was 19 and worked his way up to becoming a director of photography. He first worked with the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman on the film La nuit des forains (1953), but his collaboration with Bergman began in earnest with La source (1960). From that point on, Nykvist replaced the great Gunnar Fischer as Bergman's cameraman, and the two men started a collaboration that would last for a quarter of a century. The switch from Fischer to Nykvist created a marked difference in the look of Bergman's films. In many respects, it was like the difference between Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Fischer's lighting was a study in light and darkness, while Nykvist preferred a more naturalistic, more subtle approach that in many ways relied on the northern light compositions of the many great Scandinavian painters.Nykvist's work with Bergman is one of the most glorious collaborations in movie history. Nykvist created a markedly different look for each installment of Bergman's Faith Trilogy. À travers le miroir (1961) had an almost suffocating quality to it, and Le silence (1963) hearkened back to the days of German Expressionism. Les communiants (1963), the middle part of the trilogy, may very well be the most perfect work of Nykvist's repertoire. Having studied the light in a real provincial church carefully, he then recreated the subtle changes in the light as the day went on on a Stockholm sound stage. Indeed, it's hard to believe that the film was shot on a stage and not in a real church in Northern Sweden. For Persona (1966), Nykvist relied heavily on Sweden's famous Midnight Sun. In Une passion (1969), Nykvist was able to capture the chilly, soggy, and melancholy look of Faro, one of Nykvist's first color films. Both Nykvist and Bergman were both very reluctant to film in color. He created a fascinating study of white and red in Cris et chuchotements (1972), for which Nykvist won an Oscar. He won an Oscar again for the last feature-length theatrical film that Bergman made, Fanny et Alexandre (1982).During the late 1970s, Nykvist began making films elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, working for directors such as Louis Malle (La petite (1978)), Philip Kaufman (L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être (1988)), Bob Fosse (Star 80 (1983)), Nora Ephron (Nuits blanches à Seattle (1993)), Woody Allen (Une autre femme (1988), Crimes et délits (1989)), Richard Attenborough (Chaplin (1992)), and fellow Swede Lasse Hallström (Gilbert Grape (1993)). The documentary Ljuset håller mig sällskap (2000) paid homage to Nykvist, although it does not grant us any real secrets about his working methods. Nykvist died in 2006.