Russian cinematographer whose work with the director Andrei Tarkovsky produced poetic and powerful films
It is sometimes difficult to assess how and how much directors of photography contribute to films. However, nobody watching Andrei Tarkovsky's visual masterpieces Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972) could fail to be struck by the remarkable cinematography of Vadim Yusov, who has died aged 84.
Yusov was Tarkovsky's favourite cinematographer, having shot four of the director's eight films, from the medium-length The Steamroller and the Violin (1961) to Solaris. Yusov also shot four features for Sergei Bondarchuk, another great of Russian cinema.
Tarkovsky's films are some of the most personal, poetic and powerful statements to have come out of eastern Europe. In contrast, Bondarchuk's films, while also imbued with a rich pictorial sense, have an objective, epic grandeur. "Tarkovsky and Bondarchuk were worlds apart," declared Yusov. "It was my job to enter both their worlds."
Yusov's relationship with the two directors also differed. When he shot his first film for Bondarchuk, They Fought for Their Country (1975), based on the second world war novel by the Nobel prizewinning author Mikhail Sholokhov, they were close friends and already established internationally. When the 29-year-old Tarkovsky approached Yusov to shoot his diploma film, The Steamroller and the Violin, he was still a student at VGIK (the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), Russia's leading film school. Yusov, who was three years older, had graduated from VGIK four years previously, but had only been assistant cameraman on a few films.
Born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), Yusov worked in a Moscow metal factory before studying at VGIK, and becoming cameraman at Mosfilm studios. On Tarkovsky's first feature-length film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), Yusov commented: "Tarkovsky frequently could not understand the limitations and this ignorance made him bold – he thought things would be easy to do and he could have very daring ideas, he could invent anything, in total freedom."
The film follows the 12-year-old Ivan, hell-bent on revenge on the Nazis for having wiped out his family, who joins a detachment of Partisans. From the opening sequence, where the boy runs through swamp and forest near enemy lines, Yusov's stylised, often expressionist, camera presents a stark contrast between Ivan's two worlds: the bright, clean, lyrically beautiful landscapes of his dreams of his happy childhood and the dirty, dark, shadowy real world of the war.
Andrei Rublev, eight imaginary episodes in the life of the great 15th-century icon painter, was majestically photographed in black-and-white on the CinemaScope screen by Yusov, ending in a colour montage doing full justice to the paintings.
Jumping from the distant past to the distant future, Solaris, set on a space station where the people in the thoughts of the astronauts materialise, managed to convince technologically without reliance on special effects.
However, Tarkovsky noted in his diary: "Work on Solaris has been hell. Yusov and I are constantly arguing," while Yusov found the film "an endless search and trial".
Yusov refused to shoot Tarkovsky's next film, The Mirror (1975), because, "When the cameraman and the director work together for too long, the cameraman can sometimes feel he is under too strong a pressure from the director. Another reason to give up working on The Mirror was I felt that during the preparatory stages Tarkovsky wanted to eliminate my ideas completely, my manner of perception, that he would want to direct only his vision."
With Bondarchuk, there were only "minor conflicts". For Red Bells, parts 1 (1982) and 2 (1983) – a four-hour 70mm chronicle of the Russian and Mexican revolutions in the early 20th century – filmed in the Soviet Union, Italy and Mexico, Yusov had to shoot about 10,000 people per scene per day. "It was very difficult and the film wasn't really seen by very many people, but the work is very dear to me," Yusov recalled. Another huge production for Bondarchuk was Boris Godunov (1986), based on the Alexander Pushkin play. However, expertly shot as they were against all the difficult logistics of location filming, these epics lacked the poetic cinematic challenges that Tarkovsky's films set.
In 1988, Yusov won the best cinematography award at the Venice film festival for Ivan Dykhovichny's The Black Monk (1988), based on Anton Chekhov's mystical tale. Among his other awards was People's Artist of the USSR in 1979.
While making films, Yusov taught at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow.
His wife, Inna Zelentsova, who worked as a sound editor, died in 2000.
• Vadim Ivanovich Yusov, cinematographer, born 20 April 1929; died 23 August 2013