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Outside of the marvelous Visions of Light (1992, Todd McCarthy, Arnold Glassman), documentaries of the art of cinematography are few and far between. I may be wrong, but I think Light Keeps Me Company (Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, 2000) may be the first documentary entirely devoted to a single cinematographer, the Swedish legend, Sven Nykvist. If so, it’s not a bad place to start. However, given the dozens of documentaries on directors and actors, it seems a shame that cinematographers and their art have been given so little relative exposure.
While Light Keeps Me Company is nowhere near as interesting a piece of documentary as Visions of Light, anyone with a passing knowledge of Nykvist will learn much from this heartfelt account of Nykvist’s life and art. The film is directed by Sven Nykvist’s son, which may raise initial doubts about the film’s ability to remain objective about its subject. But this never becomes an issue, since Carl-Gustaf Nykvist is well aware of this position, and makes no claim to being an outsider. That being said, the film does attempt a balance between Nykvist the man and Nykvist the artists.
Formally, the film is your standard documentary, using film extracts, interviews, voice-over text reading, and photographs to explore its subject. Being his son, the film has a direct access to the personal side of Sven Nykvist, which means we get footage of Nykvist relaxing in his home and many home photographs which lend the film a quasi-home movie feel. However, the film is far from being a slavish home movie, as we get to hear from many of Nykvist’s closest collaborators, including, of course, the single figure he is most identified with, Ingmar Bergman, and Swedish performers Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Bibbi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Stellan Skarsgård, along with international directors (Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Sir Richard Attenborough) and performers (Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Melanie Griffith, Gena Rowland) that he has worked with. All the interviews are brief, but the set of interviews that are most interesting in terms of reflecting on Nykvist’s art and his contributions to the history of cinematography are, not surprisingly, the one’s with his peers: Vilmos Zsigmond, Laslo Kovacs, Guiseppe Rotunno, and Vittorio Storraro.
From a biographical standpoint, the film touches...