The director is the main person on the set responsible for the result of the film. But cinema is the art of image. In it, the creative idea is embodied by a person with a high level of technical knowledge - the operator. Happiness, if it is a like-minded person and a true professional in his field. Such as Pavel Lebeshev, a cameraman legend, whose passing away in 2003 was called the end of an era in Russian cinema.
Operator's son
The cult films "Girl with Character", "Shield and Sword", "Girls" are the work of cameraman Timofey Lebeshev - his father. Since 1957, his father on the site already with might and main helped son Pavel. There was one for the mechanics, and for the assistant. But at first he dreamed of becoming a mathematician. Born in Moscow in February 1940, he spent his childhood in Baku while being evacuated with his parents. There he learned to cook, later making a real cult of food. Mother, being the director of popular science films, was often sick due to heart problems. And her son had to run home from school at breaks to feed her. So Pavel Lebeshev would have become a mathematician, if not for a friend who had infected the art of photography in high school. So there was a son at the Mosfilm studio, where his father worked.
Education
It was not possible to enter VGIK to get a professional education. Pavel Lebeshev, whose family was known in cinematic circles, was forced to study in absentia. Whole legends go about his misadventures. For over 10 years of studenthood the young man was expelled several times, restoring only thanks to the authority of the department head A. D. Golovni. From his first independent work, Lebeshev has demonstrated amazing talent and skill. But he cannot explain how and with what methods he achieved the result.
In 1970, the film “Belorussky Vokzal”, the student’s camera work, made such a strong impression on Golovnya that he instructed the third-year student Lebeshev with fives until the end of his studies, allowing him to defend his diploma. After years of ordeal, in parallel with the Oxford Award, Pavel Lebeshev will receive a long-awaited document on education.
The beginning of a creative biography
The first serious work before the “Belorussky Train Station” for the cameraman was the black-and-white film “Angel” (1967) by Andrey Smirnov. The picture has a difficult rolling fate - it lay on the shelf for almost 20 years, but it was Lebeshev Pavel Timofeevich who considered it his main success. Smirnov entrusted the work to a novice master only because no one agreed to implement his plan. It was important for him to conduct all the shooting in kind, so that natural lighting would provide a feeling of an amateur film and at the same time Michelangelo's frescoes.
He recalls that when he asked whether the operator could do without additional light, he answered: “I can do without film!” Humor and always a good mood are a hallmark of Lebeshev, who has completely fulfilled the requirements of the director. Andrei Smirnov proposed to continue cooperation already in the color film “Belorussky Train Station”, widely presented on the screens of the country. He made the operator extremely popular with directors: Larisa Shepitko and Sergey Solovyov, George Danelia and Sergey Bodrov Sr. But the collaboration with Nikita Mikhalkov became really successful.
Legendary tandem
They thought and felt alike. This was shown by the very first joint picture, “One among strangers, a stranger among friends” (1974). The cameraman and artist Alexander Adabashyan became the true co-authors of the director and his loyal friends for many years. Their fates intertwined. Adabashyan even became the husband of Lebeshev’s sister, who, unfortunately, passed away early.
Mikhalkov didn’t have the final film, where four comrades, after difficult trials and minutes of distrust, meet and run towards each other. After several sleepless nights, Pavel Lebeshev suggested showing their run in real time, and hugs in the past. This option also entered the picture. The operator managed to make the environment almost animated, to combine dreams and dreams, creating a feeling of almost biblical eternity.
Having made seven paintings together, the best of which Lebeshev considered the “Slave of Love”, where he had to use a slightly illuminated domestic film “Tasma” to create a retro effect, the creative tandem broke up. Mikhalkov felt that Lebeshev got tired of his last film “Without Witnesses,” and he did not like the director's work. Until the last days, he will consider this film a creative failure of Nikita Sergeevich.
For 14 long years they did not intersect, working with other movie masters. For Lebeshev, this was a huge personal experience, although he had many creative successes. For a joint film with Bodrov Sr. in 1996 he will receive the State Prize, being already People's Artist of the Russian Federation. But all the time he will zealously follow the work of Mikhalkov, who selected people with the professional handwriting of Lebeshev for the role of operators. The creative union will reunite in 1999 in the film The Siberian Barber to bring laurels to two outstanding masters again.
Handwriting master
Gradually, three cinematographic schools took shape in the domestic cinema: St. Petersburg, Georgian and Moscow, whose leader can rightfully be considered Lebeshev. His art of making every frame unforgettable is second to none. Everyone is accustomed to observing the work of the operator, the lion's share of the working time for which it takes to set the light and only a small part - actually for the shooting. Pavel Lebeshev, performing the task of the director, is ready to look for unusual moves to emphasize the actor’s game.
So, in the film “An Unfinished Piece for a Mechanical Piano,” the actress’s face was illuminated with every puff of a cigarette during a dialogue with Platonov. This was achieved using a simple kerosene lamp. In order to show the duel scene from all sides in the Siberian Barber, the cameraman came up with a design that went down in history as a “pashamobile”. In his methods, he never repeated, considering it boring and monotonous. There are more than 50 works in the filmography of the master, where Pavel Lebeshev is the cameraman.
Family, interesting facts
Spending most of his life on expeditions, Lebeshev was never seen in novels with actresses. His wife, Natalya, worked as an editor in the APN and kept the hearth, raising two sons. The youngest passed away at the age of 25; grandchildren grow from the eldest. He did not follow in the footsteps of his father, but he is engaged in computer graphics, having achieved great professionalism.
Pavel Lebeshev died in 2003 at the age of 63 years. On February 23, watching “Two Fighters” movie on TV, his heart stopped. Filmmakers throughout the country took his death as the end of an era in the development of cinema, when masters created masterpieces of the highest standard on a domestic film film of not the best quality.
Until the last days, Lebeshev worked, completing a joint film with the Polish director Jerzy Hoffman, whose premiere he was not destined to see. Nikita Mikhalkov, who always considered his friend a talented nugget, called him “a separate planet”, without which his films would lose the subtlety and tenderness that the audience loved.