L'Amour Noir

A tip of the hat to the great John Alton (Johan Altmann), the painter with light who invented almost single handed "le cinema noir". Alton was born in Hungary in 1901, worked in America and in France but moved to Buenos Aires in the early thirties where was a seminal director and cinematographer in the pioneer days of Argentinean sound cinema. Returning to Hollywod, he shot loads of "B" gangster movies, lit with crepuscular, anguishing and magisterial style. He wrote the bible for photographers "Painting With Light" that remains the magnum opus of the genre. Alton died in Santa Monica, USA, in 1996.