The director of photography, restorer and film researcher Juan Mariné died yesterday in Madrid, to the 104 years oldas reported by the Film Academy through a statement.
Mariné, first photography director who entered the institution, received last year the Goya de Honor 2024. The Centenary Restorative collected this honorary award for his entire career and contributions to the Spanish cinema history In an intimate act that was held at the headquarters of the Academy, surrounded by his family, friends and colleagues, for «his entire dedication to cinema for more than eighty years of experience that travel through the history of Spanish cinema, his efforts in the Conservation and restoration work and for representing vividly, through its trade, the importance of light in the history of our cinema ».
He entered the cinema at the early age of 13, when he reached the filming of ‘The eighth commandment’ To deliver new cameras from France that only he knew how to work, and in his last years of life, ninety later, he frequently went to ECAM to restore films.
Born in Barcelona in 1920, his love for cinema came to him with only 4 years, when one day truthful in Arenys del Mar he saw a projection of the first shorts of Charles Chaplin. He impact Of those images it was so great that he asked his mother to enroll in school early to be able to read the posters of the mute films.
Already in his adolescence, he frequently visited the cineclub of Arenys del Mar. There, the projector used to spoil regularly and thus Mariné had his first contacts with these devices: trying to fix them to continue watching the movies that made him so enjoy. Thanks to this ingenuity and curiosity, he got, a year later, to put those cameras to work with ‘The Eighth Commandment’.
The rest, it is the history of cinema. Juan Mariné was responsible for the first Spanish film in color, ‘La Gata’ (1956). ‘Day after day’, ‘The Captain Veneno’ (with Saritísima), ‘Faculty of Letters’, ‘The other shadow’, ‘The call of Africa’, ‘The Great Family’. In all these films, of all possible genres, the director of photography worked, without rest – sometimes he chained up to six feature films a year -, to “always seek maximum beauty.”
«You have to study the face that [uno] It has in front, distribute it in plots, study the defects in each plot and act in the most important way to mitigate things that are not so pleasant and highlight the beauty of women, ”he told Yolanda Ramos ten years ago .
Retired from the sets but faithful to that world to which he dedicated life, Juan Mariné had been immersed in photographic research for years, watching out the artistic heritage.
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