Passing of Cinematographer Paul Bonis

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AFC newsletter n°257

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We were saddened to learn of the passing of our colleague Paul Bonis, cinematographer, on Thursday, 2 July 2015 at his residence in Bono (Morbihan, France). He was 76 years old. Having dedicated forty years of his life to the cinema, he said that his “master” was Claude Chabrol, who was almost a “surrogate father” to him.

Born in 1940 to a father who operated in the French Resistance from its beginnings and who died fighting the Nazis in 1944, Paul Bonis discovered the cinema in the 1950s at the movie club of a small seminary where he was sent. He was later trained at the Ecole Louis-Lumière – which, at the time, was located in the rue Vaugirard (Paris), and from where he graduated in 1960, – he became a member of the camera crew on Agnes Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1961, where he first met cinematographer Jean Rabier. His career truly took off in 1965, when he was the camera assistant on Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, and Claude Chabrol’s Marie Chantal vs. Doctor Kha, an experience that deeply affected him. He assisted Jean Rabier, and also Ghislain Cloquet, until 1971, and during the same period he worked with Claude Zidi on a number of films.

Claude Zidi gave Paul Bonis the opportunity to film his first feature-length movie as a cinematographer on Les Bidasses en folie. Six comedies with Claude Zidi would follow, but it was on a short film, La Cage de Pierre (1968), that he met Pierre Zucca, via whom he began work on films of a very different tone. The films that they made together range from Vincent mit l’âne dans un pré (1975), to Alouette, je te plumerai (1988), and Rouge-gorge (1985), amongst others.
Beginning in 1991, he began to film movies for television, directed by the likes of Jean-Louis Bertuccelli and Michel Sibra, and in 2003, he filmed Claude Grinberg’s fiction La Maîtresse du corroyeur, which was his last project as a cinematographer. In 2006, he, along with other film buffs, created the movie club entitled La Luciole, in the town of Bono, which screens forgotten movies.

The AFC presents his son Julien, his grandchildren, and their loved ones, its sincere condolences.

The image above shows Paul Bonis in 2010 – DR / Ouest-France
Thanks go to Julien Bonis and Sylvie Zucca for the photos published in the portfolio below.