This year’s PLUS CAMERIMAGE Lifetime Achievement Award will be granted to Michael Ballhaus. A special retrospective review of his films will present some of his greatest achievements and the cinematographer himself will be a guest of the Festival. 18th edition of the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Plus Camerimage will be held in the city of Bydgoszcz, Poland from the 27th November through 4th December 2010.
During the fifty-year career Michael Ballhaus worked on almost 120 movies (both feature films and documentaries). He was tree times nominated to the Oscar.Michael Ballhaus has worked for over nine years with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and worked steadily with Martin Scorsese on seven movies. He also collaborated with many other well-known directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Nichols, Volker Schlöndorff and Robert Redford.Michael Ballhaus was Born on 5th August 1935 into a German family actors. Max Ophüls was a friends to the family. He started his profession in television and by the late 1960´s he began to shoot feature films. From 1970 to 1979 he worked on 16 films directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder including The Marriage of Maria Braun and Martha.
Ballhaus arrived in Hollywood in 1982 and his first American film was Baby It’s You, directed by John Sayles. Two years later his long-lasting cooperation with Martin Scorsese began. Together they made such films as After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, Age of Innocence, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed.
Ballhaus also worked on many other well-known movies, for example Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge, and Primary Colors by Mike Nichols, Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola, Quiz Show and The Legend of Bagger Vance by Robert Redford, Death of a Salesman by Volker Schlöndorff, The Glass Menagerie by Paul Newman, Air Force One Wolfgang Petersen, and Sleepers by Barry Levinson. He was director of photography on music videos for example with Madonna and Bruce Springsteen.
Three times Michael Ballhaus was nominated to an Oscar: Broadcast News directed by James L.Brooks, The Fabulous Baker Boys directed by Steven Kloves, and Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. In 2007 M.Ballhaus received the International Achievement Award by the ASC, American Society of Cinematographers. It was the first time that a German Director of Photography was granted such an honor.
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