L’Œil de Roger Corbeau : Photographies de cinéma (exhibition at Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Paris)

Catalogue : Isabelle Champion & Stéphanie Salmon (commissariat): L’Œil de Roger Corbeau : Photographies de cinéma. Broché. 19,5 x 26 cm. 180 pages. Six cahiers iconographiques, plus de 150 photographies. Filmographie. ISBN 978-2-9598809-1-9. Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, 2025. Cover photo from: Julien Duvivier: La Femme et le pantin / The Female (FR/IT 1958) based on the novel by Pierre Louÿs and starring Brigitte Bardot (1934–2025) as Eva Marchand.

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Raymond Rouleau: Les Sorcières de Salem / The Crucible (FR/DD 1957). Mylène Demongeot as Abigail in a film based on the play by Arthur Miller. Photo: Roger Corbeau.

Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

73 avenue des Gobelins, 75013 Paris

http://www.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/

Du 23 octobre 2025 au 21 février 2026

OFFICIEL: " Considéré comme l’un des plus importants photographes de cinéma des années 1930 à 1980, Roger Corbeau a débuté sa carrière avec Marcel Pagnol et a contribué à l’univers esthétique de films tels que Toni de Jean Renoir, De Mayerling à Sarajevo de Max Ophuls, Macadam de Marcel Blistène et Jacques Feyder, Le Journal d'un curé de campagne de Robert Bresson, Pattes blanches de Jean Grémillon, La Fête à Henriette de Julien Duvivier, Les Parents terribles et Orphée de Jean Cocteau, Gervaise de René Clément, Les Sorcières de Salem de Raymond Rouleau, Les Misérables de Jean-Paul Le Chanois, La Loi de Jules Dassin, mais aussi M. Arkadin et Le Procès, d'Orson Welles et Violette Nozière de Claude Chabrol. Près de 150 films en 50 ans de carrière ! "

" Fasciné depuis son adolescence par le cinéma et les acteurs, Roger Corbeau collectionne les photographies, les livres et les revues, qui ne cesseront de l’inspirer. "

" Maitre du noir et du blanc, il s’impose comme un grand portraitiste, puis apprivoise la couleur avec un goût très sûr. Son style singulier, immédiatement reconnaissable, fait de contraste appuyés ou d’effets charbonneux, sublime et immortalise Arletty, Brigitte Bardot, Faye Dunaway, Fernandel, Jodie Foster, Louis de Funès, Jean Gabin, Annie Girardot, Isabelle Huppert, Louis Jouvet, Sophia Loren, ou encore Jean Marais, Mélina Mercouri, Raimu, Simone Signoret et Michel Simon. "

" Réalisée à partir du fonds Roger Corbeau et de ses collections, l’exposition de la Fondation Pathé rendra hommage à un illustre photographe dont l’œuvre est à redécouvrir. "

AA: Roger Corbeau, the great still photographer, was born to a bourgeois Alsatian Jewish family on 20 November, 1908 in Haguenau, Alsace-Lorraine, then in Deutsches Kaiserreich, and died on 11 September 1995 at age 86 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. He was buried in the Jewish graveyard of Haguenau in Bas-Rhin in the Grand Est without religious ceremony but with the inscription "Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres".

Corbeau's cinephilia started in boyhood, his idols ranging from Pearl White and Lillian Gish to Carl Th. Dreyer and Fritz Lang. He became an avid collector of stills, posters and movie magazines. As a wardrobe and props assistant he entered in 1932 the circle of Marcel Pagnol, who noticed Corbeau's talent as a photographer. 

A delightful serving of early cinephilia launches the exhibition which segues into the Pagnol period with Jofroi, Angèle, Merlusse, Le Schpountz and La Femme du boulanger and further to Jean Renoir's Toni, produced by Pagnol. 

The post-war period ends with Max Ophuls's De Mayerling à Sarajevo. Then comes what Corbeau called the "interruption par la guerre". During the Nazi occupation he enters a hidden life for five years, still working, but not under his own name. Having been turned back from Switzerland where he sought refuge, he joins the French Resistance as a maquisard.

After the war, Corbeau has the chance to pursue his passion for Dreyerian laconicism in Jean Grémillon's Pattes blanches, Jean Delannoy's La Symphonie pastorale, Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent and Robert Bresson's Le Journal d'un curé de campagne. For Jean Cocteau he works in Orphée, and for Jean Marais much longer in his popular assignments. For Orson Welles, Corbeau makes the photographs for Mr. Arkadin and The Trial (at the then empty Gare d'Orsay). René Clément's Gervaise (after Émile Zola) is among his highlights of the 1950s. Corbeau is favoured by Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, as well as Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri.

Corbeau meets the new artistic world of the 1960s in La Prisonnière by Henri-Georges Clouzot. In the 1970s he finds a new regular artistic partner: Claude Chabrol, the collaboration continuing until his last assignment, the English-language adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others, a French Resistance story starring Jodie Foster.

Corbeau excels in his coverage of the humanist realism of Pagnol and Renoir, the Orphic poetry of Cocteau and the stoic devotion of Bresson. He is a master of composition and lighting. 

His greatest talent is in the portrait. Today we think that everybody is a photographer. Yes, but few are great. A photograph of artistic value is a relationship between the subject and the artist. The artist sees the subject and vice versa. A trust is established. There is a lifetime of experience involved on both sides. The photograph is about the visible surface, but a backstory reaches into the unconscious. Eyes are the mirror of the soul. A true photograph is a confession of intimacy.

Such intimate confessions are Roger Corbeau's portraits. A striking feature: there is hardly ever a smile. Many have a wistful look, like they have just heard something that will change their lives.

Corbeau loved to photograph women, but there is no male gaze in the catalogue. Perhaps because it is edited by women? Corbeau never married, whatever that may imply. Corbeau adores women. They are subjects, not objects, from Arletty, Michèle Morgan and Danièle Darrieux to Faye Dunaway, Isabelle Huppert and Jodie Foster. His portraits of the sex symbols Martine Carol, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren highlight the human being. At the end of his career, in 1983, Corbeau photographed his childhood idol Lillian Gish. She smiles tenderly.

Claude Chabrol: The Blood of Others (US/FR/CA 1984). Jodie Foster as Hélène in the English-language Resistance drama based on a novel by Simone de Beauvoir. Photo: Roger Corbeau. The last movie in the Corbeau filmography.