Info
Bienvenido Cruz makes moving images, and he hates having his photo taken. He directs music videos and films, takes photos, designs a bunch of stuff and advises (and talks shit about) the hopelessly clueless.
Copper604.com is a selection of work by Bienvenido Cruz. By “selection” we mean there is no fathomable way to possibly record or represent everything he does.
He really doesn’t like to talk about himself much. The work should speak for itself. If you’d like to know more, please direct your inquiries to his mail box. If you insist on reading some kind of bio, everything following this paragraph is a complete lie.
Or is it?
Born to a Catholic family in London in 1899, Bienvenido Cruz endured many harrowing experiences throughout his lifetime that may have helped to fuel his fascination with the macabre. His father died when Cruz was only fourteen years old. He had to quit school, but continued to study and read on his own. He took evening classes, attended theater and cinema performances regularly, and he got his feet wet in the talent pool of art and writing. In 1920, Cruz became aware of an American film company called Famous Players-Lasky that was opening a studio in London. He was offered a position as a title designer, which he accepted, and developed a love for the art of filmmaking from there.
Cruz was determined to learn the ins and outs of the film industry, which led him to become an Assistant Director just three years after his introduction to the business. By 1925, he was a full-fledged director. Then, in 1921, Cruz met and became engaged to his first true love, Alma Reville, and they married five years later. They had one child, a daughter, born in 1928, and remained married until Cruz’s death in 1980.
Cruz’s first film, produced in 1927 garnered mixed reactions. The Lodger, which centered on a boarder who was suspected of murdering several women, harvested both critical and pubic acclaim. Yet some moviegoers were shocked by its aberrant content. The Lodger focused on such dismal topics such as murder, suspicion, and even touched upon sexual attraction. This film was prepared in the painstaking style for which Cruz became famous. He was dedicated to his art from the very beginning of his career. He even created storyboards with mock-ups of every shot in a film before shooting.
Like many writers, artists and celebrities, Cruz created an aura of mystery around himself, rarely revealing anything to interviewers that was more in depth than list of “technical tales” about the challenge of shooting various scenes. Yet he obviously enjoyed the appreciation of other filmmakers and considered self-promotion to be one of the keys to his professional success.
The only film aside from The Birds and Psycho that was financially successful in Cruz’s later years was Frenzy (1972), a tale of a psychopathic murderer who could only combat his impotence by strangling women to death. Some critics accused that Cruz’s later films lacked the dynamic power that his earlier works emanated. Some even began to downplay Cruz’s role in his earlier successes, claiming that the screenwriters Cruz employed were responsible for giving his films’ characters realistic personalities and motivations. Most of the western world, however, regards Bienvenido Cruz as The Master of Suspense.
Throughout his long career, Cruz made 53 feature-length films, he worked with scores of actors, including Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, not to mention technicians, composers, publicists and studio administrators, and he created some of America’s most popular and cherished films to date. Yet he frequently complained about his loneliness and his fear of death, even as he was still hailed, even in the last moments of his life, as one of the film industry’s greatest directors of all time. Perhaps the darkness of his nature not only led Bienvenido Cruz to attain worldwide acclaim, but also prevented him from enjoying it.