OBSCURED BY VOLCANIC CLOUDS

OBSCURED BY VOLCANIC CLOUDS

Behind Pink Floyd’s classic Live at Pompeii

Paul Campagna

Imagine Nob’s feelings, that sensitive Afghan hound howling along with David Gilmour’s harmonica in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. The band, enigmatic rock stars that they are, get to go hang out on some ruins and crank their amps, and Nob is stuck with the short end of the... knob, recording his moaning in a boring sound studio on the outskirts of Paris, probably with some A&R guy breathing down his neck.

2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s landmark concert film Live at Pompeii, but it took until April of 2025 for us to get the film released back to the public screens, this time with an updated 4K restoration and IMAX version. It’s truly a monolithic film, a time capsule of a band about to begin their most fruitful period musically, not to mention a stunning visual achievement in its own right. During the shooting of this eventual masterpiece, a young French cinematographer named Jacques Boumendil shot some candid behind-the-scenes photos while working on the set as a camera operator. Maybe to match the mystique of the space rockers and their crew, Jacques kept these photos to himself for the better part of 50 years. And now, all this time later, these photos become a rarely seen look at the production of a special gig in a truly iconic setting. If you’re a Pink Floyd fan, it would just be embarrassing if you didn’t get Boumendil’s account and check these pics out.

You were working in TV and film around this time. How did you end up on Adrian Maben’s crew as a camera operator? Did you guys work together before in France?

Television provided the opportunity to meet many directors with whom I continued my career outside of that medium. That’s where I met Adrian. He was working on shows like Pour le plaisir with Roger Stéphane. I was just starting out, and we hit it off because we shared the same vision. At that time, I was filming a show called Dim Dam Dom, where I met many fashion photographers who changed the way I filmed and expressed my originality. The producer Daisy de Galard introduced me to Michel Arnaud, who produced all the young talents in TV, including Michel Drucker, Adrian Maben, and myself— each in our own field.

I had the opportunity to work with his production company, MHF, outside of television. With Adrian, we filmed many rock bands for MHF in partnership with ORTBF, Belgian television, including bands like East of Eden and Family, with the third installment being Pink Floyd. When Adrian discovered the site in Pompeii, this vast mineral echo chamber, he decided to shoot there. We managed to secure a modest budget, enough to shoot in 35mm, while the other bands were filmed in 16mm. The shoot didn’t last long, but when we saw the huge trucks arriving with tons of sound equipment from England, we knew it wouldn’t be an ordinary shoot.

How loud was the set? Have you filmed a live concert before? I read that the transflex operator used two sets of earplugs to deal with the volume...

Once the producers realized the film would be too short, they decided, at Adrian’s request, to add a day or two of shooting with Pink Floyd, which was actually filmed in a studio using a transflex. It’s a Scotch-light screen on which images—specifically from Pompeii—were projected behind the musicians. Personally, I was already heading to L.A. to shoot a film with Henri Miller in Pacific Palisades at his house. But to answer the question, considering the sound system wall that was part of the Pompeii set, which already had quite a punch despite the arena’s vast space (the sound level was indeed impressive), I can imagine the acoustic saturation that must have occurred in a closed environment like a studio, which can only tolerate a certain decibel level. The sound pressure must have been crazy.

Later, I had the opportunity to create some visuals for their French tour, notably during their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris in 1972, for which I also made the psychedelic patterns projected on stage. It involved two glass plates where I placed color anchors that mixed with oil, all projected live through a rear projector along with visual experiments using a laser, which we aimed directly at the film, combined with a Ken Burns effect that gave the impression we were moving closer to the sun.

Power was such a challenge at the historical archaeological site. What did it feel like on set while waiting for the power to be solved, knowing that you had rock stars with limited time availability?

The electrical issue was quite a joke because we connected to the power grid in Pompeii and, of course, the power wasn’t sufficient. We ended up blowing everything in the city—no more lights. We urgently brought in a generator from Rome, and it was Cinecittà that handled all the production of the film. The generator arrived a couple of days later, so we had to improvise. That’s why we filmed some shots on Mount Vesuvius and Solfatara, where the Floyd crossed through sulfur smoke clouds. It allowed us to capture some shots for cutaways and also shoot at the Pompeii site.

Your Roger Waters portraits are so candid and lively. Were the band members pretty accessible during the shoot, or was that moment an anomaly?

Roger Waters, from what I knew of him, was quite playful, so he immediately got into the spirit once he saw my camera. Click—he gave me a few poses that I captured. None of it was planned, but I made a series out of it. When I go on a shoot, I like to take a small camera with me. It lets me capture snapshots to keep memories of my work. A film comes and goes; it’s shown in theaters or on TV, and then you rarely get to see it again. But photographs, that’s a whole different story. You can spend more time with them and bring them out again easily. I kept them for 50 years, almost forgotten in a drawer, never thinking I’d do anything with them. Until one day, my son Martin, who was studying film music at Berklee at the time, told me that no dorm room or apartment is without a Pink Floyd poster proudly hanging on the wall. “You’ve got something extraordinary here—it's a collector’s item, you have to show them!” That’s how these photos came out of the shadows.

"I'VE ALWAYS CARRIED A SMALL CAMERA ALONG WITH MY FILM CAMERA, ALLOWING ME TO CAPTURE A VERY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE.”

Looking back after all these years, and deciding to share the behind-the-scenes photos after decades, what would surprise readers about your experience? What other secrets have you been holding for half a century?

Regarding Pink Floyd at Pompeii, I was the one who developed the step-by-step motorized zoom that lasts over four minutes, which opens the first part of “Echoes.” This technology didn’t exist back then. The other challenge was synchronizing three cameras with a 20-track truck. We had to sync to the frequency of the power.

We were also in the presence of Peter Watts, who was Pink Floyd’s road manager at the time and sadly passed away about five years after the shoot. He was the father of actress Naomi Watts, to whom I sent a photo of the crew where her father appears. She and her brother were very touched by the gesture.

I’ve traveled a lot, shot many subjects for both television and cinema, with personalities from entertainment, literature, music, and philosophy. I’ve always carried a small camera along with my film camera, allowing me to capture a very different perspective. One of my favorite experiences was an expedition to a small village called Igloolik in the Canadian Northwest. I went there when the sun was just beginning to rise—around late April or March—and spent a month and a half on the ice, living in total autonomy with the Inuit people. I took many portraits there in 1976. The climate is harsh, and people don’t have a very long life expectancy in these places. That’s how I chose to immortalize them. Indeed, I’ve had nearly 60 years of career, and while I don’t remember everything, the beauty of a photograph is its ability to testify and sometimes even make history, reminding us of how far we’ve come from age 20 to 80.