Fact Check: Robert Krasker, BSC in ‘British Cinematographer’, July to August 2023, issue 118, page 16, BSC Heritage Series, Robert Krasker, BSC, ‘Angling for Success’

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Screen shot, British Cinematographer, July to August 2023, Web version, BSC Heritage Series, Robert Krasker, BSC, Angling for Success.

Sometimes it seems that all I do is fact checks on articles about Robert Krasker, BSC in books, magazines and Web sites but the growing dependence on Artificial Intelligence for search and article writing now means that misinformation can become mistaken for fact even more easily than in the pre-AI world.

British Cinematographer, July to August 2023, issue 118, page 16, BSC Heritage Series, Robert Krasker, BSC, Angling for Success. PDF courtesy of Phil Méheux, BSC.

The AI applications I test as they evolve rely on professional organizations like the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) and its magazine British Cinematographer as well as online databases, biographies and reference Web sites like Wikipedia, but they are as subject to misinformation as pre-online information sources.

Revered for his iconic, Oscar-winning work on The Third Man (1949, directed by Carol Reed) … his style, eschewing glamour in favour of realism and employing high-contrast images and unconventional compositions, is timeless.

I can only hope that organizations providing information about Robert Krasker will see fit to update their records on him so we stand a better chance of reducing misinformation in the world.

Fact Checks

  • “The youngest of five children from a Romanian father and Austrian-born mother” – I would have written “Romanian-born father” here as both Léon and Mathilde were child refugees to Paris, both may well have taken French citizenship though I have yet to definitively confirm that, and were educated in Paris. They were later naturalized as Australians and Mathilde may have been required to apply for citizenship by the British government in order to continue living there from 1931 onwards.
  • “Krasker’s family moved to Perth and his birth was registered in Western Australia” – Léon first travelled to Western Australia in 1907 and brought his then family of five to Western Australia in 1910 to live and work from 99 Hay Street, Subiaco and 25 Knight Terrace, Denham in Shark Bay, making frequent trips overseas and to eastern Australia for business.
  • “Robert Krasker was born in 1913 in Alexandria, Egypt” – He was born in Alexandria during a stopover on a family business trip from Western Australia to Europe and back. Mathilde’s mother Fanny Rubel was living in the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan city of Alexandria where other members of the extended family had also lived and worked. Robert’s birth was registered in Perth on the family’s return.
  • “In 1930 he sailed for Europe to study art in Paris and optics and photography in Dresden, Germany.” – The full facts are much more interesting. Denham in Shark Bay numbered 100 non-indigenous residents and 50 indigenous people in 1910. I have yet to find records of what formal education was available there. Several years after Leon’s death in 1916, Mathilde Krasker took her family of six back to Paris for their education from 1923 to 1926, returned to Shark Bay, then moved back to Paris in 1929 whereupon Robert studied art followed by photography in Dresden at the reportedly finest photography school in the world at the time, run by the distinguished Professor Robert Luther.
  • “He worked with the cinematographer Philip Tannura, ASC at Paramount’s Joinville studios in France” – Robert Krasker worked on at least three films there, three different language versions of the same story. After Robert moved to London to be with his family in 1931, he worked with Philip Tannura on their last film, Service for Ladies, starring actor/director Leslie Howard, produced and directed by Alexander Korda who had also been in Joinville at Paramount.

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