Robert Krasker, BSC, lit and photographed an Aero chocolate television commercial “when his career was in full bloom” for Joseph Losey, director of ‘The Criminal’ and other classic British films, according to ‘Sight and Sound’, Summer 1979, ‘The Reluctant Exile’

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Sight and Sound, Summer 1979, The Reluctant Exile, Richard Roud, pages 145, 146, 147 and 153. Image courtesy of Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/Sight_and_Sound_1979_07_BFI_GB/page/n17/mode/2up?q=Krasker

Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC lit and photographed more than director Hugh Hudson’s Gertcha television commercial for Courage Brewery in the 1970s, according to the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine: Krasker also photographed at least one TVC directed by expatriate American director Joseph Losey, for Nestlé chocolate product Aero.

I did something between two hundred and three hundred commercials. I had contracts with J. Walter Thompson and BBD & O and several other big agencies. They gave me a retainer, and when I was free, I did twelve a year. They gave me a wide selection to choose from and a wide measure of control. I made a couple that were so good they were never shown! One of them, I’m now ashamed to say, was for Bachelor’s cigarettes, with music by John Dankworth. I think it was absolutely marvellous, but the agency finally rejected it, as they did a few others. Not the client, mind you, but the agency.

Another one that I was very fond of was for Aero chocolate, with a score by Richard Lester. You know, Lester never worked as a director in America. He was a band-leader; well, he had a band, let’s say. He could play practically every musical instrument, and for Aero he composed this score for, as I recall, twelve trombones. I took a week to shoot it; we had a whole stage with a glass floor at Nettlefold, and there was this one ballet dancer. She started her dance in long shot and the camera moved in on her until we eventually got to the pack-shot. It was a very good commercial, I thought. But those were the days . . . Robert Krasker lit it, when his career was in full bloom.

Making commercials was a way of not doing the pictures you didn’t want to do. An alternative way of making a living, which is something you really must have if you are going to be selective. You have got to be able to say ‘no’. It’s really the only freedom of choice anywhere in the commercial world.

Krasker photographed The Criminal aka Concrete Jungle for Losey and may well have worked on other TVCs of the era for other directors.

TVCs could be lucrative work for directors and directors of photography in between longer-term projects as well as short documentaries like the two the Krasker shot on jazz music for another American expatriate director, Richard Lester.

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