Category Archives: Reviews

Robert Krasker, BSC in Library of America: The Moviegoer’s ‘Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd: Elemental conflict in a vivid tapestry of life at sea’, by Michael Sragow

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Library of America: The Moviegoer’s Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd: Elemental conflict in a vivid tapestry of life at sea, by Michael Sragow, 1 August 2019 at https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1138-peter-ustinov8217s-billy-budd-elemental-conflict-in-a-vivid-tapestry-of-life-at-sea/

British actor Terence Stamp is in the news once again in relation to a sequel to another film to be shot in Australia as well as locations beyond these shores.

So, it seemed appropriate to share a little more about the actor, the film that gave him his brilliant cinematic career and the Australian Director of Photography who played a role in helping him get there with his very first part, something of a minor miracle.

Billy Budd was a departure for Robert Krasker from the Technicolor widescreen epics that late 1950s and early 1960s Hollywood believed would persuade its formerly dedicated movie audiences to tear themselves away from their television screens.

“Robert Krasker, Ustinov’s cinematographer, was a legend who ranged from epic comedies like Caesar and Cleopatra to classic dramas like Brief Encounter.”

Krasker began his filmmaking career at Les Studios Paramount in the south-eastern Parisian suburb of Joinville-le-Pont with three remakes of a US Paramount Pictures film, with all versions in black and white or, as it was often referred to in Europe, monochrome.

His first few projects at Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions where he was apprenticed to French Director of Photography Georges Périnal were in monochrome, too, but DoP and apprentice-cum-camera operator both earned their stripes as colour cinematographers when Korda made a deal with Technicolor to site its British processing and printing laboratory onsite at his Denham Studios complex in Buckinghamshire west of London.

After Krasker became a Director of Photography in his own right, his first few projects were shot in black and white but the big breakthrough that led to him being hailed as “The Man for Colour” came with DoPing Henry V for actor/director Laurence Olivier.

From then onwards Robert Krasker would jump between the two forms, monochrome and colour, as story and budget required, and Billy Budd did not have budget enough for Technicolor.

A well-matched unit, Krasker and Ustinov

Peter Ustinov was well-suited to tackling a war film about characters with ambiguous motivations, according to Michael Sragow:

In many ways, Ustinov was in his wheelhouse—he was part of a generation of veterans. During his British Army service in World War II, he had collaborated with thriller-writer Eric Ambler and the great director Carol Reed (best known for Odd Man Out and The Third Man, both shot by Krasker) on the famous propaganda feature The Way Ahead, which dramatized a lieutenant (David Niven) molding conscripts into a fighting unit. Ustinov himself despised being in the army: he called it “a nightmare school for backward adults, in which degrees could be achieved in monstrous disciplines.”

Krasker (underclass) and Ustinov (upperclass) intimately understood the true nature of the British Empire’s class system and its expressions and impositions through architecture, clothing and space:

What sustains the film’s suspense is its piquant clarity about the everyday dangers of an eighteenth century sailor’s life (an exotic extra for today’s audiences, now that Tall Ship adventures are no longer a popular genre). Ustinov and Krasker exploit nautical space to brew up an enveloping aura. They convey the emotional and physical dynamics of every onboard experience, from the sailors sleeping on hammocks in close quarters to the vertiginous loneliness and fear of a foretopman climbing the foremast. Their visual limpidity enables us to “read” the class bias built into the architecture of the ship, from the quarter deck down to the hold, as easily as we do the gaps between upstairs and downstairs on Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey.

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Robert Krasker, BSC in ‘The Illustrated London News’, 23 December 1961, ‘The World of the Cinema: Olla Podrida’, review by Alan Dent of ‘El Cid’ directed by Anthony Mann

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The Illustrated London News, 23 December 1961, ‘The World of the Cinema: Olla Podrida’, page 1120, ‘El Cid’, directed by Anthony Mann, cinematography by Robert Krasker. Gale Document Number: GALE|HN3100395481. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

The Illustrated London News film critic Alan Dent’s review of Technicolor epic El Cid came fourteen years after his much longer article about Odd Man Out and he seems more concerned with his lack of knowledge about Spanish literature and specifically about Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar aka El Cid.

Of the film itself, critic Dent has a little less to say about the film itself and its makers including Australian Director of Photography Robert Krasker, BSC but nonetheless he is awarding it high praise:

The film itself, made in Southern Spain with a cast, literally, of thousands has an overwhelming sweep and passion. The director is Anthony Mann, and the all-important director of photography, Robert Krasker.

By the year of El Cid‘s release, 1961, Robert Krasker’s mastery of colour and black-and-white, Academy format and wide-screen, of lighting and motion, had been more than well-established with a long roster of beautifully-shot films beginning with his Technicolor masterpiece (in the traditional sense of the word) Henry V for director Laurence Olivier.

This coming week I will be searching for more quotable quotes and citations attesting to the regard in which Robert Krasker and his work were held during his lifetime.

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Robert Krasker, BSC in ‘The Illustrated London News’, 8 March 1947, ‘The World of the Cinema: A Masterpiece’, review by Alan Dent of ‘Odd Man Out’ directed by Carol Reed

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‘The Illustrated London News’, 8 March 1947, ‘The World of the Cinema: A Masterpiece’, page 244, ‘Odd Man Out’, directed by Carol Reed, cinematography by Robert Krasker. Gale Document Number: GALE|HN3100342922. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Carol Reed’s film Odd Man Out, photographed by Australian Director of Photography Robert Krasker, BSC, was hailed as the director’s masterpiece on it release and many film writers continue to refer to it as that to this day.

According to Wikipedia, the contemporary definition is “a masterpiece, magnum opus, or chef-d’œuvre (French for ‘master of work’; pl. chefs-d’œuvre; French: [ʃɛ.d‿œvʁ]) in modern use is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person’s career or a work of outstanding creativity, skill, profundity, or workmanship.”

Some film critics reserve that term for the second film Robert Krasker photographed for Carol Reed, The Third Man, but in many lists of best British films over the decades Odd Man Out has not lagged far behind.

Alan Dent of The Illustrated London News writes:

” Odd Man Out” has been a little overpraised. It is not the greatest fim ever made. It is not, I think, even the greatest English fim ever made. It is absurd to declare—as has been declared almost in so many words—that it is worth the combined output of Marcel Carné, Fritz Lang, Pabst, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein. But these qualifications do not alter the fact that “Odd Man Out” is a remarkable film to have come out of any studio, that it is, in fact, a masterpiece. I put it to the supreme and crucial test one applies to any suspected masterpiece, whether in the cinema, the theatre, or the concert hall: I sat it through twice, within five days. It emerged triumphant. …

The scene in the fantastic studio, following immediately upon an immensely realistic scene in a public house, has again been criticised as over-long and over-unlikely. But here again there is some masterly delirious camera-work (the brilliant Robert Krasker), and no one should reasonably grudge Johnny (i.e., Mr. Mason) the chance to spout some Scripture, since his part has almost wholly, or for the last hour, at least, been made up of brooding silences. …

Neither Odd Man Out nor The Third Man were Robert Krasker’s masterpiece in the traditional meaning of the word – “a masterpiece was a work of a very high standard produced to obtain membership of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts” – as he had achieved that distinction several years earlier with his Technicolor cinematography for Henry V, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier, for whom Alan Dent acted as text editor and advisor and would have known Krasker and his talents well.

“The brilliant Robert Krasker” indeed.

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BBC 4 broadcast ‘TISH’, the documentary about the great but forgotten working-class documentary photographer Tish Murtha broadcast on 1 April 2024: Reviews & Articles

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Poster, ‘TISH’, BBC Four, 1 April 2024, 9pm.

TISH, the reportedly remarkable and gripping documentary on the great but almost forgotten – where have we come across that combination of words before? – photographer Tish Murtha has been on limited release in festivals, cinemas and a couple of online narrowcasters but the BBC broadcast it on 1 April 2024 at 9pm UK time.

After that, we hope, it may be more widely available and we might finally get to see it too.

British documentary photographer Marc Davenant wrote this about TISH:

“Every gatekeeper in every museum and gallery across the country should be required to watch this documentary. It’s an object lesson in how working class talent is sidelined and ignored by the photography establishment and it made me very angry to be honest. Watch it.”

@marcdavenant at X formerly Twitter

Meanwhile I have added some links to interviews and reviews below.

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Aleh Cherp’s ‘Macademic’ website is invaluable for facts and tips on research, writing and the best macOS software with which to do it

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Macademic: Essential software for academic work on Mac: 2021 update, screenshot, 2024-01-17.

Not long after starting work on The Robert Krasker Project I began discovering the limitations of my usual collection of macOS software applications, especially that of word processors whether Apple’s Pages or Microsoft’s Word.

I had used Ulysses for extended and multi-part projects to be published on the Web and as ebooks some years before but gave it up when its developer switched to a subscription-only model.

I have had a Scrivener licence for many years but it always seemed like overkill for most writing needs, until now, while I have often used the same maker’s Scapple for simpler diagramming and mind-mapping tasks.

I stumbled across Macademic while searching for information on how best to do bibliographies, citations and footnotes such as the ones in Falk Schwarz’s Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker.

The coming German-to-English translation and expansion of Dr Schwarz’s book requires more of all three for my version’s very different readership and keeping lists of bibliographies, citations and footnotes under control in Pages has gotten completely out of hand.

My time as a student in the tertiary sector taught me nothing about academic research and writing as they weren’t part of the curriculum back then so I am working it out by myself as I go along.

Macademic hasn’t seen an update since 12 June 2021 but it still contains some valuable information and I will be looking for more such sites and advice soon.

Meanwhile I think I need to reconsider Omni Group’s diagramming application OmniGraffle and outlining software OmniOutliner given how complex parts of The Robert Krasker Project are becoming.

I relied on both applications when I was working for Australian telcos some years ago due to the work’s multi-layered complexity and I really should get back to outlining my writing again while this site’s Family Tree needs to be better designed and much, much larger to better tell the larger story.

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Movie DVD Review by Michael Sragow, ‘The Quiet American’, ‘Film Comment’, Volume 53, Issue 4, July/August 2017

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Of the more than sixty feature films that Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC shot during his brilliant career in Europe and the UK, The Quiet American (1958) is one of the most forgotten. 

Scenes from The Quiet American and Krasker’s cinematography for it have stuck in my mind since first seeing them on television as a child. Yet, when the film is mentioned in books and magazines, and that rarely happens, the writers usually fix upon writer Graham Greene’s apparent disdain for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s changes to his story and the latter’s personality traits than the film itself. 

It is refreshing, then, to come across this review by film critic Michael Sragow that does not fall into those patterns and that pays attention to the meanings and emotions with which Robert Krasker has imbued it.

“Cinematographer Robert Krasker makes the story come alive with the collision of exotic, antique iconography and contemporary mayhem and corruption. He generates a bitter romantic aura akin to his work in Carol Reed and [Graham] Greene’s The Third Man.”

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The Observer: ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’ or Australian streaming for that matter.

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The Observer, ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’, Sunday 19 November 2023.

“… Why is this? In the case of older titles, restoration and digitisation are key factors. Thousands of pictures exist as film prints, stored in canisters in archives and cinematheques, but not in the digital format that would be required for inclusion on a streaming platform. Or if they have been digitised in the past, the file doesn’t meet the quality standard that is now required, something that evolves increasingly rapidly as technology advances. It is an expensive and time-consuming process. Add to that the common problem of a “rights void”: when it is unclear who holds the rights to a film, licensing or restoring it becomes unviable.

Elsewhere, films that were previously available to stream have been disappearing from platforms at an alarming rate. This is the result of a combination of factors: expired licences and rights renegotiations; and cost-cutting measures – erasing a movie from a library can be a tax write-off and also reduces the residuals owed (fees paid to the creatives when a film is broadcast). All of which are obstacles to the instant gratification of online viewing. All in all, it’s a strong argument in favour of collecting films on physical media, such as DVDs, where possible….”

We have been seriously ill for the past month and are still in the recovery stage so are just easing back into actual work on The Robert Krasker Project now that our mental fog has lifted somewhat.

This last month the most we’ve been able to manage is research, image gathering, maintaining the content of our research drives and cleaning it up by renaming and organizing some of the now thousands of items on them.

Time to find some serious funds to buy some more external hard drives, one more so we can split our core research content between two drives as the current one is almost full and two more of the same sizes so they can mirror the content of the two core drives: two core drives and two mirrors at the very least so our data will be safe.

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 External Hard Drive, available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities. Image courtesy of B&H. We need at least four 4TB HDDs right now for our research materials.

Right now our main research drive is a an older version of the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 External Hard Drive depicted above, with limited capacity bought when we began work on The Robert Krasker Project and it cost a little more back then than the current 4 terabytes version.

We’ve spotted current 4TB versions in some Australian retailers but frankly, given what we’ve learned about in-depth research on a project like this, we’d prefer 5TB drives: right now we need three or four just for The Robert Krasker Project alone to consolidate all the data we have across our main drive and a few smaller, older ones.

We chose SanDisk G-Drive HDDs some years ago before G-Technology was bought by SanDisk as every other supposedly professional brand of HDDs failed on us, often suddenly and spectacularly and expensively.

Until then we’d relied mostly on LaCie brand external and portable drives but every single one failed so we switched to G-Technology products instead and not one has failed regardless of its size, type, capacity and price point.

The Observer: ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’ or Australian streaming for that matter.

I was pondering problems we’ve been coming up against in The Robert Krasker Project research in obtaining access to or copies in any form of relevant books and movies.

So many of them are out of print, available in short runs only, were released by academic publishers who charged hundreds of dollars for them when they were available, were produced in region-coded versions that we can’t buy or play here, or in the case of movies and especially documentaries weren’t broadcast, streamed or projected in cinemas here and may never be.

Almost nobody with whom we speak about the great but sadly forgotten Australian cinematographer and Director of Photography Robert Krasker, BSC has heard of him and have not seen the great and famous feature films that he shot for great and famous directors from Europe, Great Britain or the United States of America.

Many of the interested parties with whom we discuss Robert Krasker and The Robert Krasker Project say “well, I’ll just go to a streaming service, download it and watch it” but draw blanks when they try.

Sometimes research material can be found in various formats and degrees of quality online in places like the Internet Archive for free or for a fee but much of the time that is not the case and it has hampered our efforts.

For example, we’ve only been able to obtain copies in any form and quality of less than two-thirds of the 60-plus feature films upon which Robert Krasker worked.

We were lucky to have bought a UK Blu-ray of the restored version of Odd Man Out (1947) shortly before the company responsible for it and a vast number of other classic films and television series declared bankruptcy, still looking for a buyer or saviour.

We don’t have a suitable player for it right now but at least we have it in storage now so we can eventually watch a decent copy of this film that has often been declared British director Carol Reed’s masterpiece and “one of the greatest British feature films”, coincidently also the film where Robert Krasker experimented with some of the techniques he soon brought to bear in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).

Growing up without decent access to books and films

I’m aware of the shortcomings in my education given my family was sent off into a form of exile in the uttermost west from one of the eastern states cities where I was enrolled in what was often described as the finest public school in Australia, one run on the lines of a university and where one could only gain entrance by residing in its small inner-city catchment area or by having a parent who was schooled there no matter for how long or short a duration.

We ended up in a series of little towns located between ocean and desert with deprived schools and libraries and without cinemas.

It was a little like how Robert Krasker and his brothers and sisters ended up in Denham in Shark Bay but his strong, resourceful mother had them schooled in Paris then later returned there having got Robert into art school before enrolling him in the finest photography school in the world in Dresden while the rest of the family settled in London.

My family had no such solution available to them nor much understanding of the need for a decent education having received the barest minimum themselves.

A recommendation for a tv series that is somewhat available in the UK and Australia

Last week I came across a TV series that’s been getting rave reviews in the UK but nobody seems to have heard of here in Australia, The Lazarus Project.

It is available on Sky in the UK and Stan. in Australia so if you’re a subscriber then please give it a go.

While I think of it, another excellent TV series that is more relevant to The Robert Krasker Project is Babylon Berlin and, although its future is in some doubt given Sky Germany withdrew from supporting it, it is an excellent backgrounder for the period when Robert Krasker was studying in Dresden just south of Berlin during the ill-fated Weimar Republic.

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Offscreen: The Trouble With Harry: The Third Man (1949), by Elaine Lennon

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Just as Robert Krasker was about so much more than filmmaking’s technical means, thinking in terms of how imagery must support story, so good writers about films dig into the backgrounds, personalities and motivations of those who make them.

This two-parter article by Elaine Lennon in Canada’s Offscreen magazine about some of the individuals involved in making The Third Man provides some insights into the motivations for the choices Robert Krasker made in support of his friend, neighbour and four-times (Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Trapeze and The Running Man) collaborator the director Carl Reed.

“Against these mean streets Holly is cast as a western hero in his own mind, shifting from naïveté to intelligence and back again, rather like the genre itself, as Bazin would have it, confronting the barriers created by a half-decade of war, manned by real soldiers with a chaotic underground network actually beneath everybody’s scrabbling feet. Three crews shot 24 hours a day, with Reed keeping awake on Benzedrine (a habit shared with Selznick). Robert Krasker shot at night; Stan Pavey was in charge of the sewer unit; and Schneeberger was in charge of the day shoot. Back in Shepperton Studios, the most famous shot in the film, of Harry revealed in a doorway with a kitten, was done by John Wilcox’s second unit. It is one of cinema’s great entrances….

The overall visual style, in particular the tilted shots, reflects the Expressionist choices he [Carol Reed] made for filming Odd Man Out (1946), also DP’d by Robert Krasker, in another instance of a film concerned with moral equivocation in a city under occupation. James Mason observed of him that he “had the virtue of absolute unpretentiousness. He was unaffected by technical gimmickry… Other directors fall in love with their zoom lenses, extravagances of cutting or the dubious virtues of the hand-held camera. Carol Reed favoured a steady camera so that the spectator would be totally unaware both of camera movement and of cutting”….

The acute off-centre angles utilised by Krasker accentuate Holly’s lack of knowledge and agency as well as disturbing our perception of what it is we think we are seeing. The complex visual design and shooting style obviates any prior knowledge of the city; the jump-cutting confuses our notion of space and perception and enhances our empathy with Harry’s situation as he is ultimately trapped by the film’s aesthetics. The moral order is ultimately restored, if temporarily, but with Harry’s death the price. Self-righteousness trumps loyalty.”

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