A Master of the Hard Shadow: foreword by Professor Wolfgang Treu

I must have been 19 when I saw The Third Man for the first time. I sat in the dark cinema hall and could hardly stand the tension that emanated from this nocturnal Vienna. I was fascinated by the density of the atmosphere and the eerie effect of light and shadow. When I saw the film again years later as a budding cinematographer, I was still impressed, but I was also certain that I didn’t want to shoot my own films like that. Harsh shadows, relentless light, Fresnel spotlights – I wanted soft light, natural shadows, the logic of light.

Then, as I watched two other Bob Krasker films from the 1940s (1) for this foreword, I admired the virtuosity and dynamism of his imagery. With what consistency he set backlight! Krasker’s films in this early period tend not to be films noirs. That was the trick of these films, that they didn’t care much about the logic of the light. There’s a woman lying on the bed, a murder is imminent, the camera pans from her face to her arm, tracks down the arm and suddenly you see her hand dropping limply. The woman is dead. It’s film noir, told in symbols, but that’s not how Krasker works. He illuminates his pictures completely so that as much as possible can be seen – even at night. It strikes me that in day and night shots, indoors or outdoors, his faces always have 100 percent “key” – i.e. key light to bring out the skin tones. At night you could underexpose the keylight by one to one and a half stops, then the skin would be correspondingly darker, but its guide light is always 100 percent, regardless of the lighting situation.

With him, the night light is rather pointed, not flat, he puts more shadows on the faces up to the complete absence of the brightening light. You had to be daring to do that back then! I can’t remember getting as involved with the manual aspect of lighting as I have with these two films lately!

Krasker’s works offer plenty of illustrative material. He believed in the importance of the guide light, which always remains recognizable in his films. The eye gets used to shadows much more easily than the lens. What we see 100 percent as bright light, the lens recognizes perhaps 10 percent. That must you help with the brightening, which should be inconspicuous. But true mastery is represented by the backlight, the light that is directed towards the camera, the so-called edge light. Black hair, black suit against a black background would not be distinguishable. Separation light has to be used, and then there’s this kind of halo on the actors’ heads that Krasker’s characters have. The separation of foreground and background is made visible. With Krasker, the actors don’t look “all ready” but perfectly right, adapted to the role.

When the New Wave in the 1960s began to artistically illuminate the rooms instead of the faces, some actors suddenly wondered why they were no longer shown to their best advantage. That would have been unthinkable 20 years earlier. In his films, Krasker struggled with the fact that only Fresnel lens headlights [?] were available. With them, shadows were sharply outlined. Few reflectors were used because they in turn reduced the light intensity. Working with these Fresnel spotlights was always particularly difficult when the actors were moving and had to switch from one sharply edged beam of the spotlight to the next. That was necessary and not up to others. You could have put fill-in lights between the spotlights, but in Krasker the actors just walk through a shadow that’s only a second on their face. This short shadowing can become a stylistic device of the film. Krasker used it again and again.

The smaller the point of light, the harder the shadow. The larger the surface of a light source, the softer the light. In Odd Man Out you can see from many night shots that they were filmed in the studio. Because the horizon was still bright, which was simply not possible with the film sensitivity at that time. But how much trouble did Krasker put into the lighting – for example at the train station in Brief Encounter. There the compartments of the trains are individually illuminated from the inside. He had to install separate lamps, generators and cables for each compartment so that the lights could be seen clearly in the trains.

The difference between German and English cameramen was that in England there was always a camera operator and the Director of Photography set the light. This separation still applies today. It was also common in Germany until the 1960s. I think I’m partly to blame for the system changing. When I photographed my first film, I was 32 years old and had been a camera operator until then. I liked doing this job. Now I found switchers in the studios who were in their forties. Would you let me tell you something? I asked the producer: Let me switch myself.

So now I was not only responsible for the lighting, but also for the movement of the camera. Nothing would work on the set without me. If I disappeared for a coffee, the whole business came to a standstill. But it worked and led to this system being adopted by others.

When it came to England, we cameramen were always given a riddle – only the British were able, it was said, to produce “English light”. I never understood what that actually meant. One day Stanley Kubrick asked me if I could do some of the shooting for his film Barry Lyndon, which was to be shot in Germany. I was surprised.

Why did he come to me? And then it turned out that he had seen my film The Pedestrian, where we worked on insensitive 50 ASA film material with only natural light without any help from spotlights. Soft, flattering shadows. And English light “couldn’t” do something like that?

Director, lighting director and cameraman form much more of a unity in England than in Germany, where the cameraman is solely responsible for photography. That’s why it’s so difficult to find out afterwards who contributed which idea to which picture.

The best camera work is always the one that the viewer doesn’t notice. The viewer must not get lost during a film; the action, actors and director must captivate him in such a way that the cameraman can only do it visually. Robert Krasker was masterful at that!

Prof. Wolfgang Treu, Hamburg, June 2011

Footnotes

  1. Odd Man Out and Brief Encounter

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