Foreword by Dr Falk Schwarz

This book owes its genesis to a problem. Anyone who talks to film people in England will always hear what amazing work English cinematographers have turned in, but that there was one who was the best among the good. And then the name of Robert Krasker comes up. But where has he been appreciated, where is anything published about him, who has described his achievements? Who was this man who was one of the most influential cameramen in Britain?

Finding anything in writing about Robert Krasker is difficult. His diaries and his personal notes have disappeared, the archives hold little about him, his friends have died, his family scattered to the winds. Anyone who wants to know anything about Robert Krasker can only turn to his films.

Robert Krasker was not a man who pushed himself forward, not one who stood around at parties of the great and influential, constantly wearing his knowledge and skills on his sleeve. He was calm, quiet, reserved, and privately kept away from the glamour of the movies. He lived in seclusion, and his personal friends and acquaintances had nothing to do with film. To be invited to his house was not an accolade, but a sign of friendship. Krasker stood only for himself and no one else. The film people held him in high esteem and considered him an extraordinarily gifted man. They took their hats off to his work, but they knew nothing about him.

He didn’t want to tell them anything either. Where he came from, who his family was, who he befriended, remained deliberately vague. He knew why he was doing it. His reasons can be guessed at.

The film world is quick to forget. Important colleagues who benefit from today’s interest in the work of cinematographers barely mention him. His films, however, continue to exist. Who, like him, could model shadows that once again commented on and narrated the action on another level? In the darkness of a windowless studio hall, he used finely coordinated light sources to place the actors in that three-dimensional light in which they first became fully effective. Krasker was an aesthete of the shadowed. He stood at a threshold where the self-evident craft of a cameraman turns into cinematic art. It is this fine line that needs to be described.

This book attempts to answer the question of what Robert Krasker was. However, what he was like must remain open.

Falk Schwarz, October 2011

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