Tag Archives: Dr Falk Schwarz

The Internet Archive online lending library has proven essential to our research for The Robert Krasker Project, but why are book publishers so against it?

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Screenshot, Internet Archive, ‘WHY ARE SO MANY BOOKS LISTED AS “BORROW UNAVAILABLE” AT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE’, https://help.archive.org/help/why-are-so-many-books-listed-as-borrow-unavailable-at-the-internet-archive/

As an independent self-funded, in reality completely unfunded, researcher I depend on the Internet Archive almost every day I work on The Robert Krasker Project. I don’t have access to a world-class bricks-and-mortar research library and don’t have the means to travel to another country to use one for months at a time, as I am told academic researchers quite often do.

Unfortunately I often come across books that are marked as “Borrow Unavailable” at the Internet Archive and too often they are the authoritative references on a given subject and especially the same ones that Dr Falk Schwarz referred to in the course of writing his book on Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC, titled Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker.

This lack of access to so many books has somewhat limited my own research and particularly the more expansive story that I need to tell about Robert Krasker, directed at an Australian readership for whom Dr Schwarz’s excellent book is simply not detailed enough or broad enough.

Farbige Schatten was directed at a German-speaking, film-literate readership who were already familiar with the name Robert Krasker and his status as one of the great feature film cinematographers of the 1940s through to the mid-1960s, from the Golden Age of British Cinema to the age of Technicolor widescreen swords and sandals epics.

That readership’s interest in the specifics of Robert Krasker’s family background, life, times, places and epic journey from remote Shark Bay through Paris, Dresden and London before finding success at the peak of the film industry would be less than that of Krasker’s fellow Australians and especially those of us working in the film industry here or aspiring to do so.

Likewise Robert Krasker’s story as a rank outsider with a long list of disadvantages for entry into the film industry, during his lifetime as much as if he had tried to do the same today in Australia, would be of less interest to a German or global readership than an Australian one.

I am under no illusions about Australian publishers, broadcasters or funding organizations, having learned long ago how little interest there is in telling the stories of great but forgotten creative Australians.

I have been there before, time and again.

If anyone in those types of organizations is interested in Robert Krasker’s story at all, then they won’t be located in his home country.

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Our work on ‘The Robert Krasker Project’ has been hampered by problems with our electricity and Internet access suppliers…

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Accordingly we have now changed to another power company and are considering new candidates for Internet access though the latter continues to be hamstrung by Australia’s expensive and mediocre National Broadband Network aka NBN.

Meanwhile I’ve been catching up on research into Robert Krasker’s life and times so I can better understand where and when he lived and worked in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe and what has going on there then.

Work is ongoing with our German-to-English translation of Dr Falk Schwarz’s book on Robert Krasker, Farbige Schatten – Der Kamermann Robert Krasker, aided considerably by compiling material provided by him and his publisher so I can better make sense of its bibliography and extensive footnotes.

‘Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker’ German-language compilation PDF

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I have added and updated the Bibliography aka Literaturverzeichnis from Dr Falk Schwarz’s excellent book about Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC: ‘Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker’

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Cover, Falk Schwarz, Farbige Schatten: Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, ISBN 978-3-89472-757-4, 1st January 2012. Image courtesy of Schüren Verlag.

My re-publication here at The Robert Krasker Project of complete versions of Dr Falk Schwarz’s book about Robert Krasker, BSC has been delayed by the need to render its footnotes in a form more suitable for reading on the Web and in ebooks.

References to printed books are a large percentage of those footnotes and the original German edition of the Krasker book renders them in a rather cryptic form.

Readers of the print version are able to flick to its Literaturverzeichnis aka bibliography page to read more about each such book then flick back to the specific footnote but Web HTML and ebooks deserve a different approach.

The English-language bibliography is now at a stage suitable for sharing, link below, and I will be adding more information to it as my research turns it up.

Soon I will be re-publishing the Literaturverzeichnis aka bibliography from the original, German-language version of the book in a PDF assembled from Dr Schwarz’s author’s draft PDFs along with a selection from publisher Schüren Verlag’s PDF sample of the books front material.

In the process I have needed to extract and re-process a large number of behind-the-scenes (BTS) photographs and stills frames aka frame grabs of movies about which Dr Schwarz has written.

It has been quite a challenge as the images used in the book were mostly very small and of low resolution, embedded within the author’s draft PDFs, often having gone through several generations before reaching print including photographs from television screens, photocopies, scans of photocopies, photographs of photographs and so on.

Where possible I will be replacing these low-res images with better quality versions in our English language version of the book, Colourful Shadows: The Australian Cinematographer Robert Krasker.

We have digital files of less than two-thirds of the feature films Robert Krasker photographed throughout his career and they are of varying quality and size but I will be making frame grabs from them soon.

The BTS images in our collection are of varying quality and size and constitute only a sub-set of the few photographs with Robert Krasker in them that are floating about the Web with most now locked up in picture libraries.

Dr Schwarz told me that, when he was doing his initial and subsequent research for the book, many more such photographs were easily found on the Web and were free, but now many seem to have disappeared from there.

Meanwhile I will be working on the German-language PDF of Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker and the English-language version of the book in its HTML form for The Robert Krasker Project and for publication as a PDF ebook soon.

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We’re in the middle of translating Dr Falk Schwarz’s excellent book about Robert Krasker, BSC from German into English, from its print version to a Web version

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There’ve been fewer posts and updates to the Filmography and Timeline pages lately as we’ve been in the midst of translating Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker from German into English and we’re hoping to get our first iteration of it done by the end of this week.

[No such luck, sorry. Just when it looked like the translation process was going smoothly, we encountered a stack of sticking points and bottlenecks and so we’ve only published the first two parts of a total of five, with the biggest one being part 4. … Ed.]

We are also in the process of converting a book written for distribution in print back in the early part of this century into a work more suited to sharing and reading online as web pages.

Two very different paradigms where there is no limit to the number of words, pages and photographs in a version for the Web compared to the hard limits set by publishers and distributors of books in their printed forms.

There’s already some content from Farbige Schatten – De Kameramann Robert Krasker in this website under the heading of ‘Colourful Shadows’ in the menu bar above.

Much more content will be appearing soon, the rest of the five parts from Falk Schwarz’s book, and after we publish all the text then we’ll be adding photographs.

We’re considering linking content from book pages to relevant content in the Filmography and Timeline pages as well as other new content we discover in the course of our research.

That research includes fact-checking and confirming common assumptions about Robert Krasker.

The biggest difference between a book in print and a website based around it is this interlinking, something that excited our attention in the early 1990s when we discovered the Palimpsest software application made by developers in Bondi, Australia while we were based in the United Kingdom.

Palimpsest appeared before the World Wide Web but it heralded some of the Web’s fundamental traits, what we personally referred to as “deep text”.

Palimpsest was discontinued years ago and we’ve lost our contact details for the developers but if anyone reading this knows who they are then please let us know so we can thank them for their pioneering and insight into the future of digital storytelling.

Schüren Verlag: Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, by Falk Schwarz

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Cover, Falk Schwarz, Farbige Schatten: Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, ISBN 978-3-89472-757-4, 1st January 2012. Image courtesy of Schüren Verlag.

“240 Seiten, 100 Abb., 150 x 220 mm
Februar 2012

24,90 €sofort lieferbar
ISBN 978-3-89472-757-4

Wer war Robert Krasker? Einer der größten englischen Kameramänner des vergangenen Jahrhunderts. Seine Filme kennt heute noch jeder – ihn selbst kaum jemand. Er fotografierte Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, James Mason, Gina Lollobrigida, Bette Davis und Sophia Loren. Er arbeitete mit Regisseuren wie Carol Reed, Anthony Mann und Joseph l. Mankiewicz. Seine Filme waren Der Dritte Mann, Begegnung, Trapez und El Cid. Nicht einmal seine biographischen Daten stimmen.

Genaue Analysen seiner tiefgegründeten ästhetischen Substanz zeigen, warum Krasker einer der ganz Großen der Kamerakunst war: Licht als Mittel zur Erkenntnis. Trotz seiner hoch expressiven Fotografie war das dramaturgisch ausgeklügelte Spiel mit Licht und Schatten niemals Selbstzweck – es spiegelte stets die innere Verfasstheit der Charaktere wider. Krasker war ein Ästhet des Verschatteten. Er stand an einer Schwelle, wo das Handwerk eines Kameramannes umschlägt in Filmkunst. Aufwendige Recherchen des Autors belegen, dass dieser außergewöhnliche Künstler auch eine tragische Figur war.

Mit seinem filmographischen Essay setzt Falk Schwarz dem virtuosen Kameramann und Oscar-Preisträger jetzt das längst überfällige Denkmal.

„Farbige Schatten” ist reich illustriert, umfangreich recherchiert und liefert einen kompakten Beitrag zur Filmgeschichte. Verschiedene Stilelemente wie Reportagen und Interviews, eingestreute Anekdoten und Drehberichte machen das Buch zu einem Lesevergnügen….”

Google Translate machine translation from German to English

“Who was Robert Krasker? One of the greatest English cameramen of the last century. Everyone still knows his films today – hardly anyone knows him. He photographed Orson Welles, Burt Lancaster, James Mason, Gina Lollobrigida, Bette Davis and Sophia Loren. He worked with directors such as Carol Reed, Anthony Mann and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. His films were The Third Man, Brief Encounter, Trapeze and El Cid. Not even his biographical data is correct.

Precise analyses of its deep-founded aesthetic substance show why Krasker was one of the greats of camera art: light as a means of knowledge. Despite his highly expressive photography, the dramaturgically sophisticated play with light and shadow was never an end in itself – it always reflected the inner constitution of the characters. Krasker was an aesthete of the shadowed. He stood on a threshold where the craft of a cameraman turns into film art. Elaborate research by the author proves that this extraordinary artist was also a tragic figure.

With his filmographic essay, Falk Schwarz now sets the long overdue monument to the virtuoso cinematographer and Oscar winner.

“Colored Shadows” is richly illustrated, extensively researched and provides a compact contribution to film history. Various style elements such as reports and interviews, scattered anecdotes and shooting reports make the book a reading pleasure….”

Fact checks

  • Robert Krasker, BSC was an Australian cinematographer who was based in England and worked there and throughout the rest of Europe on feature films for American, British and European movie studios.

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