Tag Archives: Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker

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.

Links

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.

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.