Tag Archives: Madrid

Robert Krasker, BSC in ‘Samuel Bronston’s “El Cid”‘ brochure

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Samuel Bronston’s “El Cid”, 40-page brochure, page 38. Image courtesy of Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/samuelbronstons0000char/mode/2up

Australian cinematographer and Director of Photography Robert Krasker, BSC made three epic feature films with American director Anthony Mann – El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire and The Heroes of Telemark – and the first two were produced by Samuel Bronston from his base in Madrid at Chamartin Studios.

It is likely that Robert Krasker, who grew up between yellow-orange desert and sparkling shallow sea-edge in the remote Shark Bay township of Denham in Western Australia, made his decision to buy a connected pair of apartments in the Andalusian city of Marbella, about this time: my research into specific times and dates continues.

“Robert Krasker, … one of the film world’s masters of color and lighting.”

Krasker had moved into his Sloane Square apartment in the late 1950s after his courageous and remarkable mother Mathilde died and family connections with the western suburbs of London had dissolved.

Did the light and warmth of the Costa del Sol bring psychological and physical comfort and relief from the almost lifelong debilitation caused by malaria contracted in Sudan while camera-operating in 1938 for The Four Feathers and the Type 1 diabetes to which it led?

Samuel Bronston’s “El Cid”, page 38:

THE CAMERAMAN

ROBERT KRASKER, Academy Award-winning director of photography for his memorable lensing of “The Third Man,” is considered to be one of the film world’s masters of color and lighting. He has been lauded for his work on such pictures as “Henry V,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Trapeze.” Although the Australian-born Krasker has photographed all types of pageantry, he feel that “El Cid” offered his greatest opportunity because of the many real-life settings of ancient castles and towns, as well as the multitude of panoramic scenes.

Links

  • The Hollywood Art (via Wayback Machine) – Maverick Gentleman: Samuel Bronston’s Vanishing Empires
  • Wikipedia – Anthony Mann
  • Wikipedia – Samuel Bronston – “Bronston frequently worked with a regular team of creative artists: the directors Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray, the screenwriters Philip Yordan and Jesse Lasky Jr., composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Miklós Rózsa, the co-producers Jaime Prades, Alan Brown and Michał Waszyński, the cinematographer Robert Krasker and film editor Robert Lawrence. He also favoured Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren as his leading actors.”
  • Wikipedia – Samuel Bronston Productions

Press photograph of Robert Krasker, BSC (right) with Prince Peter of Greece (left) in Spain for ‘Alexander the Great’ (1955), directed by Robert Rossen — updated with commentary on archival storage

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Unretouched scan, Robert Krasker BSC with Prince Peter of Greece, set of ‘Alexander the Great’, Spain, 1955.

We bought this print from a US-based online seller of vintage photographs mostly of celebrities and movie stars and have just had it scanned in high-resolution so it can be used in The Robert Krasker Project.

The print was made in 1955 to press-quality proof standards on single-weight non-resin-coated paper aka baryta paper, and it would not have been processed, washed, dried and stored to archival standards.

And yet it has survived to this day.

The digital scan, on the other hand, will not survive for many years to come as the print did.

Rapid-drying press prints, scan of page 55 from ‘MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot’, Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester and Michael Troyan, 2011.

I have worked in photo-labs making press prints like this that were intend for distribution, reproduction then throwing in the bin, and I have made archival museum-quality prints on double-weight silver-rich baryta paper.

Far too much of my collection of digital scans and files has not survived over the years despite my best efforts at maintaining them with admittedly limited financial resources so it is clear that digital is a supplement to analog and not a replacement insofar as maintaining archives goes.

This morning I read, to my horror, that the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is proposing to digitize all the wills in its collection and throw out the paper originals of all those that do not meet certain criteria:

“… paper wills for notable figures like Darwin and Dickens to be preserved for posterity…

Where wills belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest the physical copies would remain preserved. The wills of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales are among those currently stored at the Ministry of Justice facility in Birmingham….

The consultation also suggests exceptions should be made to preserve the original paper wills of famous people for historic record….”

The justification is this, according to Justice Minister Mike Freer:

” Historic wills can provide us with a unique window into the past and we want to make it as easy for amateur and professional historians alike to access these documents.

Digitalisation allows us to move with the times and save the taxpayer valuable money, while preserving paper copies of noteworthy wills which hold historical importance.”

The proposal to digitize all wills is a good one in that it will make it easier and faster for researchers like us to obtain good digital copies of wills such as Robert Krasker’s from 1981.

The copy we have, below, is embedded in a proprietary word-processor file and looks like it might have made from a photocopy that was subsequently photographed and saved as a low-resolution image file before being placed inside a word-processor document.

Robert Krasker’s last will and testament of 12th June 1980. Image courtesy of Dr Falk Schwarz.

I then opened the document, made a screenshot of it and enhanced the image file a little before exporting as a low-res JPEG for use in this website.

The result looks nothing like the original document and is partially indistinct making it less than useful for primary research purposes.

I am not sure what I am going to do for a decent copy of Robert Krasker’s will for use in The Robert Krasker Project’s English-language translation of Dr Falk Schwarz’s book Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker in HTML and PDF as we do not have a budget for fees to give organizations like the UK’s Ministry of Justice.

Links