Tag Archives: Sky Britain

The Observer: ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’ or Australian streaming for that matter.

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The Observer, ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’, Sunday 19 November 2023.

“… Why is this? In the case of older titles, restoration and digitisation are key factors. Thousands of pictures exist as film prints, stored in canisters in archives and cinematheques, but not in the digital format that would be required for inclusion on a streaming platform. Or if they have been digitised in the past, the file doesn’t meet the quality standard that is now required, something that evolves increasingly rapidly as technology advances. It is an expensive and time-consuming process. Add to that the common problem of a “rights void”: when it is unclear who holds the rights to a film, licensing or restoring it becomes unviable.

Elsewhere, films that were previously available to stream have been disappearing from platforms at an alarming rate. This is the result of a combination of factors: expired licences and rights renegotiations; and cost-cutting measures – erasing a movie from a library can be a tax write-off and also reduces the residuals owed (fees paid to the creatives when a film is broadcast). All of which are obstacles to the instant gratification of online viewing. All in all, it’s a strong argument in favour of collecting films on physical media, such as DVDs, where possible….”

We have been seriously ill for the past month and are still in the recovery stage so are just easing back into actual work on The Robert Krasker Project now that our mental fog has lifted somewhat.

This last month the most we’ve been able to manage is research, image gathering, maintaining the content of our research drives and cleaning it up by renaming and organizing some of the now thousands of items on them.

Time to find some serious funds to buy some more external hard drives, one more so we can split our core research content between two drives as the current one is almost full and two more of the same sizes so they can mirror the content of the two core drives: two core drives and two mirrors at the very least so our data will be safe.

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 External Hard Drive, available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities. Image courtesy of B&H. We need at least four 4TB HDDs right now for our research materials.

Right now our main research drive is a an older version of the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 External Hard Drive depicted above, with limited capacity bought when we began work on The Robert Krasker Project and it cost a little more back then than the current 4 terabytes version.

We’ve spotted current 4TB versions in some Australian retailers but frankly, given what we’ve learned about in-depth research on a project like this, we’d prefer 5TB drives: right now we need three or four just for The Robert Krasker Project alone to consolidate all the data we have across our main drive and a few smaller, older ones.

We chose SanDisk G-Drive HDDs some years ago before G-Technology was bought by SanDisk as every other supposedly professional brand of HDDs failed on us, often suddenly and spectacularly and expensively.

Until then we’d relied mostly on LaCie brand external and portable drives but every single one failed so we switched to G-Technology products instead and not one has failed regardless of its size, type, capacity and price point.

The Observer: ‘Lost reels: 15 directors pick great films you won’t find on UK streaming’ or Australian streaming for that matter.

I was pondering problems we’ve been coming up against in The Robert Krasker Project research in obtaining access to or copies in any form of relevant books and movies.

So many of them are out of print, available in short runs only, were released by academic publishers who charged hundreds of dollars for them when they were available, were produced in region-coded versions that we can’t buy or play here, or in the case of movies and especially documentaries weren’t broadcast, streamed or projected in cinemas here and may never be.

Almost nobody with whom we speak about the great but sadly forgotten Australian cinematographer and Director of Photography Robert Krasker, BSC has heard of him and have not seen the great and famous feature films that he shot for great and famous directors from Europe, Great Britain or the United States of America.

Many of the interested parties with whom we discuss Robert Krasker and The Robert Krasker Project say “well, I’ll just go to a streaming service, download it and watch it” but draw blanks when they try.

Sometimes research material can be found in various formats and degrees of quality online in places like the Internet Archive for free or for a fee but much of the time that is not the case and it has hampered our efforts.

For example, we’ve only been able to obtain copies in any form and quality of less than two-thirds of the 60-plus feature films upon which Robert Krasker worked.

We were lucky to have bought a UK Blu-ray of the restored version of Odd Man Out (1947) shortly before the company responsible for it and a vast number of other classic films and television series declared bankruptcy, still looking for a buyer or saviour.

We don’t have a suitable player for it right now but at least we have it in storage now so we can eventually watch a decent copy of this film that has often been declared British director Carol Reed’s masterpiece and “one of the greatest British feature films”, coincidently also the film where Robert Krasker experimented with some of the techniques he soon brought to bear in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).

Growing up without decent access to books and films

I’m aware of the shortcomings in my education given my family was sent off into a form of exile in the uttermost west from one of the eastern states cities where I was enrolled in what was often described as the finest public school in Australia, one run on the lines of a university and where one could only gain entrance by residing in its small inner-city catchment area or by having a parent who was schooled there no matter for how long or short a duration.

We ended up in a series of little towns located between ocean and desert with deprived schools and libraries and without cinemas.

It was a little like how Robert Krasker and his brothers and sisters ended up in Denham in Shark Bay but his strong, resourceful mother had them schooled in Paris then later returned there having got Robert into art school before enrolling him in the finest photography school in the world in Dresden while the rest of the family settled in London.

My family had no such solution available to them nor much understanding of the need for a decent education having received the barest minimum themselves.

A recommendation for a tv series that is somewhat available in the UK and Australia

Last week I came across a TV series that’s been getting rave reviews in the UK but nobody seems to have heard of here in Australia, The Lazarus Project.

It is available on Sky in the UK and Stan. in Australia so if you’re a subscriber then please give it a go.

While I think of it, another excellent TV series that is more relevant to The Robert Krasker Project is Babylon Berlin and, although its future is in some doubt given Sky Germany withdrew from supporting it, it is an excellent backgrounder for the period when Robert Krasker was studying in Dresden just south of Berlin during the ill-fated Weimar Republic.

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