Moments later a crossfade consigns the cannily unbalanced lighting sequence and its lovely oddball theatricality to audience memory.
Did the shadow over Laura’s reverie come from a tunnel, or a waking dream? Whatever the source, the two women swiftly exit the train. “Nothing lasts, really, neither happiness nor despair,” Laura tells herself in voice over, and, finally: “I want to remember this to the end of my days.” The moment over, the train pulls into the station and the original background light and texture return. Then, Laura’s voice fades up and Krasker’s background light fades down, turning the tatty upholstery pattern behind Johnson’s head into a blacked-out abyss. The train leaves the station and Krasker subtly veils Laura’s motor-mouthed companion in a net of shadow from a largely unseen window curtain before the camera returns to Johnson. Krasker frames Johnson’s expertly doleful distraction (somehow even her teeth seem sad) in a slightly down angle close-up favoring both her forehead and her eyes. Co-lead Trevor Howard was reportedly so confused by his character’s credulity-straining old-school chivalry toward Laura that he demanded of director David Lean: “Why doesn’t he fuck her?”Īn evolving exchange between Laura and a heedless gossiping acquaintance seated opposite her on a commuter train contains one of my favorite light tricks in movies. Noel Coward’s script sets the film before World War II, and the romantic recollections of the married Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) serve as a gateway to an unspoken yearning for what was, to war-weary contemporary British audiences, a vanished suburban England of comparative ease and innocence. Krasker’s fifth credited film as “lighting cameraman” (that’s British for “cinematographer”) was 1945’s Brief Encounter, depicting a borderland where expressionistic psychological interiority meets the quotidian details of middle-class existence. Krasker’s British apprenticeship with Alexander Korda’s secret weapon, Georges Périnal (a veteran of Vigo), provided a paid master class in the French cinematographer’s genius for using differing densities and details of light and shadow to inexpensively add visual agency to Korda’s early low-budget historical portraits of Henry the VIII and Rembrandt van Rijn. The flex between the heightened and the naturally captured image would energize his subsequent work in film. There, psychologically determined, shadow-drenched deep focus film photography was the rule, not the exception, and visually unadorned photographic realism in cinema was an almost avant-garde parallel creative preoccupation. Brief Encounter, The Third Man, and Billy Budd-a trio of black-and-white films playing on TCM this month and all lensed by Krasker-offer a reminder of this great mid-20th-century craftsman’s indelible contribution to the films he photographed and to the evolving commercial art form he helped refine.Ī formative interest in fine art and in cameras lured Robert Krasker from his home in Australia to Paris and then Weimar Berlin. But collaborating with directorial heavyweights like Carol Reed, David Lean, Luchino Visconti, William Wyler, and Anthony Mann has arguably consigned his name to the fine print of film history. Robert Krasker collected a no-contest Academy Award for photographing Carol Reed’s The Third Man and was worshipped by his collaborators (including actors: Terence Stamp called him the “J.M.W.
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