silver nitrate notes

Robert Krasker and the Tilted Vienna

4 oct 2015

Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) is the film I would show someone who did not believe black and white photography could be a complete moral argument. Robert Krasker's camera in this film thinks. The Dutch tilts that he and Reed put on the static frames of postwar Vienna are not a mannerism. They are a statement about what a film can know about a place.

Krasker (1913-1981) was Australian by birth and British by trade. He had photographed Olivier's Henry V (1944) and Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) before Reed brought him onto The Third Man. The decision to tilt the camera in Vienna was, Krasker later said, an attempt to convey the disorientation of a city that had been quartered by four occupying armies and that no longer had a single perspective. The complaint at the time, including from William Wyler who wrote Reed an angry letter saying the tilts gave him a headache, missed the point. The headache was the effect.

Look at the sequence after Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) has identified the body of Harry Lime in the morgue. He walks back through Vienna alone, at night. Krasker shoots him from low angles, the camera tilted left or right depending on the cut. The cobbled streets are wet, lit by single sodium lamps that throw long shadows. Each shot is a still life of disequilibrium. Holly is upright in the frame; the city around him is on a slope. The visual language tells you, before the dialogue does, that Holly is going to be the one walked off, not the one who walks others off.

The sewer chase late in the film inverts the technique. Underground, where a city has no daylight axis, the camera straightens up. The tilts disappear. The chase is photographed in conventional horizontal frames lit from the sides, the water on the floor reflecting hard whites. Down here Lime cannot hide behind a city's geometry. The composition gives him no walls to lean on.

The famous final shot, the long take of Anna (Alida Valli) walking down the cemetery road past Holly without acknowledging him, is held for ninety-seven seconds. The camera does not move. Anna does not look at Holly. Reed's instruction to Krasker, by Reed's own later account, was to hold until Anna was past the camera and out of frame, no matter how long it took. Krasker held.

Anton Karas's zither score is the other half of why this film works. It would have made a worse film better. It made The Third Man unforgettable.

Krasker won the cinematography Oscar for it in 1951. The win is one of the few that needs no defence.

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sources
[1] Drazin, Charles. In Search of The Third Man. Methuen, 1999.
[2] Greene, Graham. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol. Viking, 1950 (novella and preface).
[3] Wapshott, Nicholas. The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
[4] BFI Screenonline entry for Robert Krasker.