Wolfgang Suschitzky obituary: a cameraperson of the world

Wolfgang Suschitzky at BFI Southbank in 2012
Credit: Lucas Aliaga-Hurt

Even given his grand age, Wolfgang Suschitzky’s death last week caused much sadness to many. His exquisite pictorial talent leaves us a finely evocative visual record of much of the last century.

Suschitzky was among the last of that generation of talented middle Europeans who arrived in London in the tumultuous 1930s and 40s (in his case in 1935). Emigrés, migrants, refugees, use what term you will: in making homes, families and careers here they’ve enriched our national life and, remarkably many of them, our film and TV industries in particular. A salient point, not often enough made, is that many of them developed a great and knowledgeable respect for Britain’s home-grown working class. This is true of Suschitzky in spades, evidenced by many of his photographs and more than a few of the films he shot.

Suschitsky was a photographer first and a cinematographer second but his artistry in the one medium hugely informed his craftsmanship in the other. His attitude to filmmaking was thoughtful but straightforward: “I tried to put on screen what the director wanted… My contribution was perhaps in the choice of lenses and lighting.” One director has told me that compared to all other cameramen he’d worked with, Suschitzky always took less than half the time to prepare a shot, always doing so with twice the effectiveness.

In person Wolf possessed tremendous modesty, charm and kindness laced with a dry, disarming wit. And he was a film fan – big time. I speak for many in saying that bumping into him at screenings – which one constantly did since he went to so many – always brought a smile to the face and gave the soul a fillip.

He’d go on forever, we told each other. The sad truth is that nothing and no-one does. Given which, last Friday my colleague Becky Vick put it best, via Twitter:

Get Suschitzky

from our August 2012 issue

Get Carter (1971)

The titles begin. Light at the end of a tunnel slowly swallows the black frame with onrushing train track. Cut to Michael Caine in his seat, pan past his fellow passengers, via warehouses and factories speeding past the train window…

The iconic opening sequence of Get Carter (1971) forms, among other things, the junction at the centre of the criss-crossing career of the man directly behind the camera. Knowing northeast England, intimately familiar with industrial Britain, he doubtless feels at home, far from any studio, shooting mute footage of gritty landscapes. But he’s also fluent with the human face – and with helping his director (in this case Mike Hodges) expose the truth within the drama, as well as finding the drama in documentary images. Director of photography Wolfgang Suschitzky was, at the time, pushing 60. Fast-forward to 2012 and he’s still standing.

Get Carter (1971)

What is it about DPs? They may not all be long-lived, but there sure is a pattern. Stanley Cortez made it to 91, Henri Alekan to 92, John Alton to 94… Turning to Britain, consider Jack Cardiff, Freddie Young, Ronald Neame, leaving life at 94, 96 and 99 respectively. Christopher Challis died recently, at 93. Oswald Morris remains with us at 96, as does Douglas Slocombe at 99, and Slocombe’s friend and elder: Wolfgang Suschitzky, known in the business as ‘Su’, who turns 100 on 29 August this year.

A few weeks before that, 19 July sees the centenary of Su celebrated in public (to the slight embarrassment, no doubt, of this self-effacing man). At a special event at BFI Southbank, BAFTA will honour this long-standing, still-active member with a Special Award for Creative Contribution, concluding an evening of tributes from colleagues, screenings of evocative extracts (some long unseen) and thoughts from the man himself.

Anyone with any feeling for the recent past is prone to a certain star-struck sentimentality when in the presence of people of distinction living among us in great old age. Certainly, durability is worth celebrating. In Suschitzky’s case, his place at the head of not just two but three generations of cameramen adds a further twist: his son Peter, among many illustrious credits, is best known as David Cronenberg’s long-time DP; grandson Adam, meanwhile, has done fine work in features, documentaries and, particularly, TV drama (from Life on Mars to the recent ITV miniseries Titanic).

Credit: E.R. Roberts, Dublin

But the romance of longevity notwithstanding, Suschitzky’s is a rewarding and singularly instructive career to look at. In Britain at least, 20th-century screen history was as much as anything the sum of its subplots. Though his camerawork was always excellent, Suschitzky’s career wasn’t studded with certified masterpieces of narrative cinema (as was Cardiff’s, say).

Get Carter is the exception in this respect (and was divisive in its day). Instead Suschitzky personifies the diversity both of the business and of the art of filling the screen: classics, cult items, curios; features and shorts; documentary and fiction; cinema and TV; industrial, charity and natural-history films; and, last but not least, innumerable commercials (most destined never to be documented).

Connections

Wolfgang Suschitzky’s career also makes illuminating connections between motion and still photography. Suschitzky is renowned as a committed, beguilingly gentle photographer of human and industrial scenes, animal life, occasional distinguished portrait sitters, and the world’s children. There’s much to be gained from study of the artistic connections between his work in the two media (a pair of attractive volumes from Austrian publisher Synema make a fine starting point) – and the practical connections, too: it was film commissions that took Suschitzky to many of the places in Britain and abroad where his best photographs were taken.

Suschitzky was born in Vienna in 1912, to a Jewish (non-practising) and socialist (very much practising) family. Both of these allegiances would likely have lost him his life long ago had he not fetched up in London, via the Netherlands (his sister Edith Tudor-Hart, herself an important documentary photographer, settled here first). After 77 years in Britain, Suschitzky retains his distinctive Austrian accent and his left-leaning politics (he for one laments the decline of strong trade unionism in Britain’s film and TV industries in the years since his retirement).

Credit: Julia Wincklers