Wolfgang Suschitzky
Photographer and cinematographer who brought a glowing black and white image of Dublin to life in Ulysses
THE photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, who was best known for his atmospheric film of Ulysses, his stills of pre-war London, and the imaginative cinematographer on Get Carter (1971), has died aged 104.
His naturalistic approach gave the film its brooding documentary feel, Suschitzky lighting the face of Michael Caine (starring as Jack Carter) in a cinema verite style to emphasise the cobra-lidded eyes and the cold, calculating nature of Caine’s character. Similarly, his grainy location shots of desolate Tyneside landscapes created a beautiful, menacing and bleak world, exuding what the American film critic Pauline Kael considered “calculated soullessness”.
Known in the film trade as Su, Suschitzky, a native of Vienna, had worked in Europe as a stills photographer before World War II, fleeing to Britain in 1935 and rapidly making a name for himself with a remarkable series of photographs taken along a quarter-mile stretch of the Charing Cross Road in London.
Tempering the social conscience of a documentarian with the eye of a German expressionist, Suschitzky captured not just browsers in the second-hand bookshops scrabbling for bargains but shoeblacks, knife-grinders and milkmen, as well as underworld characters playing pinball machines and theatre queues. In one of the most strikingly intense and enigmatic pictures, a woman smoking a cigarette in a crowded tea-room gazes blankly past an earnest male companion.
“His images of London, taken with the keen eye and gentle humility of a recent immigrant, are so evocative you feel they must be stills from films made before the war, mysteriously replayed in your mind’s eye,” noted Gaby Wood in The Daily Telegraph. Suschitzky himself always thought these were among the best pictures he ever took.
When war came, Suschitzky joined the documentary movement, working with its distinguished principal exponent, Paul Rotha, on films such as World of Plenty (1943) as well as shooting numer- ous government information shorts. During the Blitz he chronicled the shattered topography of London, once clambering up the dome of St Paul’s to photograph the bombed-out streets below.
His first feature film, also with Rotha, was No Resting Place (1951), about Irish Travellers. On this and subsequent films like Jack Clayton’s The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), which won an Oscar for Best Short, he earned a reputation as an expert location photographer with a documentary-maker’s ability to extract atmosphere from naturalistic settings.
Suschitzky’s prowling, prying camera gave a jagged edge to The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), starring Anthony Newley as an East End hoodlum trying to scratch a living in London. Other feature films included Ulysses (1967), in which his black-and-white widescreen photography of Dublin glowed immaculately; and Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970). Meanwhile, he continued to carry his stills camera wherever he went, especially on his cinematic travels to far-flung locations, including Africa and the Far East, where he captured many memorable images, among them a portrait of a relaxed Jawaharlal Nehru, father of modern India.
The son of a bookseller, Suschitzky was born in a working-class district of Vienna on August 29, 1912 into a non-observant Jewish family of active socialists, and never abandoned his Left-leaning political views.
His first love was zoology, and although he forsook it to take a degree in photography, he continued to take great delight in photographing animals.
After training as a studio assistant at the Institute for Graphical Research in Vienna, the course of his life changed when Austrian fascists under Engelbert Dollfuss took over the government in 1934. In February that year, troops loyal to Dollfuss turned their heavy artillery on housing estates occupied by the supporters of the Social Democratic Party.
Though the Anschluss was some way off, Suschitzky knew it was time to leave. He and his Dutch girlfriend, to whom he was briefly married, moved to Holland, after which Suschitzky left for Britain, where his sister Edith, also a photographer, had already emigrated. Shortly afterwards, their father committed suicide, in despair at the political situation in Austria.
While continuing to pursue his photographic career as a contributor to pre-television era magazines such as Illustrated and Picture Post, Suschitzky moved into films as a cameraman at Paul Rotha Productions, part of the docfor umentary movement whose civic commitment attracted him. In 1944, he was one of the founders of DATA (Documentary and Technicians’ Alliance), Britain’s first film cooperative.
In 1940 he staged his first exhibition (of animal photographs) in London and published a guide to photographing children. The following year he published Photographing Animals and his talent for animal photography can be seen in his pictures for Julian Huxley’s book, The Kingdom of the Beasts (1956), and his cinematography in, for example, Ring of Bright Water (1969), the story of a man living with his pet otter on the Scottish coast.
In 1956 Suschitsky moved into television, making episodes of the Charlie Chan se- ries. Throughout the following decade, he shot a mixture of quirky features, commercials and non-fiction shorts, as well as several corporate films.
From the late 1960s he was increasingly in demand as a features director of photography, although he never abandoned his non-fiction origins, and was still shooting industrial training films as late as the 1980s. He retired in 1987. His work can be found in the photographic collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A book of Suschitzky’s photography was published in 2007, and in 2016 an exhibition of his photographs opened at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Brighton University in 2014.
During the war Suschitzky married Ilona Donath, with whom he had three children. One of them, Peter, worked as a cinematographer on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back and several films directed by David Cronenberg.
Suschitzky, who died on October 7, is survived by his partner, Heather Anthony, and by two sons and a daughter from his marriage to Ilona Donath.