Frederick Baker
Archaeologist and film-maker best known for his documentary about the making of The Third Man
FREDERICK BAKER, who has died from kidney cancer aged 55, was an Anglo-austrian film director, artist and archaeologist; he was best known for Shadowing the Third Man (2004), a documentary exploring the artistry, moral world and furious infighting behind the making of The Third Man, the Carol Reed/ Graham Greene 1949 film noir. It was one of several works commissioned by Anthony Wall, editor of the BBC arts strand Arena, and in 2006 won best documentary award at the Venice Film Festival.
During its making Baker developed a technique for projecting films on to historical monuments that he described in his book The Art of Projectionism (2007). He used it again in The Return of Harry Lime (2015), a short film mapping Orson Welles’s Third Man character on to the Bridge of Sighs at St John’s College, Cambridge, having first charmed the ever-cautious college council into agreement.
Projectionism featured in Zeituhr 1938 (2018), Baker’s re-enactment of the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich. It began with a giant clock projected on to the Chancellery building in Vienna striking 6 pm, depicting the moment on March 11 1938 when the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was forced to step down, and continued for 24 hours telling the story of the Anschluss through news clippings, diary entries and film snippets.
The Art of Projectionism also introduced Baker’s concept of “ambient film” in which the viewer, seated on a swivel chair, is surrounded by 360 degrees of film and sound.
Baker not only had flair and imagination, but also a comprehensive knowledge of 20th-century history that enabled him to interview key figures ranging from Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev to Helmut Kohl and Werner Herzog.
The subjects of his films ranged from the spiritual appeal of John Lennon’s song Imagine (including an interview with Yoko Ono) to the abiding devotion for Stalin in the former Soviet Union.
For the latter he charmed Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, “Uncle Joe’s grandson”, into revealing anecdotes such as the time he played his grandfather in a film about the Second World War; when he walked on set in uniform the entire crew fell silent, as if they had seen a ghost. The ensuing documentary, Stalin: The Red God, won a Golden Gate award at the San Francisco film festival in 2002.
Some of Baker’s films centred on music, including Testing Mozart, about the so-called Mozart effect on unborn children, and The First Silent Night, in which Gabriel Woolf narrates the history of the Austrian carol.
Rebuilding the Reichstag (1999), for the BBC Omnibus programme, came about because Baker’s brother Nick was working with the architect Norman Foster on the Reichstag in Berlin, filming builders removing internal panelling that revealed remarkable Russian graffiti. Nick had showed the film to his brother at a family Christmas gathering, eliciting a response in the form of rap – “It’s jarred and jumbled, just about crumbled. Painted, wasted, what’s to replace it?” – as well as another insightful documentary.
Frederick Douglas Stephan Baker was born in Salzburg on January 26 1965, the son of Barrie Baker, who became operations director at English Heritage, and his Austrian wife Irmingard (née Drechsler), who was registrar at Southgate College. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, north London, and read Anthropology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield. He took an M Phil in archaeology and museum practice at the University of Cambridge, which in 2009 awarded him a PHD.
Baker returned to Austria in 1991 to make a documentary about Ötzi, the late stone-age mummy found in South Tyrol, and worked for a while as a journalist. He spent long hours writing at his favourite table in Café Sperl, an 1880s Viennese coffee house. “When I had trouble with a story, I would look around the coffee house and say, ‘How do I tell this story to those people over there?’ ” he said in 2012.
He not only wrote about his documentaries, but also covered events in the region, including the rise of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party in Austria, the role of poetry among the border guards of the Berlin Wall, and a 1994 Croatian version of Faust that reopened old wounds.
Back in Britain he worked on Down to Earth, the Channel 4 archaeology programme, and in 1997 won a “Gold Hugo” at the Intercom film festival in Chicago for an episode of Stories My Country Told Me: the Meaning of Nationhood in which he followed the historian Eric Hobsbawm from Vienna to Bratislava. In 2013 he directed Und Äktschn!, a German comedy starring Gerhard Polt.
One of Baker’s last projects was Klimt’s Magic Garden: A Virtual Reality Experience (2018) for the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna that is now part of the permanent exhibition. Visitors wear specially adapted headsets to get the impression of walking through a threedimensional Klimt garden with accompanying music. “Everybody thinks they know Klimt,” he explained. “I wanted to refresh their eyes.”
Fred Baker, who since 2016 had been a research associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge, was a charming and droll presence. He was the go-to man for British colleagues needing advice on Austrian holidays and was a serious football lover.
In 1997 he married the film-maker Sandra Fasolt, who survives him with their daughter.
Fred Baker, born January 26 1965, died August 24 2020