Wolfgang Suschitzky, in many ways, was an example of the immigrant success story: a young Jewish man in mid-1930s Vienna who saw the way the wind was blowing and ended up in London – where he proceeded to live a life of demonstrable achievement, both for his own work and as an enabler of others.
I think I first noticed his exotic, Mitteleuropäische-flavoured moniker as the cinematographer on Get Carter, a film now so familiar it’s almost impossible to appreciate what Suschitzky was actually doing. But threaded through Michael Caine’s still-thunderous performance and streams of quotably brilliant dialogue, Suschitzky introduced a bewildering variety of unconventional angles, unlikely framing and shots that became classics.
Suschitzky paid his dues cinematically in the documentary movement of the 1940s and 50s, always a working cameraman, where he learned to be light on his feet and work with whatever came to hand. Amusingly, one of his first essays into fiction film-making, the Oscar-winning short The Bespoke Overcoat, saw him work with the “other Wolf” – the writer Wolf Mankowitz, another shining example of the fantastic contribution immigrant families could make to the cultural life of the UK. (Both Wolfs had children – Peter Suschitzky and Gered Mankowitz – who became renowned practitioners in related fields.)
My own favourite of Suschitzky’s films is probably The Small World of Sammy Lee, a wonderfully seedy Soho thriller directed by Ken Hughes and starring Anthony Newley. It is due to screen at the London film festival on Wednesday, where Suschitzky was to make an on-stage appearance. Sammy Lee is distinguished by its raw opening shots of early-morning Soho streets, and in the same year Suschitzky shot a now-legendary short film called Snow, directed by Geoffrey Jones, that stands as a high-water mark of the impressionist, poetic tradition of British film. As Snow shows, one of Suschitzky’s great abilities was to service idiosyncratic vision; another example was the oddball Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, a whimsical French-style musical shot in Hampstead.
When I met Suschitzky in 2007, when appreciation for his work was gathering pace – largely at the behest, to be honest, of Austrian cultural forces – he was not only in incredibly good shape for a 94-year-old, but offered a highly articulate and modest account of himself. (He still sounded furious about the February uprising of 1934, when the Austrian army had shelled communist housing estates in Vienna, which had forced him to reconsider his future.)
Before he was a cinematographer, he was a remarkable photographer: the series of atmospheric pictures he took in London’s Charing Cross Road shortly after his arrival are still classics of their kind, both an invaluable documentary record of long-vanished time, but also brilliantly expressive treatments of their subjects, whether bored cafe patrons, sweating street workers or obsessive bookshop habitues. Even after finding more remunerative work in the film industry, he never stopped taking still photographs: he developed an enthusiasm for portraits of children and animals, creating a humane – and humanist – body of work in this area alone. (Among the subjects of his 1940 book Photographing Children was my mother-in-law, then a one-year-old.) It was perhaps revealing that when Suschitzky picked his favourite among his own photographs, it was a doleful picture of London zoo’s famous gorilla Guy, whose discontent leaps off the page.
When I spoke to him, Suschitzky repeatedly described himself as a “lucky man”; presumably, to have found shelter in Britain and a productive and rewarding life. In truth, Britain was lucky to have him.
