Rudolph Cartier

Rudolph Cartier (born Rudolph Kacser, renamed himself in Germany to Rudolph Katscher; 17 April 1904 – 7 June 1994) was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC. He is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

After studying architecture and then drama, Cartier began his career as a screenwriter and then film director in Berlin, working for UFA Studios. After a brief spell in the United States he moved to the United Kingdom in 1935. Initially failing to gain a foothold in the British film industry, he did some scripting work for BBC Television in 1939 before the service was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, he occasionally worked for British films before he was again hired by the BBC in 1952. He soon became one of the public service broadcaster's leading directors and went on to produce and direct over 120 productions in the next 24 years, ending his television career with the play Loyalties in 1976.

Active in both dramatic programming and opera, Cartier won the equivalent of a BAFTA in 1957 for his work in the former, and one of his operatic productions was given an award at the 1962 Salzburg Festival. The British Film Institute's "Screenonline" website describes him as "a true pioneer of television", while the critic Peter Black once wrote that: "Nobody was within a mile of Rudolph Cartier in the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and as deep as CinemaScope."

Early life and career

Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), Cartier initially studied to become an architect, before changing career paths and enrolling to study drama at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. While at UFA, he worked with noted writers, directors and producers including Ewald André Dupont and Erich Pommer.

In 1939, Cartier first worked for BBC Television when his script Rehearsal for a Drama was produced by the service. He had also worked on another play for the service, The Dead Eye, but due to the outbreak of the Second World War this was stopped at the production stage. Little further is recorded of Cartier's career until after the war, when he began writing storylines for several minor British films. Cartier returned for a time to the United States, where he studied production methods in the new medium of television. a job which also involved directing. and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach". Arrow to the Heart was the first of many collaborations between the pair, who enjoyed during the next few years a highly productive working relationship, despite profound creative disagreements on occasion. Cartier and Kneale were an important presence in the British television drama of the era and were, according to television historian Lez Cooke, "responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s".

Collaborations with Nigel Kneale

thumb|205px|A Cartier location shot from [[Quatermass II (1955), looking down from one of the towers of the Shell Haven oil refinery. Such ambitious location work was new to British television.]]

Cartier and Kneale's first major production was the six-part serial The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast in the summer of 1953. A science-fiction story, it relates the sending of the first humans into space by Professor Bernard Quatermass and the consequences when an alien presence invades the crew's rocket during its flight and returns to Earth in the body of the one remaining crewmember, having absorbed the consciousnesses and shredded the bodies of the other two. A critical and popular success, The Quatermass Experiment has been described by the British Film Institute's Screenonline website as "one of the most influential series of the 1950s". Cartier's contribution to the serial's success was highlighted in his 1994 obituary in The Times newspaper, which also called the serial "a landmark in British television drama as much for its visual imagination as for its ability to shock and disturb". and Cartier's production work on them became increasingly ambitious. For Quatermass II, he pre-filmed a significant amount of material on location, using 35 mm film, opening the drama out from a confined studio setting with the most ambitious location shooting yet attempted in British television. Cartier, with his previous experience as a film director, particularly enjoyed working on these cinema-style filmed scenes.

The appeal of the Quatermass serials has been attributed by the Museum of Broadcast Communications to the depiction of "A new range of gendered fears about Britain's postwar and post-colonial security. As a result, or perhaps simply because of Kneale and Cartier's effective combination of science fiction and poignant melodrama, audiences were captivated." The Screenonline website suggests that the visual impact of Cartier's interpretation of Kneale's scripts was a major factor in their success, which it attributes to their "originality, mass appeal and dynamism... The Quatermass Experiment became a landmark of science fiction and the cornerstone of the genre on British television." Of particular note was their collaboration on an adaptation of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally broadcast on 12 December 1954, regarded as Cartier's most famous work. The production also attracted considerable controversy. There were questions asked in the House of Commons concerning some of the graphic scenes of horror in the play, and the BBC received several telephone calls threatening Cartier's life if the second live performance, scheduled for 16 December, went ahead. The BBC took these threats seriously enough to assign him bodyguards. The production had by this time received the backing of the Duke of Edinburgh, who commented during a speech to the Royal Society of Arts that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the first performance.

Nineteen Eighty-Four had been a success, but it was also one of the most expensive television dramas ever made in the UK. Cartier often spent large amounts of money on his productions. Earlier in 1954, Michael Barry had heavily criticised him for the money and resources he had expended in an adaptation of Rebecca. In a memo written after that production's transmission, Barry admonished Cartier for his over-ambitious production:

<blockquote>The performance of Rebecca seems to me to have taken us further into the danger area instead of showing any improvement. I am unable to defend at a time when departmental costs and scene loads are in an acute state the load imposed by Rebecca on Design and Supply and the expenditure upon extras and costumes... the vast area of the hall and the stairway never justified the great expenditure of effort required in building and one is left with a very clear impression of reaching a point where the department must be accused of not knowing what it is doing.</blockquote>

Later life and work

Despite Barry's concerns, Cartier continued to work successfully in television, and at the 1957 Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards (later known as the British Academy Television Awards, or BAFTAs) he was the winner of the Drama category. "The essence of television is that you can control the viewer's response to a much greater extent than other media permit," he told The Times in 1958.

Cartier continued to direct television dramas during the 1960s, although after Barry stepped down as Head of Drama in 1961, he lost much of his creative independence. Barry's successor, Sydney Newman, abolished the BBC's traditional producer-director role and split the responsibilities into separate posts, leaving directors such as Cartier with less control over their productions. and The Joel Brand Story (1965, about Adolf Eichmann's 1944 offer to the Allies of the lives of 1 million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks). Lee Oswald – Assassin (1966) was a drama-documentary telling the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, based on the Warren Commission's findings, while Conversation at Night (1969) saw the first television acting appearance of Alec Guinness.

Legacy

Nearly all of Cartier's 1950s television productions were performed live, and the majority of them were not recorded—he once described them as being "gone with the speed of light". In the accompanying analysis of each entry to the list, Nineteen Eighty-Four was described as "An early example of the power of television drama... Even now, the torture sequences retain their power to shock and disturb."

Nigel Kneale, scriptwriter of both of the Cartier dramas acclaimed by the BFI, felt that the productions would not have been as successful as they were had they been handled by any other director. "I don't think any of the things I wrote then would have come to anything much in other hands. In his they worked." Television historian Jason Jacobs, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, wrote in 2000 that Kneale and Cartier together created an entirely new, more expansive vision for British television drama in the 1950s.

<blockquote>It was the arrival of Nigel Kneale... and Rudolph Cartier... that challenged the intimate drama directly. Cartier is rightly recognised as a major influence on the visual development of British television drama... Cartier and Kneale had the ambition for their productions to affect a mass audience, and the scope of their attention was not confined to the 'cosy' aesthetics of intimacy. Cartier uses the close-up both to reveal emotions and as a shock device: a more threatening—and perhaps exhilarating—method than was used before. 'Intimacy' is reformulated by Cartier in terms of his power and control over the viewer—no longer a part of the family, but isolated in his home.</blockquote>

Cartier's pioneering use of an increased number of pre-filmed sequences to open out the studio-bound, live television drama productions of the 1950s is also praised by Lez Cooke. "While film inserts were being used in television drama from the early 1950s, Nineteen Eighty-Four represented the most extensive use of them in a TV play up to that time, and signalled Cartier's determination to extend the boundaries of TV drama." Similarly, his Times obituary stated that: "At a time when studio productions were usually as static as the conventional theatre, he was widely respected for a creative contribution to British television drama which gave it a new dimension." The Times praised it as being "possibly the first drama-documentary". A revised version of this feature was screened on BBC Two under the title Rudolph Cartier: A Television Pioneer on 1 July 1994, followed by a tribute screening of the surviving telerecording copy of the second performance of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Selected filmography

Screenwriter

The Game of Love (dir. Victor Janson, 1928)
Tales from the Vienna Woods (dir. Jaap Speyer, 1928)
Mascots (dir. Felix Basch, 1929) – based on an operetta by Georg Okonkowski and
The Smuggler's Bride of Mallorca (dir. Hans Behrendt, 1929)
Im Prater blühen wieder die Bäume (dir. E. W. Emo, 1929)
The Tiger Murder Case (dir. Johannes Meyer, 1930)
The Shot in the Sound Film Studio (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1930) – based on a novel by Curt Siodmak
The Copper (dir. Richard Eichberg, 1930)
Täter gesucht (dir. Carl Heinz Wolff, 1931) – based on a novel by Frank Arnau
' (dir. Karl Grune, 1931) – based on a play by Josef Matthäus Velter
The Yellow House of Rio (dir. Karl Grune, Robert Péguy, 1931) – based on a play by Josef Matthäus Velter
Express 13 (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1931)
Tropical Nights (dir. Leo Mittler, 1931) – based on Victory by Joseph Conrad
The Squeaker (dir. Karel Lamač, Martin Frič, 1931) – based on The Squeaker by Edgar Wallace
Salto Mortale (dir. E. A. Dupont, 1931) – based on a novel by Alfred Machard
The Paw (dir. Hans Steinhoff, 1931)
The Man with the Claw (dir. Nunzio Malasomma, 1931)
A Shot at Dawn (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1932) – based on a play by Harry Jenkins
' (dir. Serge de Poligny, 1932) – based on a play by Harry Jenkins
The Star of Valencia (dir. Serge de Poligny, 1933)
The Star of Valencia (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1933)
The Man from Morocco (dir. Mutz Greenbaum, 1945)
Corridor of Mirrors (dir. Terence Young, 1948) – based on a novel by Chris Massie
The Avenger (dir. Karl Anton, 1960) – based on The Avenger by Edgar Wallace

Director

Teilnehmer antwortet nicht (co-director: Marc Sorkin, 1932)
Invisible Opponent (1933)
The Oil Sharks (co-director: Henri Decoin, 1933)
Arrow to the Heart (1952, TV film) – based on the novel Unruhige Nacht by Albrecht Goes
The Quatermass Experiment (1953, TV miniseries)
Wuthering Heights (1953, TV film) – based on the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954, TV film) – based on the novel 1984 by George Orwell
Quatermass II (1955, TV miniseries)
Passionate Summer (1958) – based on the novel The Shadow and the Peak by Richard Mason
Quatermass and the Pit (1958–1959, TV miniseries)
Adventure Story (1961, TV film) – based on the play Adventure Story by Terence Rattigan
Maigret (1961–1963, TV series, 3 episodes) – based on Maigret novels by Georges Simenon