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Zorba the Greek: Managing the lighting

RELATED STORIES

Operating the camera on Zorba the Greek
Walter Lassally Film-maker
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Operating yourself. That, of course, is the big factor. I love to operate myself, provided I had enough time. Because operating yourself becomes a nightmare if you have a very short schedule because you've got enough on your plate already, without operating as well. But if you do operate yourself, it adds something. To me, if I look at those two films side by side, the biggest factor there, that separates them, is the fact that I operated myself on Zorba and that makes it more personal to me. All the compositions I can, I can kind of sign, whereas on Tom Jones they were at one removed, and not all that much attention was paid to the compositions, as I would pay, quite automatically, if I'm operating myself.

Born in Germany, cinematographer Walter Lassally (1926-2017) was best known for his Oscar-winning work on 'Zorba the Greek'. He was greatly respected in the film industry for his ability to take the best of his work in one area and apply it to another, from mainstream to international art films to documentary. He was associated with the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s, and the British New Wave in the early 1960s. In 1987 he published his autobiography called 'Itinerant Cameraman'.

Listeners: Peter Bowen

Peter Bowen is a Canadian who came to Europe to study and never got round to heading back home. He did his undergraduate work at Carleton University (in Biology) in Ottawa, and then did graduate work at the University of Western Ontario (in Zoology). After completing his doctorate at Oxford (in the Department of Zoology), followed with a year of postdoc at the University of London, he moved to the University's newly-established Audio-Visual Centre (under the direction of Michael Clarke) where he spent four years in production (of primarily science programs) and began to teach film. In 1974 Bowden became Director of the new Audio-Visual Centre at the University of Warwick, which was then in the process of introducing film studies into the curriculum and where his interest in the academic study of film was promoted and encouraged by scholars such as Victor Perkins, Robin Wood, and Richard Dyer. In 1983, his partner and he moved to Greece, and the following year he began to teach for the University of Maryland (European Division), for which he has taught (and continues to teach) biology and film courses in Crete, Bosnia, and the Middle East.

Tags: Zorba the Greek

Duration: 47 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008