Karl Struss

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Karl Struss (1912)

Karl Fischer Struss (born November 30, 1886 , New York - † December 16, 1981 , Santa Monica , CA ) was an American photographer and cameraman who, in the early days of film, played a key role in the development and with others Using the movie camera played.

Struss was the first cameraman to receive the Oscar and was nominated three more times.

Life

Karl Fischer Struss was the youngest of the six children of Henry W. Struss and his wife Marie. According to some sources, he did not finish high school because of an illness . According to other sources, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City . From 1903 Struss worked in his father's factory for ten years. During this time he attended evening classes in photography at Columbia University Teacher's College (from 1908). Struss studied photography for four years in total before settling in Los Angeles and running his own photo studio from 1914 to 1919.

Cecil B. DeMille hired him in 1919 . Together with Charles Rosher , Struss quickly became one of the leading cameramen in the fledgling film industry. Rosher and Struss often worked together and shared the first Oscar for Best Camera Ever in 1929 for their work on FW Murnau's Sunrise - A Song of Two People ( Sunrise ).

Many of Struss' innovations are falsely attributed to other people, such as the use of infrared filters in the metamorphosis in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Rouben Mamoulian (1931).

Struss trained some of the best cameramen of the 1950s, including George Clemens , who later took over the camera for the television series Twilight Zone . Until 1959, Struss was often behind the camera for the director Kurt Neumann . His penultimate film was The Fly (1958). Here he used the now famous "look through the fly's eye". Between 1960 and 1970 Struss shot only TV commercials.

Karl Fischer Struss died on December 16, 1981 in Santa Monica, California. There are always exhibitions showing Karl Struss' photographs.

Filmography (selection)

Struss also worked for numerous episodes of the television series Broken Arrow . In total, Struss was behind the camera for almost 140 films.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Struss, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Struss, Karl Fischer (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer and cameraman
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , NY
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1981
Place of death Santa Monica , CA