A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Beda F. Batka
Bedřich Baťka
Birthplace:
Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)
Born:
August 21, 1922
Died:
June 6, 1994
Beda Batka (August 21, 1922 – June 6, 1994) was a Czech and American cinematographer and a teacher in the Tisch School of the Arts. Batka started his career as a camera operator on the movie On the Right Track (1948). In Czechoslovakia he frequently worked with director Jiří Weiss. Batka told Weiss a story that happened at his wife's workplace. Weiss decided to use this story as a basis for his film Ninety Degrees in the Shade. In 1967 Batka was a director of photography for František Vláčil's Marketa Lazarová, which was later voted the best Czech movie of all time. After he emigrated to USA, he taught cinematography at the Tisch School of the Arts. Among his students were Barry Sonnenfeld, Bill Pope, and the late Ken Kelsch. The best known movie he worked on in America was Little Darlings.
Assistant Camera:
1949 Na dobré stopě
1951 Victorious Wings
1952 Štika v rybníce
1956 Sons of the Mountains
1957 Johnny's Journey
1958 Bomba
1958 Kasaři
1959 A 105 p.c. Alibi
1959 Hry a sny
1960 Prázdniny v oblacích
1961 Policejní hodina
Camera Operator:
1949 Na dobré stopě
1951 Victorious Wings
1952 Štika v rybníce
1956 Sons of the Mountains
1957 Johnny's Journey
1958 Bomba
1958 Kasaři
1959 A 105 p.c. Alibi
1959 Hry a sny
1960 Prázdniny v oblacích
1961 Policejní hodina
1961 Where an Alibi Is Not Everything
1962 The Coward
Director:
1949 Na dobré stopě
1951 Victorious Wings
1952 Štika v rybníce
1956 Sons of the Mountains
1957 Johnny's Journey
1958 Bomba
1958 Kasaři
1959 A 105 p.c. Alibi
1959 Hry a sny
1960 Prázdniny v oblacích
1961 Policejní hodina
1961 Where an Alibi Is Not Everything
1962 The Coward
1964 Fear
Director of Photography:
1949 Na dobré stopě
1951 Victorious Wings
1952 Štika v rybníce
1956 Sons of the Mountains
1957 Johnny's Journey
1958 Bomba
1958 Kasaři
1959 A 105 p.c. Alibi
1959 Hry a sny
1960 Prázdniny v oblacích
1961 Policejní hodina
1961 Where an Alibi Is Not Everything
1962 The Coward
1963 Promiňte, omyl!
1963 The Golden Fern
1964 Fear
1964 Láska nebeská
1964 Zajatci tmy
1965 90° in the Shade
1967 Marketa Lazarová
1967 Sign of the Cancer
1968 Čtyři v kruhu
1980 Little Darlings
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.