Chronicle of a Camera: The Arriflex 35 in North America, 1945–1972

By Norris Pope

This volume provides a history of the most consequential 35mm motion picture camera introduced in North America in the quarter century following the Second World War: the Arriflex 35. It traces the North American history of this camera from 1945 through 1972—when the first lightweight, self-blimped 35mm cameras became available.

Chronicle of a Camera emphasizes theatrical film production, documenting the Arriflex's increasingly important role in expanding the range of production choices, styles, and even content of American motion pictures in this period. The book's exploration culminates most strikingly in examples found in feature films dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, including a number of films associated with what came to be known as the “Hollywood New Wave.” The author shows that the Arriflex prompted important innovation in three key areas: it greatly facilitated and encouraged location shooting; it gave cinematographers new options for intensifying visual style and content; and it stimulated low-budget and independent production. Films in which the Arriflex played an absolutely central role include Bullitt, The French Connection, and, most significantly, Easy Rider. Using an Arriflex for car-mounted shots, hand-held shots, and zoom-lens shots led to greater cinematic realism and personal expression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781628467888

Norris Pope

Norris Pope is former director of Stanford University Press. The author of Dickens and Charity, he has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University. He owns and often uses an Arriflex 35.

Book preview

Chronicle of a Camera

CHRONICLE OF A CAMERA

The Arriflex 35 in North America, 1945–1972

Norris Pope

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of

the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2013

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pope, Norris, 1945–

   Chronicle of a camera : the Arriflex 35 in North

America, 1945–1972 / Norris Pope.

      pages cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-741-2 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-61703-742-9 (ebook) (print) 1. Arriflex 35

motion picture cameras—History—20th century.

2. Cinematography—United States—History—

20th century. I. Title.

   TR883.A77P67 2013

   777—dc23                                        2012023400

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To my wife and children—

and for all cinematographers who have enjoyed using the Arriflex II

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Terms

1. Introduction: A Thirteen-Pound Wonder

2. Advantages of Portability: The Early Postwar Years

3. Increasing Usefulness: The Fifties

4. Technical Innovation: The Fifties and Sixties

5. A Secondary Camera of Choice: The Sixties and Early Seventies

6. Shooting Low-Budget Features: The Sixties and Early Seventies

7. Mainstream Successes: The Sixties and Early Seventies

8. Conclusion: Master Shot

Appendix: Foreign Influences: The Arriflex 35 Overseas

Notes

Photo Credits

Index

Forty illustrations follow p. 51

Acknowledgments

My interest in the Arriflex 35 dates from 2004, when I purchased a used Arriflex IIB, manufactured sometime around 1960, to shoot short ends of 35mm film. After a few worn parts were replaced and the camera professionally tuned, I ended up with a fine piece of equipment—albeit a camera whose heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s. My pleasure in using this camera, and my growing recognitions of its capabilities, led directly to my interest in tracing the North American history of the Arriflex 35 from the end of the Second World War up through 1972, the year in which the 35mm Arriflex BL was introduced. Various questions arose as I turned to the available records to explore this history. What were the circumstances in which an Arriflex 35 was typically used? How often were the cameras employed in the production of theatrical films? And, most importantly, did the camera significantly influence filmmaking practices in North America, and did its use appreciably affect film styles and perhaps even film content? The chapters that follow attempt to answer these and other questions.

I began my research by working my through the pages of American Cinematographer and the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers—first, during visits to Southern California, at USC’s Film and Television Library, and later, at Stanford. Going systematically through these journals provided the initial research basis for the project. I also profited from examining portions of the Delmer Daves papers, which are held in Special Collections at Stanford, material that provided an account of the first use of an Arriflex camera to take shots for an American feature film. I have subsequently benefited from the remarkable development of online search capabilities, which have allowed me to track all kinds of fugitive references to Arriflex cameras—in much less time and with greater effectiveness than I could have done in library stacks (even though a number of the books and journals that came up in online searches required me to go to their printed versions). The irony is not lost on me that the digital revolution now placing the continuing use of actual motion picture film in jeopardy has also provided me with very valuable tools for my study of film.

As grateful as I am to technology, I am still more grateful to a number of people who have helped me in different ways, at different stages in this project. Among those in the film industry with extensive experience in cinematography and production, I am especially grateful to Vilmos Zsigmond and Roger Corman, both of whom tolerated follow-up questions as well as initial interviews. In addition, I’d like to thank Mervyn Becker, Axel Broda, John Bud Cardos, Ron Dexter, Howard Ford, Ron Garcia, William Grefé, Don Jones, Gary Kent, Richard Leacock, Paul Lewis, Richard Rush, and Sam Sherman. I should also note that Axel Broda not only restored my own Arriflex IIB but also provided important historical information about Arriflex cameras (including his own experience keeping Arriflex cameras operating in the Philippines during the production of Robert Aldrich’s 1970 film Too Late the Hero). In the film industry more broadly, I’m also very grateful to Franz Wieser, of Arriflex; to Dave Kenig, of Panavision; and to Denny Clairmont, of Clairmont Camera—all of whom provided valuable historical information and materials.

My debts to film scholars and people who have written knowledgeably on film are acknowledged primarily through the endnotes in this book. But I’m also grateful to a number of people in this category who have given me direct advice—especially Charles Eidsvik and David Bordwell, both of whom provided helpful and encouraging responses to an early version of the manuscript. Later on, Charles Eidsvik provided an evaluation of a revised version of the manuscript for the University Press of Mississippi. I would also like to thank Brian Albright, an authority of exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s, for giving me contacts for a number of people involved in making low-budget films in this period. In addition, I’d like to thank Ron Alexander, who used an Arriflex 35 early in his career and who taught documentary film at Stanford for many years; Beverly Gray, who has written about Roger Corman; and Ray Zone, who has written about Laszlo Kovaks and also about 3-D.

I have naturally received valuable assistance from a number of librarians and archivists, particularly Harry Garvin, Kristine Krueger, and Faye Thompson at the Margaret Herrick Library of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Harry Garvin also happens to be a cinematographer, with considerable shooting experience with the camera that this book concerns); Elizabeth Reilly, Curator of the Photographic Archives at the University of Louisville; Albert Ohayon, of the National Film Board of Canada; and Matthew Reitzel, Manuscript Archivist at the South Dakota State Archives.

In addition, I want to acknowledge a number of the faculty, staff, and students in the highly regarded film and television program at De Anza College, in Cupertino, California. This program has provided me with many opportunities to shoot with my Arriflex and to learn a lot about film (as well as to serve as a volunteer TA in the 16mm film-production sequence). Among De Anza faculty and staff members, I would particularly like to thank Tom Schott, Dennis Irwin, and Darcy Cohn. In addition, I have benefited from the teaching of Zaki Lisha, Sara Schieron, and Susan Tavernetti, all of whom are familiar with my interests in Arriflex history. Alas, I have met too many aspiring filmmakers in the De Anza program for me to list everyone with whom I have worked, but I want to single out for special thanks Alin Bui, for whom I have shot many short ends of Fuji and Kodak 35mm film. (The best way to improve shooting skills is to shoot!) Other filmmakers connected, directly or indirectly, with the De Anza program who have abetted my Arriflex use include Frank Perez, Karsten Freeman, Dave Noonan, Kaushik Sampath, Herb Wolff, Lino Brown, and Ray Arthur Wang.

Within the University Press of Mississippi, I am particularly grateful to Leila Salisbury, the Press’s director, who reacted to my initial proposal by noting that she often found the study of film technology a valuable avenue for opening up and exploring larger questions about film. I’m also grateful to Peter Tonguette, who copy-edited the manuscript on behalf of the Press. It’s very reassuring to have as a copy-editor someone who has written extensively on American film himself. In addition, I’m grateful for the suggestions of the Press’s second reader, who has remained anonymous.

Finally, closer to home, I am grateful to my two sons, Geoffrey Pope and Jeremy Pope, who have accompanied me on film shoots with my Arriflex and have shared a number of my film interests. And finally, I am especially grateful to my wife, Janet Gardiner. Janet, whom I met when I was shooting a 16mm student film at Oxford University, not only encouraged me to return to recreational filmmaking after a long hiatus, but also provided a lot of editorial help with the manuscript of this book, including valuable organizational and structural advice to help solve problems that arose as a project initially conceived as an article evolved into a book.

Norris Pope

Palo Alto, California

March 2012

A Note on Terms

Throughout this book, I use the designation Arriflex 35, in conformity with the manufacturer’s initial practice, as a general name for the entire series of 35mm cameras based closely on the original prewar Arriflex design—the only 35mm Arriflexes made prior to the release of the 35mm Arriflex BL in the early 1970s. These models include the original Arriflex, the Model I (1938–1945), the Model II (1946–1953), the Model IIA (1953–1957), the Model IIB (1957–1964), and the Model IIC (1964–1979). I also use the term inclusively when referring in a general manner to the variants within these models, namely the IIBV, IIB-S, and IIB-T, along with the various versions of the IIC: the IICV, IIC-S, IIC-T, and IIC-GS, and then the IIC/B, with its variants. In addition, I include under this general designation the Arriflex IIB and IIC cameras purchased and modified by Panavision for rental as part of Panavision camera packages. (The introduction and special characteristics of these models and their variants will be discussed most fully in Chapter 4.) Indeed, by the time the Arriflex IIC ceased production in 1979, nearly 17,000 Arriflex cameras based on the original Arriflex 35 design had been manufactured.

For the sake of consistency, I have also chosen to refer throughout the book to all of the Arriflex II models and its variants by using the roman numeral II. In the mid-1960s, after the launch of the IIC, Arriflex itself switched over and began referring to the cameras with an arabic numeral, as the 2C, and so forth. Although I have retained the older usage employing the roman numeral in my own references, I have kept the arabic form in all quotations that refer to the camera in that manner.

Chronicle of a Camera

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

A Thirteen-Pound Wonder

The Arriflex 35 was the most consequential 35mm motion picture camera introduced in North America during the quarter century following the Second World War—and it also became, for filmmakers working outside the studio establishment, the most hip.¹ Unveiled by the German firm Arnold & Richter at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1937, the Arriflex was a lightweight, highly portable, reflex camera—the first commercially manufactured motion picture camera designed with a rotating-mirror reflex shutter (the basis for all modern reflex motion picture cameras), and thus the first professional motion picture camera to allow a cinematographer to see, while filming, the exact visual field being recorded on the film.² Described by a later authority as the archetypal go-anywhere, do-anything 35mm camera,³ the Arriflex 35 proved to be rugged, dependable, and capable of reliably capturing theater-quality images. Over time, it came to serve in a variety of circumstances as a lightweight alternative to the Mitchell, long the standard camera for 35mm professional cinematography in America. Indeed, by the time the revolutionary 35mm Arriflex BL was released in North America in 1972—the first lightweight self-blimped 35mm camera—the Arriflex II had become a familiar tool for American cinematographers involved in all areas of 35mm film production, from newsreels, sports films, documentaries, government work, industrial films, and educational projects, to commercials, television series, and feature films. The basic design, which was given a technical Academy Award in 1967, proved highly enduring: later models of the camera, notably the IIB and especially the IIC, are still sometimes used in professional film work today.

This book seeks to provide a brief history of the Arriflex 35 in North America from the end of the Second World War up through the introduction of the 35mm Arriflex BL in 1972.⁴ It emphasizes theatrical film production, documenting the Arriflex’s increasingly important role in expanding the range of production choices, styles, and even content of American motion pictures in this period, culminating most strikingly in examples found in feature films dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, including a number of films associated with what came to be known as the Hollywood New Wave.⁵ The book will argue that the Arriflex’s impact proved particularly marked in three areas: in the encouragement the camera provided for location shooting; in the options the camera gave cinematographers for intensifying visual style and content; and in the doors the camera opened for low-budget and independent production.

Brief comments about each of these three areas provide a helpful starting point, beginning with the role of the camera in encouraging location shooting. In 1957, to take one example, an advertisement in American Cinematographer, the leading professional journal in the field, reminded filmmakers that the Arriflex 35 had proved ideal for location shots under the most difficult conditions.⁶ This is scarcely surprising: as a lightweight, highly portable, battery-powered camera, the Arriflex greatly simplified location shooting for non-sync material. It could be easily carried by one person, set up quickly almost anywhere, and yield theater-quality results. By 1971, an important guide to film production was prepared to conclude confidently that the Arriflex is probably the closest to an ideal camera for use on location shooting as any camera available.⁷

Second, the Arriflex encouraged an intensification of film style and content. Location shooting was obviously part of this, contributing directly to the quest for more persuasive realism and authenticity. But the Arriflex also permitted a more intimate physical relationship between photographic equipment and subject matter. The camera showed that theatrical films need not be shot with a large and difficult-to-maneuver industrial machine, operated primarily in an industrial setting, and placed imposingly between filmmaker and subject. Moreover, the Arriflex enabled filmmakers to seek new levels of immediacy by allowing the camera to mimic the suppleness and mobility of the human body—serving as a prosthetic device for personalized vision and allowing the creation of a level of immersive visual content that was much harder to achieve with a studio camera.⁸ As an Arriflex advertisement put it in the late 1960s, the Arriflex 35 could be used not just as a medium, but as an extension of the viewer’s senses, to involve him fully in the emotional turmoil of what’s happening.⁹

An Arriflex advertisement in 1970 expressed the overall point a little differently: the Arriflex was the only 35 small enough [and] fast enough to be used for the high pitched, intense, deeply involved camerawork now part of the grammar of contemporary films.¹⁰ This claim overlooked the Éclair Caméflex (CM3), but it nevertheless expressed an important aspect of the shift in film styles and audience sensibilities bound up with the use of lightweight cameras. For one thing, as John Cassavetes observed, A hand-held camera … pushes the actors’ tempo up without words.¹¹ In addition—and more importantly—hand-held shooting rapidly became a tool for matching the intensification of a film’s dramatic action with an intensification of shooting style. Ed Digiulio, a leading figure in camera innovation, cited the enormous rise in the use of hand-held cinematography in the period running from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a development clearly related to Arriflex use that DiGiulio ascribed to the desire for realism, the increasing use of location filming, the need to film practical interiors, and the creative need of both cameraman and director to produce new and imaginative imagery.¹² Flexible shooting options, along with reflex viewing and focusing, thus allowed the Arriflex to play a significant part (for better or worse) in the modern predilection for increasingly graphic film styles and content—material that seeks an immediate visceral response from viewers rather than appealing to viewers’ emotions (in the manner of classical Hollywood cinema) primarily through dialogue and story elements.¹³

Moreover, whereas all motion picture cameras had view-finders of varying degrees of accuracy, reflex viewing, as the master cinematographer Conrad Hall later noted, led to a whole new style of filmmaking in which the cameraman could now be more involved in immediate choices.¹⁴ This viewing system, pioneered by the Arriflex’s rotating-mirror reflex shutter, inevitably enhanced the role of cinematographers by allowing them to frame and focus on the fly, giving them an increased degree of authorship over film images. Reflex viewing also allowed an unprecedented degree of spontaneity within shots, especially when camera movement was involved, thereby placing critical decisions directly in the hands of cinematographers (particularly in hand-held shooting)—decisions that were outside the strict control of the film’s director or producer (at least in the period before the ubiquity of video-assist).¹⁵ Additionally, on a more practical level, reflex viewing prompted much greater use of very long and very short focal-length lenses, as well as zoom lenses, and it also encouraged, with long lenses, techniques involving selective focus—approaches to image-making that could only be managed effectively while looking through the taking lens. (The use of long lenses, it should be noted, was not always just an aesthetic choice: it went hand in hand with the use of practical locations, since populated locales often dictated the need to set the camera up at some remove from the characters and action.¹⁶ In addition, selective focus could be used to avoid the added costs of unnecessary coverage¹⁷; and zoom lenses could reduce the number of lens changes and camera setups, thereby helping to speed up production.)

Third, the Arriflex helped to open doors for low-budget and independent productions. Indeed, the camera was much more economical to own or rent—or to operate—than a Mitchell. According to an October 1958 article in American Cinematographer, the newly released Arriflex IIB—including a wild motor and battery cable (but no matte box, lenses, magazines, or battery)—cost only $1,645 brand new.¹⁸ A few months later, Birns & Sawyer was renting out Arriflex IIB models with three lenses and three magazines at $15 per day, or $60 per week.¹⁹ This provided remarkably inexpensive access to equipment that permitted shooting theater-quality material. When sync sound was required, sound blimps and sync recorders obviously added to these costs; but the general economy of