Machines that Made the Movies: Part 1
Chronicling the history of the motion picture camera
by Russ T. Alsobrook

This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in July 2000.

Ten thousand soldiers draw nervous lines of blue and gray across the valley. A soft mist hangs in the air, lending an ethereal quality to the morning light. Cavalry horses struggle against their reins, anticipating the coming charge. Bugles sound the attack. Cannons belch smoke into the swirling, thickening haze. From a vantage high above the fray, the general and his staff observe the battles’ progress with approval — it is a victorious charge. The general calls out “Cut!” — the altercation also happened to be a pretty good take. The Army of the Potomac has won the Battle of Antietam for a second time. But this time the General’s stalwart second-in-command has recorded the bloodless onslaught on 35mm motion picture film. At the center of the action, surrounded by clouds of gun smoke and stampeding horses, stands a lone cameraman, calmly hand-cranking his trusty Pathé Camera.

Staged in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, this reenactment of The War Between the States was directed by D.W. Griffith and photographed by his longtime associate G.W. “Billy” Bitzer. The film in question, The Clansmen (retitled The Birth of a Nation for its release in 1915), changed film history. After the first box office blockbuster hit the theaters, President Woodrow Wilson described the experience as if “it was like history written with lightning.” In 1915, the nation’s memory of the Civil War remained fresh; the release of The Birth of a Nation came barely two generations after the conflict it dramatized. (About the same time-span connected Saving Private Ryan with World War II.) The motion picture’s pioneer era had ended, leading to a new “Golden Age” of cinema. The Birth of a Nation was the first successful feature-length movie and it was shot by one man with one camera, each and every frame, cranked by hand.

On this epic, Bitzer employed the Pathé Studio camera, first developed in 1903 by the Lumière Brothers in association with Pathé Frères Studios in France. Bitzer’s 1914 camera is a technological leap from the crude, unwieldy machines that only 20 years earlier photographed the first moving pictures which flickered in peep shows and on scraps of canvas hastily set up in storefronts. The turn-of-the-century working class audience found themselves mesmerized by simple one or two minute vignettes: a locomotive chugging into a depot; a man sneezing; or waves crashing on the beach. These pieces of time became captured forever by heavy, ponderous contraptions predating what we now know as movie cameras. Still cameras captured moments in time, forever freezing slivers of life in one image. But the motion picture camera preserved the flow of time, reliving a fragment of actual reality each time a projector spun long strips of celluloid through its flickering lamp and wondrous images flashed on screen.

The basic mechanism for moving celluloid through a light tight box with a lens attached to it was developed almost simultaneously: by the Lumière Brothers in France, and Thomas Edison and his chief engineer, W.K.L. Dickson, in the United States. Edison actually commissioned Dickson to design the moving picture camera as early as 1887, but cameras and the means to view their magic moving images were not demonstrated publicly until 1895. The Edison Kinetograph and the Lumière Cinematographe (the latter being a combination camera and projector) were the first viable “movie cameras.” They combined elements of the machine age — gears, cams, sprockets and motors — with the cabinetmaker’s art. Edison/Dickson’s Bioscope camera was often acquired in modular form. The intermittent movement could be ordered from Alfred Darling in England along with plans for a cabinet to encase the mechanism. A local cabinetmaker was commissioned to build the camera body. The finished product did not look very much like a movie camera — it appeared more like a piece of Victorian furniture with a strangely protruding lens, which was sold separately!

Dickson left Edison to co-found the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Their first camera design was similar to the Edison camera developed by Dickson, but with enough changes to avoid patent infringements. The 350-pound Mutoscope used 2 3/4-inch unperforated film shot at 30 frames-per-second. One thousand-pound batteries powered the camera’s  2 1/2 horsepower motor drive. Thus, it is understandable why early works of cinema consisted of very simple, very static shots. Billy Bitzer, then an electrician working for Mutoscope, helped construct this camera. Using the monster machine to record newsworthy events, he ended up becoming a cinematographer. Bitzer was sent to Cuba during the Spanish American War with orders to photograph Teddy Roosevelt leading his Roughriders up San Juan Hill. Unfortunately, his camera gear was too heavy to transport to the battle scene in time: Bitzer missed the shot. The move toward smaller lighter cameras was quickly underway. In 1899, a patent was granted to the new, improved Mutoscope, which used 35mm film, had an optional hand crank and was light enough for one man to carry — no more half-ton batteries. By the time Bitzer partnered with Griffith in 1908, he had photographed more than 1,000 two-reel short films.

A watershed year for movies and the machine age’s technical advancements turned out to be 1903. The Lumière brothers sold their camera patents to Pathé, leading to the debut of Pathé’s Studio camera. The Wright Brothers achieved powered, manned flight over the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Edwin S. Porter, a cameraman under Edison’s employ, directed and photographed The Great Train Robbery. Up to that time, this twelve-minute movie was one of cinema’s longest works. But what set it apart from the Nickelodeon’s current fare was the story: one created not by gesticulating actors photographed on a stage in wide shot, but one made by editing different shots together to create a narrative flow. The Great Train Robbery ended with the famous medium close-up of a cowboy firing his pistol directly at the camera lens. The audience gasped in terror and some ran screaming from the theaters!

The Pathé Studio camera was the first to actually look like what we consider to be a movie camera. The body housed the intermittent movement, the sprockets moved the emulsion through the aperture, the film magazine sat on top and the lens pointed the way out front. Itwas beautifully constructed from fine mahogany, polished brass fittings and covered in Moroccan pigskin. By 1915, Pathé cameras were rigged with state-of-the-art accessories, some off-the-shelf, but many added by working cameramen. Fades and dissolves were accomplished by the touch of a button, along with careful rewinding and judiciously timed cranking! An adjustable iris diaphragm could be attached to the front of the lens to “zoom” in or out of a scene by means of a shrinking or widening black vignette, thus drawing the viewers’ eye to a particular subject in the frame — a precursor to the close-up. Precision pressure plates and film guides, anti-static heaters and through-the-film-plane focus tubes all led to the Pathé being one of the pioneer movie era’s most versatile cameras.

The Pathéwas a far cry from the days when cameras were so heavy that they had to be bolted to industrial strength tripods and nailed to the stage floor, never to move during a shot. Compact, lightweight and fitting easily on a thin wooden tripod, the Pathé could go anywhere. One man could swing the camera and tripod over his shoulder and discover camera angles to spice up any scene: hanging over cliffs for The Perils of Pauline (1914); strapped to racing Model T Fords on Mack Sennet comedies; or sweeping through Civil War battle scenes. The freedom to place a camera anywhere, and move it along with the action, was the important catalyst that allowed Bitzer, Griffith and their innovative colleagues to discover and develop the visual grammar and storytelling techniques still a part of today’s cinema. By 1912, cameramen and directors were utilizing combinations of the wide shot, medium shot and close-up to dramatize narratives. The close-up was a crucial discovery because it allowed the audience to “see” actors’ thoughts. Panning, tilting, tracking, slow motion, fades, dissolves and source-motivated mood lighting had become established tools in the cameraman’s bag of tricks. From then on, cinematographers merely had to refine the techniques. 

A host of other cameras offered technical innovations and the always-beneficial attributes of being compact and lightweight. The first handheld camera with an integrated motor was the 35mm Moy Gyro. Of an English design, the camera featured a gyrostabilizer, pre-threaded quick-change magazines and a twin lens reflex viewing system — quite a modern make-up for 1911. Bell  & Howell’s Eyemo offered a handheld camera with a spring wound motor that allocated 30 seconds of continuous filming — no batteries, no cranks. Handheld shooting and hand-cranking weremutually exclusive operations. Forgotten names like the “Gillon” by Éclair, the Debrie “Parvo,” Ernmann, Gennert and many others contributed to the progress of early movie cameras, each providing a particular technological advancement.

Software Standards Spur Hardware Progress

The Pathé did not have registration pins to lock the film in place during exposure, but was still considered steady enough to be the most popular camera until World War I made it impossible to obtain new cameras and replacement parts from France. Launched in 1912, the Bell and Howell model “2709” became the camera of choice. As the first all- metal camera, the “2709” came equipped with the most sophisticated, technically advanced film transport system, which featured dual pin-registration to ensure rock solid pictures and a ball-bearing crank for more precise speed control. The Bell & Howell Company had developed the standard for sprocket hole design, which the Society of Motion Picture Engineers accepted in 1909. The company’s experience in manufacturing film perforators and printing machines naturally continued in their camera design. The Bell & Howell “2709” was so steady that many were used in special effects work and optical printers for decades after leaving production’s rough-and-tumble world.

Standardized sprocket holes might seem an insignificant technological achievement, but it meant that all 35mm film would run smoothly in all cameras and projectors conformed to the convention. (This came after 1909’s international agreement that set 35mm as the recognizedfilm width.) Legend has it that George Eastman asked Thomas Edison what size his new motion picture film should be: the inventor supposedly held up his thumb and index finger and said “about so wide,” indicating an area around an inch and some change — a spacing size pretty close to that of 35mm film. Is this an apocryphal story? Probably, but it’s interesting to think that a worldwide standard lasting nearly 100 years could have been decided in such a casual manner. (Could HDTV’s 16 x 9 aspect ratio been hatched in a similar way?) Another standard settled on for the movie’s early development was shooting and projection speed. Scientists had discovered that the human eye could not discern “flicker” if a light source flashed on a screen at around 50 times per second. This, of course, is the theory of persistence of vision. The mind retains the previous image even during the period of black preceding the upcoming image. However, projecting film at 50 pictures per second proved unfeasible. Cameras and projectors did not have enough sophistication to run the film at such speed without tearing it to shreds. Experimentation uncovered that a rate of 16 frames of picture per second interspersed with a shutter that opened and closed three times during image projection created the minimum speed for workable persistence of vision. This particular frame rate also saved lots of money on raw stock.

Had 35mm not become the standard film size and 4 x 3 the accepted aspect ratio, today’s movies might be shot with a multitude of different cameras. Just imagine using film widths of 63mm, 60mm, 2 3/8”, 2 7/8”, 50mm, 28mm, 26mm, 24mm, 23mm, 22mm, or in amateur gauges going from 18mm to 8mm. Each of these formats was utilized at one time and some — like Biograph’s 2 7/8” film — had limited success. Motion picture’s evolution would have been stymied by the wide divergence of film sizes, sprocket holes and frame lines rampant in the pioneer era. Such irregularitybrings to mind the vast array of formats available in today’s ever-evolving digital, high-definition video world. Because of early standardization, any 35mm movie can be projected anywhere in the world. Try and do that with a piece of videotape. (More on this subject in upcoming installments.)

Thoroughly Modern Mitchell

The booming prosperity of the 1920’s swept America into the “Jazz Age.” Henry Ford put the country on wheels with the Model T — his car for “Everyman.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyrical tome The Great Gatsby was a bestseller of its day. The tunes“Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Makin’ Whoopee” danced across the radio waves. Glittering movie palaces showcased the finest works of a maturing, confident art form. Having survived the “war to end all wars,” a now full-flowering 20th century was ready to embrace all things “modern.” A feeling of optimism saturated the atmosphere: a sense that technology and the white wizard of science could solve any problems that beset mankind. Cars and airplanes could go anywhere, anytime; and the movies could go wherever the imagination roamed.

In 1922, the Mitchell Company introduced the Mitchell Standard, a camera that offered a new benchmark in precision crafted film transport. The Mitchell movement has been little improved over the last eight decades. (Open the door on a Panaflex and what you see is basically a highly refined Mitchell intermittent movement.) The Mitchell Standard allowed through the lens, non-parallax viewing (for exact framing and focusing) with the patented rack-over system. Thus, the camera body could slide laterally away from the film path so a viewfinder could look directly through the taking lens. However, the operator had to rack the camera back in order to roll film and view the scene through a side-mounted finder. A true, through-the-lens reflex viewing system had yet to be invented. The Mitchell camera reigned supreme in various models for the next 50 years.

Electric motors were available for the Mitchell and Bell & Howell cameras that photographed movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age. However, most cameramen still preferred to crank the film by hand because it gave a higher degree of artistic control over the pace of the action being shot. If a cowboy took too long to climb in the saddle and ride his horse off into the sunset, the cameraman could “ramp up” the speed by slowing the cranking a touch: the on-screen action would then speed up. He could also “ramp down” the action by cranking faster and the horse would gallop away in slow motion. To this day we refer to shooting slow motion as overcranking and accelerated motion as undercranking. As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

By this time, the motion picture camera had reached a high degree of technical perfection. Film was exposed with an unwavering registration. Rugged all-metal cameras could withstand the rigors of any location and were compact enough to be rigged to anything that moved — be it planes, trains or automobiles. Director William “Wild Bill” Wellman and his team of cameramen, led by Harry Perry, ASC marshaled an astonishing array of cameras to shoot the World War I flying epic Wings (1927). For the crucial battle scene with thousands of troops and dozens of airplanes, Perry and his crew cranked at least twelve cameras — Mitchell Standards, Bell & Howells, a couple of Ackelys (designed specifically for slow-motion action work) and 28 Eyemos positioned throughout the bomb-cratered battle field and mounted on dogfighting biplanes. In 1929, Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture.

Buster Keaton directed himself, two locomotives and a small army of actors and technicians in The General (1927). J. Devereux Jennings and Bert Haines shot this masterpiece of action comedy with long tracking shots that followed intricate scenes on speeding trains. In the movie, Keaton performs complicated sight gags on the moving locomotive while another train is in hot pursuit. All the action is framed and choreographed with perfect timing. Through the crystal clear shooting of Rollie Totherah, on countless shorts and numerous features, Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” became a movie icon with a global cachet. Walter Lundin, ASC hung his camera from precarious skyscraper ledges to record the heart stopping comedic stunts of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923). Cecil B. DeMille followed in D.W. Griffith’s mighty footsteps and continued the “new” tradition of the epic film with The Ten Commandments (1923). Bert Glennon, ASC supervised photography on the first of “CB’s” many Biblical tales with color sequences photographed by Ray Rennahan, ASC.

Hollywood’s Golden Age of the Twenties is due in large part to the brilliant cinematographers who took a fledgling mechanical novelty from the Nickelodeon Age and in less than 30 years — through technical innovation, experimentation and damned hard work — turned it into an art form. One of the finest examples of silent film photography can be seen in the brilliant work of Charles Rosher, ASC and Karl Struss, ASC on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). In 1924, Murnau and Karl Freund, ASC had perfected the use of the fluid camera on the successful German UFA Studio production of The Last Laugh. Under contract to William Fox, Murnau came to Hollywood where he continued his directorial artistry on Sunrise. Murnau offered encouragement and, most importantly, freedom to his team of cameramen. (The director rarely looked through the camera). The naturalistic mood lighting, constantly moving cameras (Rosher’s Mitchell and Struss’ Bell & Howell were suspended on overhead tracks that expedited 360-degree shots) combined with forced perspective sets (inspired by German Expressionism) to create a sumptuous visual feast. In 1929, Sunrise won the first Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

The Icebox Cometh

The year 1927 witnessed Babe “the Sultan of Swat” Ruth as he smacked 60 home runs for the New York Yankees. Meanwhile, Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindberg single-handedly flew his one-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, non-stop across the Atlantic; after 33 hours in the air, he landed in Paris, an overnight hero of the Roaring Twenties. Back home, the movies were not the raging success that they had been a few years earlier: attendance was down and box-office receipts were dropping. Some pundits blamed the growing popularity of radio as the culprit for lackluster profits. (The same would be said of Television in the Fifties). Others saw the audience growing tired of the same old fare. Even so, a few big budget movies like Wellman’s Wings, DeMille’s King of Kings and the Greta Garbo /John Gilbert vehicle Love did do brisk business.

What audiences did respond to in droves — much to the surprise of almost everyone in the movie business — was a low- budget sleeper from Warner Brothers that contained one of the most famous lines in film history. Al Jolson spoke right from the movie screen and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute you ain’t heard nothin yet, folks. Now listen to this.” The audience listened, the studios listened and the executives listened intently as The Jazz Singer (1927) became the surprise hit of the season. If The Birth of a Nation arrived like lightning only 12 years before, The Jazz Singer was like a thunderclap that stormed through Hollywood. By 1929, every studio was producing talking pictures.

This moment has often been characterized as the end of the “Silent Picture,” but movies were never really silent to begin with. Almost from their inception, films were shown with live musical accompaniment. Elaborate orchestral scores were written for road show pictures while even the smallest theater had a pianist adding musical moods to every scene. Recorded sound effects were also played back on phonograph disks to add realistic background sound. Wings felt stunningly real with the rat-tat-tat sounds of machine guns and the banshee wail of diving fighter planes. As early as 1902, Gaumont’s Chronophone in France and the Vivaphone system in England produced synch-sound short subjects. Technology to add synchronized speech to motion pictures had been in development from the earliest days. The invention of the vacuum tube, which produced sound amplification strong enough for theaters, was a crucial step. Three songs and a few lines of ad-libbed dialogue in The Jazz Singer had been made possible by the Bell Laboratory Vitaphone system. When Warner Brothers released their next “all-talking picture” — The Lights of New York(1927) — the long lines of theater patrons further convinced the studios that sound was not just a fad, but had become its future.

The new wave of sound technology brought the Golden Age of motion picture photography to a close. The microphone was king. Noisy cameras were yanked from their cranes and dollies, or anything else that moved, and unceremoniously locked up in soundproof booths, along with operators and assistants. Ironically, the padded rooms were dubbed “iceboxes” because the operators and assistants suffered from sweltering heat and lack of oxygen. Also referred to as “bungalows” (a hint as to their size and mobility) these camera enclosures were the newest editions to the hastily built soundstages that sprang up like mushrooms throughout Hollywood in the late-1920s. Because soundtracks couldn’t be edited, the dialogue had to be photographed and recorded with multiple cameras to cover all the angles in one continuous take. Three or four icebox-enclosed cameras would encircle the scene as the actors tried to make peace with the newly anointed “King Mike.” Silent film’s gorgeous mood lighting gave way to the flatter style of multiple camera production. The “cameraman” was now the “director of photography”— a new job title that described the supervisory aspects of his role in the new milieu of movie production. After soaring to incredible artistic heights, the camera found itself totally encumbered by the limits of a new technology. Once again, the camera was virtually nailed to the stage floor, a prisoner of sound. Will the camera break free from the constraints of “King Mike”?  Will cinematographers regain their artistic freedom? The thrilling adventure continues in episode two of “Machines That Made the Movies.”

The author would like to offer special thanks to Kevin Brownlow and Sam Dodge. The history of the motion picture camera is, of course, the history of the cinema, which comprises an endless stream of books and articles. It is hoped that this briefest of surveys will inspire readers to delve more deeply into the history of the “liveliest art.” But, more importantly, to view and enjoy the great films of the silent era — the masterworks of our pioneering colleagues who carved out the glorious craft of cinematography that we are privileged to practice today. •