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

8. Conclusion: Master Shot

99 Chapter 8 CONCLUSION Master Shot John Boorman’s taut thriller Deliverance (1972) was made shortly before the North American release of the 35mm Arriflex BL. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond in a remote region of the Appalachian Mountains, mostly along whitewater stretches of the Chattooga River, the film took an approach to its subject matter that required many very difficult shots on, in, and around the edges of the rapidly moving river. According to Wally Worsley, a veteran production supervisor who worked on the film, Zsigmond “made it sound as if most of the footage could be shot hand-held, out of a few suitcases. To hear him describe it, a few people were going to float down the river with maybe one [Mitchell] NC 35 millimeter camera and perhaps a hand-held Arriflex, and from that would emerge a mainstream Hollywood feature.”1 Despite Worsley’s skepticism, this is exactly how important parts of the film were shot, except that only one variety of camera, a Panavised Arriflex, was carried by the production crew when they were filming on or along sections of the river accessible only by raft or canoe.2 For locations that could be reached more easily, Zsigmond relied on a self-blimped Panavision studio camera as his primary camera, a decision that obviously made shooting dialogue sequences easier. But the film ended up calling for lots of Arriflex use, including hand-held shots that Zsigmond took from within canoes and inflatable rafts. Moreover, Boorman and Zsigmond both concluded that the menace surrounding the main characters, as they ventured deeper into the wilderness, would be powerfully enhanced through a number of water-level shots, with the camera lens just inches above the surface of the ominously swirling river. 100 Conclusion Zsigmond got some of these shots by taking an Arriflex wrapped in plastic out into the river and mounting it on a submerged tripod .3 Other water-level shots, however, were made by putting an Arriflex inside a water box, with a glass window in front: “We used [the water box] quite a lot,” Boorman recalled, “because that would give you the effect of the camera being slightly underwater .”4 It would have been next to impossible, not to mention very risky, to have attempted these shots with a heavy Panavision camera or a Mitchell: as it was, one Arriflex was lost to the river during production.5 At about the same time, John Huston shot Fat City (1972), a film that Huston insisted was to be about “how your life can run down the drain before you have a chance to put in the plug.” To give substance to this theme, Huston asked Conrad Hall, his cinematographer, to gather some real-life footage on Stockton’s skid row prior to any shooting involving the film’s actors. “I got a camper and covered the rear and side windows with black curtains ,” Hall recalled: “I had quick-set mounts on tripods in each window and just moved my Arriflex from window to window depending on what I saw. . . . When John [Huston], the crew, and the actors sat down to look at the footage I’d compiled, you could have heard a pin drop. Some of it was devastating. It really gave you a sense of the harshness of these lives we were recording, and it provided an all-too-real reference point for the actors.”6 This material, some of which was used in the final film, could not have been shot in this manner with a Mitchell or any then existing Panavision camera. Nor could it have been shot with an Eyemo, which lacked reflex viewing. The footage thus provides another illustration of how an Arriflex could play a central role in securing unusually dramatic, authentic, and compelling location material to enhance a film’s sense of the real. Both of these examples, coming at the end of the period under consideration in this book, are reminders that the Arriflex played an important part throughout the postwar decades in notching up the visual intensity of American films. Visual intensity is a standard correlative of dramatic intensity, and although there is no single cinematic formula for enhancing visual intensity, various techniques were (and still are) commonly used to achieve it. Master Shot 101 Indeed, camera movement is automatically immersive, tending...