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

1. Introduction: A Thirteen-Pound Wonder

3 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 goanywhere , 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 4 Introduction 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 Arri- flex’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 theaterquality 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, A Thirteen-Pound Wonder 5 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...