Introduction: Behind the Camera

An interesting question for film and media historians might be this: Who is the most crucial person involved in the production of a film? A likely answer could be the director. Other responses might include the scriptwriter, the leading actor, or even the producer. Yet surely one could not claim that any of those roles are essential in making a film, for films have been made without directors, producers, actors or scriptwriters. Ultimately I would argue that there is only one person who is essential in making a film, and that is the cameraman, for a film could not be made without anyone to operate the camera (apart from the rare cases where the images are painted directly onto the film stock). That does not mean, of course, that the cameraman is the principal determinant of a film's audience appeal or artistic quality, merely that there would be no appeal or quality without the person who shoots the moving images in the first place.

There is already considerable film historical scholarship on the cinematographer, including quite a number of books by or about individual cameramen or collections of interviews with them, and - right from the early era - books about how to do the job.¹ So it would not be correct to claim that my subject has been "unjustly neglected" (as is customary to say in scholarly books and articles). What I might claim more modestly is that this journal has somewhat neglected the work of the cinematographer, for it has published only a handful of articles over the years, and never until now an entire issue on the theme. And this despite the evident interest of the editorial team in the subject. So with this issue we try to make amends. I might also add that this issue of the journal comes at a very appropriate point in time. Next year marks the hundredth anniversary of the founding, in 1913, of the first cameramen's organisations in the USA: the Cinema Camera Club (in New York) and the Static Club (in Los Angeles), which were the forerunners of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).² Actually, though, the profession of cameraman stretched back well before the founding of these organisations; indeed one might argue that it originated even before the invention of cinema.

In accounts of the early period of cinema it is sometimes stated that this medium developed "astonishingly fast", for within the first twenty years all the major genres had emerged and many or most filming techniques had been invented, and in some cases had reached quite a sophisticated level. Furthermore, an entire industry of distribution and exhibition had been created from nothing, and thousands of cinemas had arisen in neighbourhoods all across the world. Yet, as film historians are increasingly realising, this rapid pace was not as astonishing as it seems at first glance; it was possible because cinema did not come out of nothing. The new medium was built on - and was strongly influenced by - pre-existing media and entertainment traditions, and cultural and technical practices. This evident fact of cinema building on earlier experience is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of cameramen, especially with regard to their inheritance from, and debt to, still photography.

In its early days, cinema was sometimes thought of as little more than a newer branch of still photography, and indeed was often known as "animated photography". There was, in fact, a direct line of descent between the two forms of photography in the heritage of shared practitioners, for many of the earliest cameramen had worked in still photography before going into the movies. In a recent article I have made some rough calculations as to the extent of this career background.³ I looked, for example, at biographies of cameramen in the Motion Picture Studio Directory of 1918, and found that almost a third of the 245 individuals listed had previously worked in still photography, including as press photographers.⁴ Furthermore, many techniques were shared between the two types of photography. I found that published manuals in the respective media before the Great War gave...