The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever by Nick Hall (review)

In recent years, historians of film style have sought to cast our understanding of technology and the ways filmmakers use it in a new light. In the wake of work by Patrick Keating, Scott Higgins, and other scholars arrives The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever, by Nick Hall, research officer at Royal Holloway, University of London. For his doctoral dissertation and now his first book, Hall focuses on the much-maligned zoom. Both as a piece of technology (i.e., the zoom lens) and a highly variable technique (changing the focal length slowly, quickly, etc.), the zoom has a dual history. Hall charts these two intertwined histories of development and use (and, in the eyes of many, “abuse”) in exacting, fascinating detail; a critical apologia this is not. While only some of us have been waiting for a monograph on the zoom, Hall’s book deserves an audience both for the depth with which he studies his denigrated subject and for the larger questions Hall asks or only brushes against.

How does Hall intervene in scholarship on the zoom? That is not actually a trick question; as the book’s wide-ranging literature review attests, many scholars and critics have already analyzed and theorized about the zoom. For his part, Hall claims to have assembled an exhaustive history of the zoom, as both technology and technique, from its invention in the 1920s to the present day. Through extensive archive work, he seeks to fill three specific gaps in the scant historical accounts and more numerous theoretical interpretations that do exist. First, he builds off two oft-cited secondary sources on zoom history—John Belton’s 1981 Cineaste article, “The Bionic Eye,” and Barry Salt’s Film Style and Technology (1983)—to detail technological milestones like the Zoomar lens and the many ways filmmakers “zoomed” before the 1940s. Second, he expands on “formalist accounts such as [David] Bordwell’s” to consider the zoom’s place in television (20). Here, as one might expect, Hall examines how “TV Generation” directors like John Frankenheimer used the zoom, but—venturing where few film scholars go—he also includes sports telecasts. After all, he stresses, most Americans would see their first and only zooms on television.

Hall’s more egalitarian corpus dovetails with his third main contribution, which is to move beyond the “use and abuse” paradigm of most historical and theoretical work on the zoom. In other words, many scholars have passed off prescriptive evaluations of the zoom as empirical analysis. Scholars also tend to focus only on the showiest, most complicated instances of the zoom—for this reason, exegeses of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) abound. While this emphasis on “artistically motivated” zooms is natural for the film scholar raised on hermeneutics, Hall raises concern over how this focus has been at the expense of the studying the less spectacular or “intellectualized” zooms across “mainstream American cinema.” Basically, Hall adopts a historical poetics approach, à la Bordwell, toward the zoom, assessing its norms and conventions across American film and television production. Hall’s specification of “American” here narrows his project into a manageable scope, but it overlooks zooms from world cinema that have attracted interest for their allegiance to or deviance from these Western norms, for instance, the obtrusive zooms of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo or the suspenseful zooms of Lino Brocka from the Philippines. Hall’s claim to assess a wider oeuvre of zooms than those of scholars prior naturally begets such questions.

After an introduction, the book moves in chronological order across its remaining six chapters. Chapter 2, “Drama at the Touch of a Lever,” traces the zoom from its origins at Paramount Pictures up until the mid-1930s. Chapter 3, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” follows the installation of zoom lenses on television cameras between the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s. Chapter 4, “Unlimited Horizons,” details competing zoom lens manufacturers...