A Camera in a Film, with Its Character - Text 1
The Akeley camera’s conquest of Hollywood was not immediate, because from a technical point of view, as we know, its history lies in documentary film. At the heart of the documentary paradigm, but not far from the spirit of narrative and fiction cinema, one of the high points in the career of the Akeley camera was certain shots in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). The film shoot took place in the icy Arctic over a period of two years, using two Akeley cameras and panchromatic film stock. We propose here to read the film’s success as a bridge between two film worlds, as the film was able to attract Hollywood’s attention to the Akeley camera. Although the contemporary sources consulted do not describe Nanook as the major lever in the history of the camera’s penetration into the cradle of the studios – a history that we are helping to unravel, but which has yet to be fully written – we can suppose[1] that the members of the new American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in particular, an association of directors of photography and special effects technicians, took note of its advantages. These professionals could only be stunned by the excellent control the camera offered while shooting, by its gyroscopic tripod, by its rotating viewfinder which made it possible to freely regulate the camera angle while shooting, independent of the camera’s position, and by the possibility it afforded of shooting and making pans and tilts of high quality[2] with relative fluidity using telephoto lenses.[3] Its peculiar tripod, equipped with a spherical head, eliminated a great deal of friction and neutralized the vibration brought about by moving the hand crank (this vibration was very difficult to avoid with a Bell & Howell or Mitchell camera, however masterful the operator may have been).
In this way, the Akeley camera established a connection between documentary film and the cinema made by the large studios. The Rin Tin Tin series, which starred a dog and contributed to the success of the brand new Warner Bros. Pictures company, is an example of this connection. Akeley cameras were used in the production of the Rin Tin Tin film Where the North Begins (Chester M. Franklin, 1923), whose exteriors were shot in northern Canada. An Akeley camera was used to shoot the scenes with the dog, because it was the only camera capable of following the dog in a reliable and fluid manner: “It gives the scenes enormous impact, being able to keep up with the animal,” Kevin Brownlow remarks. “It went round and round the camera parallel!”[4] A later Rin Tin Tin film, The Clash of the Wolves (Noel M. Smith, 1925), showed a chase on horseback between the protagonists and the dog; the pans in this scene were shot with an Akeley with powerful telephoto lenses. The camera operator was E. Burton Steene, a prominent operator in Hollywood who specialized in action scenes.
