Coda: When Lenses Became Cinema Lenses - Text 2
Taylor-Hobson was not alone in the effort to sell the motion picture industry on improved projection quality: in the field of motion picture projection, they faced stiff competition from the American company Bausch & Lomb. Bausch & Lomb, similarly mobilizing their wartime contributions to peacetime markets, released the Cinephor projection lens in 1921. In an advertisement in Moving Picture World, Bausch & Lomb proclaimed:
[B]etter illumination alone did not satisfy the Scientific Staff of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Co. They were not content until they had devised a lens possessing as well all the elements necessary to real projection improvement – a flatter field, sharper definition to the very corners of the picture and stronger contrasts between light and shadow; a lens that will give the quality pictures expected by patrons of a quality house.[8]
Like Taylor-Hobson, Bausch & Lomb used advertisements to educate consumers on the criteria of what constituted a quality lens. The advertisement claimed that a greater aperture in the lens was not enough, and also emphasized that the lens quality was, on the judgment of “unbiased experts,” “uniformly reliable in quality.” By 1925, advertisements shifted to promote a “Cinephor Projection System” that promoted an increase in illumination without additional expense, and depending on the type of light and operating conditions, “Illumination can be increased up to 25 percent.”[9] In comparison to the discourse surrounding anastigmats, which emphasized the importance of faithfully reproducing an image, discussions of lens quality became predicated on discussions of efficiency, percentages, and systems: language that spoke to the manufacture, rather than capture, of visual reality.[10]
Cinema as Advertisement
While less obvious than the notion that cinema lenses were specialized products addressing the need for standardized tools in cinematography and projection, one of the primary reasons that Cooke lenses became so closely branded as “cinema lenses” was due to Bell & Howell and Taylor-Hobson’s investment in selling more lenses.[11] The film industry, while growing, constituted a relatively small market. However, the prestige of the film industry was a way to leverage sales of lenses to a wider market: amateur and semi-professional consumers.
Cooke’s reputation in studios served the particular kind of consumer that Bell & Howell sought to attract with the Filmo and Eyemo home movie cameras. Cinema’s allure was a way to sell a growing market of filmmakers on new kinds of equipment. As Marzola writes, while the financial interests of the company lay primarily in the amateur market by the end of the 1920s, Bell & Howell recognized the continued importance of Hollywood to the image of the company.[12] As Bell & Howell engineer Joseph DuBray suggested in 1929, motion picture use was not solely divided between amateur and studio practice:
[C]an we really call amateurs the number of researchers who today have recourse to motion picture photography as an aid to their investigation? The doctor who records in motion pictures the action of living organisms or the performance of operations? The industrialist who applies motion pictures to the precise recording of the functioning of the machines or products he manufactures, the educator who, more and more, realizes the great possibilities of motion pictures as a mighty collaborator?[13]
DuBray linked Bell & Howell’s cameras to an imagined desire on the part of consumers to add “beauty to the picture, to express his artistic sentiments in them, to rival the cinematographic results that he daily sees on the thousands of theatre screens all over the country.”[14] Doctors, industrialists, educators: this set of modern motion picture practitioners, which DuBray defined as the “semi-professional,” were imagined to desire more than just the ability to make “simple pictures” or to “rely solely on the interest they awaken just because they ‘move’ on the screen.”[15] Given that George Eastman allegedly told William Taylor that “90 % of the 16 mm film used in America passed behind lenses made in Leicester,” Cooke’s reputation helped foster a strong imagined connection between semi-professional movie makers, quality, and studio practice.[16] Cinema lenses, defined in the context of the studios, also became a way for amateurs and semi-professional filmmakers to buy-in to the dream of using lenses to capture the world as the cinema does.
A look forward to the first American Cinematographer Hand Book and Reference Guide, initially published in 1935, indicates the array of lens brands that were used for cinema frequently enough to merit publication in such a standard manual. Cooke and Zeiss, while prominent figures of cinema’s early years, were also only two of many brands that constituted the market of early cinema lenses.
