On-screen Cameras: Mirrors of Cinematic Practice - Text 1
Within the diverse range of cinema equipment, the movie camera can be seen as the primary machine. First of all, chronologically it is the device that inaugurated cinematic practice and which provides the images for every film. Next, in occupying this function at cinema’s origins and by virtue of its historic importance, it has become enveloped in a symbolic aura, ranging from its primordial role in the act of cinematic creation to its metaphorical effigy as a vision machine. For these reasons, to show a camera in a film is a representational project which, one way or another, brings us to think about the medium itself and our position as viewers.
In cinema’s early years, its equipment still took part in the viewer’s experience of the images and was often a theme of the film or even a character in it. But what happened when narrative cinema took flight? Henry Lehrman’s Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (1914) is an interesting example: this short film, playing on the expectations of audiences still accustomed to fairground films, shows Charlie Chaplin strutting about in the foreground before appearing to walk directly towards the viewer on the other side of the screen while behind him a children’s mini-automobile race is taking place. A man then comes and pushes him out of the frame, and soon afterwards a wider-angle shot shows a newsreel camera operator energetically cranking what appears to be a Pathé Professionnelle camera, in front of which Charlie obstinately places himself. Thus the play between the diegetic camera and the overall view provided by the film configures a shift to another spectatorial experience, as if at first we were watching the film shot by the diegetic camera and then saw Lehrman’s film itself, shot by a camera we will never see.
