Viewfinders - Text 5
The operation was rather simple: one only had to open the door on the back of the camera, push the negative aside, remove the pressure plate, place a piece of ground glass in the gate, close the door, and frame and focus while looking through the eyepiece. Karl Brown, who was employed as Billy Bitzer’s assistant while the latter was D.W. Griffith’s lead cinematographer, explains in his memoirs that the production of the pieces of ground glass used for framing was one of the numerous essential duties performed by camera assistants: “I kept right on my job, which was making a whole flock of new ground glasses for the Pathés. The cameramen kept cracking or dropping them (they’re very fragile), so I was making up an ample supply to keep well ahead of the game.”[2]
While the Professionnel’s eyepiece was not intended to be uncovered while filming, some operators occasionally did use it to monitor the images captured by the lens as they were shooting. The operation was rather tricky – light leaks were a constant risk – but made it possible for them to ensure that the framing and focus remained acceptable during complicated shots involving camera movements. Bitzer, for instance, decided to film the tracking shot of Belshazzar’s feast in the Babylonian story of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) while looking through the lens and film. For this celebrated shot, the camera, Bitzer and his assistant Brown were installed atop a sort of elevator built in a tower set on rails. According to Bitzer’s testimony,
This great dolly was moved backward and forward by manpower; twenty-five workers pushed it smoothly along the rails. Another staff operated the elevator, which had to descend at a regular rhythm as the railroad car moved forward. The whole scene had to be filmed in one continuous shot, in focus at every level. It wasn’t easy to do. We rehearsed it over and over.
It was shot with only one hand-cranked Pathé camera. Karl Brown, seated underneath the Pathé, did the cranking through a flexible shaft. I handled the tilt and pan cranks, looking directly through the Pathé eyepiece focusing glass in the back door of the Pathé onto the film, with a special eyepiece of rubber, which fitted around my eye, to keep the light from fogging the film. It was a brilliant sunny day, and the whole thing came out fine and clear.[3]