Cranks and Motors - Text 1
In the mockumentary Forgotten Silver (1995), filmmakers Peter Jackson and Costa Botes narrate the story of Colin McKenzie, a forgotten New Zealand film pioneer who had built a motion picture camera driven by a bicycle crank and whose films were, as a result, exclusively made up of forward tracking shots. The case of Colin McKenzie and his camera is, of course, both extreme and fictional. It nonetheless remains an excellent demonstration of how important it is to choose carefully the source of energy that will drive the film through the camera.
Since the film industry’s conversion to sound in the late 1920s, cameras employed for studio work have all been fitted with electric motors. These have two essential advantages: they are relatively silent, and their steady speed makes it possible to synchronize the camera with sound recording devices. In the days of silent cinema, however, other energy sources with their own advantages had been used by camera manufacturers.
From the late nineteenth century onward, engineers and camera manufacturers have held a multitude of opinions about the best way to set in motion the film, intermittent movement and shutter contained by the camera. At the Edison laboratories, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s team chose to use an electric motor – a predictable choice, considering the central place occupied by electricity in the multiple projects and ventures of the Edison company. The electric motor nevertheless had a few disadvantages. For starters, the camera designed by Dickson and his team, the Kinetograph, was rendered quite large and cumbersome by its electric motor, as well as by the batteries that supplied it with current. Film shoots were, as a result, largely limited to the “Kinetographic theatre” built on the Edison lot. In other words, the Kinematograph did not go out to discover the world; rather, the world – and more specifically the artists, comedians, gymnasts and acrobats hired by Edison – had to come to it.