Uses - Text 8
Following Maya Deren, a pioneer of the 1940s, many women filmmakers, such as Barbara Hammer, have developed corporeal techniques based on the manoeuvrability of this camera, which is compact and light enough to be carried about. To start the Bolex one needs only wind the spring, making it possible to shoot in any conditions. At the same time, the spring drive lasts only thirty seconds. This maximum length of a shot makes filming every shot a very intense experience. When he made Geschichte der Nacht (1979), the Swiss filmmaker Clemens Klopfenstein filmed European cities at night until the Bolex spring ran down. Every shot has the same duration, determined by the camera, and Klopfenstein relied on the material structure of the H16 to conceive his working method and the film’s form. The camera’s mechanism is noisy, obliging the person filming to conceive different relations with the sound. In his earliest films, in the 1960s, the Dutch filmmaker Johan van der Keuken tried out other relations with time and synchronism using this rhythm box. In Beppie (1963) and L’esprit du temps (1968) he used the camera to sculpt time according to the principles of cuts, variation, ruptures and jumps. Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (1967) is certainly the film which, for van der Keuken, represents the encounter between jazz and filming; in an interesting look back at the origins of this technical object, he viewed the camera as a musical instrument. In this film in search of polyphony, van der Keuken filmed the manufacture of saxophones as well as the musician, the sounds of the workshop merging with the notes of the music. Then Ben Webster grabs a camera and also begins to film the streets of Amsterdam, as an amateur but also as a jazzman. Seeking out diverging impulses of reality, van der Keuken is in tune with the mechanical sound produced by the camera, making him more sensitive to the chaos of reality, in contrast with the harmony of the music or the framing he is looking for through other sequences in the same film, thereby interrogating a fundamental factor in documentary creation: improvisation.
