Introduction - Text 4
Concurrently, it became a camera at one and the same time tied up with the golden years of Hollywood cinema and firmly rooted in a documentary cinema in the field of natural history, out of which it had emerged:
It is today unquestionably one of the greatest instruments of its kind in existence, and for the particular purpose for which it was designed it has no equal. It is found in the studio, in the home, on the athletic field, and in the most remote corners of the earth, the peaks of the Himalayas, the South Seas, the Arctic circles. It has provided a fascinating textbook for countless numbers of men, women, and children, and very particularly the children. Furthermore, as I mentioned, the Government of the United States found it important for its use in war and is continuing to do so in peace.[8]
The Akeley camera was thus born for the first time, in 1916, out of a desire to extend practices already underway for recording live animals, in this case through the use of a new medium. It was then born a second time with its role in various fields of cinema, granting them their autonomy from the camera’s initial function conceived by Carl Akeley. As in the powerful double birth model in media history,[9] these uses of a moving picture camera – and its later recuperations – are part of a history of technology which must be written in a way which takes its uses, but also its re-uses and shifts in use, into account.
The sections of the present parcours and their titles underscore their authors’ decision to highlight a kind of personification of the Akeley camera. A persona, a personage, with a personality which came into the world and is the subject of a biography, the ideal afterword for which is, in our view, an exhibition of the 2020s whose mounting we will recount at the end of this parcours through the storytelling of the museologist Mark Alvey. A kind of oral history, one might say. In this way, this vitalistic metaphor becomes a key to understanding through which the present authors (Viva Paci, Gil Chataigner, Maxime Harvey, Éric Falardeau) and the head of the research project under the aegis of which this collective text has been prepared (Viva Paci) have been able to tie together the usually remote fields of knowledge in which our personage’s adventures took shape. This camera, when studied through the prism of its birth in the museum, and its cinematic birth, will also assist us in thinking about the relations between cinema and the museum. This in turn will make it possible to demonstrate the dynamics of exchange and influence between the fields of scientific research, the dissemination of knowledge, and entertainment. This technical object warrants our attention for several reasons: its cultural origins (natural history); its documentary uses (expedition films); and its incorporation into the cinema of the studio system (specific shots taken by specialized camera operators). Over the course of our synchronic research, which focused on the era of this camera, the Akeley appeared to us to have its own aura. It has unique technical attributes, which have special charm, and an unusual personal history: born for adventure, it was very helpful because it was so functional, and was both ergonomic and of unusual shape. Its curves were out of keeping with the hard angles of its fellows, something which became an element of distinction, almost a trophy, for any in-the-know camera operator who mastered it. It carried within it a whole lifetime of stories.
Through the stories and non-stories around the history of the Akeley camera there arises a polyphonic and critical historiography of its uses – both real and imagined – and of its protagonists – both recognized and marginalized, but also human and non-human. From the hopes and ideals (pertaining both to cinema and to the museum) materialized by the camera’s creation (The Habitat Diorama, in/a Film) to the museographical revisiting carried out a century later (A Camera in the Museum, with the Other Living Things), this parcours aims to bring to light several aspects of the roles taken up by this technology in a variety of corporations and different professional and amateur trades in American cinema (Patents and Prowess; The Akeley Specialists; A Camera in a Film, with Its Character) and in an elsewhere made exotic (The Moving Camera and Films on Shelves; (Don’t) Look at the Camera).