Reminiscences of the old days of cine cameras

I know I’ve said it before, but it keeps on coming back in my mind even after all this time. The age of the cine camera and film. Its just that I sometimes miss it. My old Bolex, a superb camera, remains stored away in a cupboard and I occasionally take it out and just look at it. Film is too expensive to use these days and the results of a day’s shooting cannot be viewed straight away, though the picture quality still remains better than even DV, the reason why the BBC still use Super 16mm film for important epics. But a video is run in optical parallel for on the spot viewing to OK the take then used in editing. We know all this, I hear you say. It’s just that I like to go down memory lane at times.

Getting back to the old cine camera is what I am buttoning on about. Before I owned a Bolex, my first two cine cameras were 9.5 mm, a Coronet that actually had a Maltese Cross intermittent movement design. After that interesting museum piece I got hold of a second hand Dekko. It was small but hand held and was so heavy that you never got a shaky shot. This robust design was built into a metal case.

9.5 mm film was becoming expensive and the camera only held 30 feet of film in a special cassette. This produced only 1 minute at silent speed. Using Kodachrome, this 1 1/4 minute silent film cost more than an hour of video. My first 16mm camera was very robust, a sturdy Bell & Howell.

This is where my point about buttons comes in. There was only one! Just one button did it all except work out the exposure which was taken care of with a good exposure meter. This amazing one button was used for three operations. One, pressing it down and holding it while it was running then releasing quickly to stop filming. Two, press the button down and released slowly it continued to run. Three, press once and release quickly for a single shot. Focusing by hand is not really a chore in my opinion as I often use manual focus when using the camcorder. The 16mm Bolex, a superb camera, still had one main button. It could be locked to run continuously, pushed forward to make a single shot. The only addition I added to this camera was a “fade out and in” attachment. So, by winding back 40 frames I could create a lap dissolve, now available on more expensive camcorders.

The perhaps rather obvious point is, why all these buttons on present day equipment? If you are using a camcorder to make a serious story or documentary, all the special effects are made when you get down to editing, but it’s expensive. If a camcorder was made that simply produced superb quality 25 frames a second with one button only, think how much cheaper the camcorder would be, wouldn’t it? Perhaps these multi-button gimmicks are all aimed at the shooter who just uses it for his hols. But do they need to be quite so complicated?