Aces of the Camera — Farciot Edouart (1942) 🇺🇸
Aces of the Camera XVIII: Farciot Edouart, A.S.C.
by Walter Blanchard
The men who do Hollywood’s special-process photography seldom have a chance to bask in the limelight of publicity. You see their names on the credit-titles of pictures, lurking behind some cryptic notation like, “Special Photographic Effects by So-and-So,” but unless you’re right in the industry, you don’t get much of a chance to find out what they do, and still less to learn what they look like, or what sort of people they really are. Yet among them are some of the greatest aces of the cinecamera — and without their unheralded contributions, many a modern production could never have been made.
A typical example is Farciot Edouart, A.S.C. Officially, he’s the Head of the Transparency Department at the Paramount Studio — which means that he’s one of the industry’s top-ranking specialists in the projected-background process, with a record of twenty-one years of specialization in “trick” and special-effects camerawork behind him, all of it with Paramount or its several corporate forerunners. As a matter of fact, throughout his twenty-seven year career in the industry, he has never worked for any other organization than Paramount except for the period he worked for Uncle Sam as a cinematographer during the last war. Then, he went in as a buck private — and emerged with a major’s commission!
Farciot was born in California, where his grandfather was a portrait photographer, and his father a portraitist, as well. Around the turn of the century, the junior Edouart came to Los Angeles, where he established a branch of the family’s fashionable portrait studio during one of Southern California’s early “boom” periods. When this boom collapsed, Edouart closed his studio and entered commercial photography, first for the Gas Company, and later in the office of the County Assessor— a position which he held until very recent years. Meantime, he kept a studio and darkroom in his home, and continued with his portrait work on the side.
Small wonder it is, then, that young Farciot absorbed photography all through his childhood and youth; as he puts it, he was weaned on developer.
And it is no wonder, either, that when the time came to select a job, he should choose the most modern form of photography — the cinema. In 1915 he went to work at his first job — as an Assistant Cameraman in the Realart Studio in Hollywood, a subsidiary of one of the firms which finally became today’s Paramount.
During the succeeding two years, he worked his way up the cinematographic line until America entered the war. Then he enlisted, placing his specialized knowledge of photography as it related, to color, color-rendition and filtering (of which he had made a special study) at the disposal of the Camouflage Division of the Army Engineers. Examined for a commission in this service, he passed highest among a group of sixty specialized experts, and with his commission assured, boarded the train for Washington.
And while he was on that train, his official papers also enroute by rail (as there was no air mail in 1917), a departmental reorganization took place in Washington. All of the Army’s photographic work was centralized in the Signal Corps — and when Edouart arrived in Washington, he found himself without rank, as military red tape prevented his transferring to the Signal Corps with the rank he had been promised by the engineers!
So he enlisted in the Signal Corps as a buck private, and was sent to the Signal Corps’ famous school of cinematography at Columbia University. Eleven weeks later he completed the course, standing second in his class — and was kept on at the University as an instructor, to teach others.
After seeing more than a few of his pupils go on to active service, he finally secured his own transfer to more active duties. He was assigned to the 78th Division as Chief of the Division’s Photo Section, sent overseas and promoted to Sergeant. And from then on until the armistice, he saw enough action to suit anyone, for the 78th was at the front most of the time, participating in such offensives as St. Michel, Grand Pré, and others, first as an American unit brigaded with the British forces, and later as a unit of the A.E.F.
It was at Grand Pré that he had the closest shave of his wartime career. The Germans held part of this picturesque village — still largely untouched by the war — and the heights above. The Americans were advancing on the village, across a little valley and the Loire River. As they got into the town, Edouart, in command of a three-man photographic unit, advanced with them. One man packed a still camera; Edouart, a Bell & Howell, completely assembled with a 400-foot magazine in place on a back-pack, and a spare magazine and tripod to make sure he wasn’t under-loaded; the third man carried film and accessories for the others.
Up the main street of the village they walked, remarking on how peaceful and untouched the place looked. Coming to a cross-street, Edouart instinctively paused for a moment at the corner. Just as he was about to step on across, a doughboy yelled to him to duck back. Down that innocent-appearing cross-street, he learned, was a German machine-gun, which had already taken toll of half-a-dozen Yanks who incautiously walked past the corner!
Still looking for a good photographic vantage-point, Edouart spotted the undamaged spire of the village church — Just the place to get some good shots of the action, he thought. Up he went, climbing the inevitable long, spiral stone staircase which gave access to the tower. At the top, he found a perfect position for his camera, behind some louvres through which he could train his camera, unobserved, on the town. Glancing I down, he noticed a surprising lot of , troops in the nearby streets below. “My,” he thought, “I hadn’t realized we had so many men in the village yet” — and then he noticed that instead of khaki, they wore the German feldgrau.
While he was still debating as to whether to stay and get his picture, or leave and retain his health, the matter I was decided for him. A sudden whoosh like the grandfather of all hurricanes shook the tower. A second later, another— on the opposite side — repeated the performance. A German field-gun had opened up on the advancing Yanks, its shells passing so close to the tower that the wind of their passage literally rocked its sturdy stone walls! Edouart started down immediately. But, as he says, “the weight of that loaded camera made a mighty unwieldy load, and it wasn’t long before my feet slipped. Eighty pounds of assorted camera equipment saw to it that I kept on descending the stairs; only I finished the course in a sitting position — skidding the rest of the way down that long, bumpy spiral on my rear!”
Back in the street, he saw things happening at the far end of the village. The American artillerymen were expressing their disapproval of being potshotted at by laying down a creeping barrage — a curtain of high-explosive shells which was steadily advancing toward Edouart. Again he beat a very hasty retreat. “It must have looked funny,” he says. “My two men were several yards ahead of me, running for all they were worth, and urging me to stop and get some pictures. I was doing as good a job of sprinting as I could, with that fully-assembled camera banging my back at every jump, but I couldn’t catch up with them… somehow, you don’t give much thought to getting pictures when you see solid stone buildings only a few hundred yards away jumping into the air in small pieces! The next day, though, I did get some pictures of Grand Pré: there were hardly two stones left on top of each other after that barrage did its work! I was quite as well satisfied I hadn’t stayed to make pictures the day before!”
The division moved out of the front lines just before the Armistice. Edouart — in Paris to see to the development of his films — was “on the spot” for the most riotous of Nov. 11th celebrations, that day in 1918. Not long afterward, Edouart received his discharge from the Army, and was given a lieutenant’s commission in the Red Cross as a special cinematographer. Sent to Germany as an official of the Armistice Commission, he had the interesting task of making motion picture records of the demilitarization of much of Germany’s military plant and industry before he returned to Paris, and eventually to America, by this time a Captain.
Back in Hollywood, he learned that the studio had kept his old job open for him, but was given strict instructions to take a two weeks’ vacation — with pay — before reporting for work. Only a few days of this had been spent, however, before telegrams from Washington and cables from Paris informed him that he was urgently needed to come back to Europe — at any price to take complete charge of the Red Cross’ motion picture work there. At length, persuaded by the offer of a Major’s commission and a salary a good deal higher than most studio cameramen in those days received, he assented. Back to Europe he went, to bring order out of the chaos in which the thousands of feet of historical film had been left, and to tour the Balkans and Russia, filming post-war relief activities.
When he finally returned to Hollywood and civil life in 1921, it was to marry the very charming sister of his closest friend of the Columbia University days, and settle down with his own very successful photographic business. But studio activities soon lured him away from this. The man in charge of making glass-shots at the Lasky studio drafted him into this work, where his knowledge of photography, color-rendition and painting proved invaluable to the making of these difficult shots, which involved photographing a scene through a large pane of glass upon which was painted whatever was necessary to complete the actual portions of the set.
In due time Edouart found himself heading a special department of his own. He pioneered several processes of making composite shots by the complementary-color method. This, in its best-known form, placed behind the actual set and actors, which were illuminated with yellow-filtered light, a blue backing, which was lit with blue light. In the camera, in front of the unexposed negative, was a “key” containing the desired background. This “key” was a motion picture positive, carefully bleached and toned orange. The yellow-lit images of set and actors photographed through this background film as though it wasn’t there; but the blue light reflected from the blue backing served to print the yellow-toned background image on the film wherever there was no direct image of foreground set and actors, for the orange-toned “key” absorbed the blue light in proportion to the density of the “key’s” image, much as a yellow filter absorbs the blue light from the sky. The result was that the background image, in action, was printed on the film behind the direct image of set and actors, so that the two appeared to have been photographed actually together.
But this process had severe limitations. The camera making the composite shot was rigidly anchored in one position; it could not be panned, tilted or dollied to follow the foreground action. The camera had to be specially adjusted, to permit passing the two films through its aperture. Worst of all, the background was never visible on the set, and nobody — even the cameraman — could be certain of the result until the rushes were screened the next day.
Therefore when the introduction of the first supersensitive panchromatic film, faster lenses and more powerful projection lights made it practical, many of the industry’s “trick” specialists began to experiment with a process they’d long visioned — projecting the background-film onto a translucent screen behind the actors, and rephotographing the real and projected images with a foreground camera electrically synchronized with the background-projector. George Teague [George J. Teague], at the old Fox Studio, was probably the first to use this process on production (Just Imagine). Edouart was the second to employ it.
Since then, the process has become indispensable in modern production; scarcely a single feature goes out from any major studio without some “process-shot” footage in it. Some involve 75 or 80% of their entire footage in “process.”
“Moreover,” Edouart says, “producers and directors have constantly pressed us to give them greater scope, through the use of larger and yet larger screens. When the process was first used, a scene inside a closed car, with a screen six or eight feet wide, was something to be happy about. But before long, demand had forced us to find ways of using screens 12, 15, 18 and 20 feet across. But still came the cry for greater and yet greater scope. When we succeeded in using a 24-foot screen, we already had demands for shots that would call for a 36-foot screen. My most recent scenes have made use of twin screens totalling 48 feet in width — and the end is not yet in sight!”
Edouart’s success in this work is due to an unusual combination of forward-looking imagination with an absolute passion for precision. You’ll see it in the way he plans his shots. Every detail of camera-position and angles, composition and action is painstakingly planned out in advance, even to such minutiae as the lens to be used on the background-camera, its focal length, its focus and its height from the ground.
Edouart likes to point out that these transparency or background-projection shots are very seldom used to “fool” the public — except in such obvious instances as a “trick” picture like Dr. Cyclops, in which the process, sometimes using a huge screen, sometimes a very tiny one, was used to produce the illusion that some characters had been reduced to very tiny dimensions, while to them normal-sized humans seemed giants. Instead, as he points out, “modern transparency or projected-background process-shots are used to give the public a better show for its money. Today, pictures have to be turned out with a definite eye to economy; and sending a troupe on a distant location, where they may have to wait for weather, and where sound, lighting and other factors aren’t under complete artistic and technical control, can become prohibitively expensive. There are increasing restrictions on location-trip, anyway, due to today’s wartime conditions.
“So today, the task of all of us, in every studio, who are engaged in this type of work is not to fool the public with camera-magic, but to help make it possible for the studios to turn out better pictures, with less expense and effort, yet with no sacrifice in quality or dramatic scope. Most of us are sincerely anxious to live down yesterday’s publicity that branded special-process specialists as camera-magicians. We have a definite job to do, and we’re trying to do it as perfectly as we can. The highest praise to any of us is the comment that one of our shots creates such a perfect illusion of reality that nobody takes it for a process-shot. If we can do that, and at the same time give the public a better picture, made more easily and efficiently than could be done by straightforward methods, we’re content that we’ve done our job well.”
End.
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Collection: American Cinematographer, June 1942
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see other entries of the Aces of the Camera series