Knights of the Camera (1930) 🇺🇸

Some unsung artists of the cinema — reprinted by special permission from the Theatre Guild Magazine of New York

by Harry Potamkin

It is taken for granted among American film-makers that “cameramen rarely break into print.” Although the photography and shots of a movie may be admired, the identity of the cinematographer excites no curiosity, save in the industry of the film and in the trade of the cameraman. What devotee of the American film will recall these names: Billy Bitzer [G. W. Bitzer], Alvin Wyckoff, Karl Brown, Charles Rosher, Gilbert Warrenton, George Folsey, Oliver Marsh [Oliver T. Marsh], Bert Glennon, Karl Struss?

The enthusiast may recognize two associated with direction, Karl Brown and Bert Glennon. But he would never remember that so many of the films which he enjoyed owed much of their merit to the camera work of either. Yet many a film has been given its outstanding quality by the cinematographer. Frequently the work at the camera has determined the film.

In a consideration of the cameraman (who is more truly the camera engineer), one naturally begins, in America, with George William (Billy) Bitzer. About thirty-five years ago Bitzer turned to the camera from his trade of electrician, and American motion picture history wrote its first chapter. In 1896 Bitzer caught McKinley receiving the notification of the presidential nomination in Canton, Ohio.

Films Prize Fight

A few years later he recorded the Jeffries-Sharkey bout, inaugurating the practice of artificial lighting. This historical note is highly interesting, when we recall that Hollywood was founded in the search for natural sunlight. The movie began outdoors, but the Jeffries-Sharkey fight at the Coney Island Athletic Club on Nov. 3, 1899, brought the film indoors. Some four hundred arclamps were clustered over the ring and the camera speeded to a night’s mileage of seven-and-a-quarter of negative, then postal card size.

The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company was born into the studio world with that film and Bitzer was its dominant figure. The director was incidental.

With the new century, however, the film moved toward its creator, and that evolution was consummated in David Wark Griffith [D. W. Griffith]. D. W. was an actor. Bitzer was camera lord.

One day the director of a film was absent. Griffith was called in to substitute. With that incident the famous AB (American Biograph) became a leader; the great Griffith-Bitzer team commenced.

This combination was responsible for the close-up. Of course, the bold image existed in the film before the Biograph days. The very first peepshow films were large scale. That, however, was an expedient to film a moment.

The first use of the close-up in the movement of a narrative film was made in The Mender of Nets, in which Mary Pickford acted and which Griffith directed and Bitzer photographed. It is a victory such as this that I call camera engineering.

Evolution of Close-Up

The too superficially reasoning critic may condemn the close-up as a banality — its use has been banal — it is nevertheless, as a rhythmic component, intrinsic cinema. We may note here that in America the closeup has remained a device for effect. In Europe it has evolved as a structural element and has attained, in The Passion of Joan of Arc, the eminence of a structural principle.

In this evolution we connect two great directors, Griffith and Carl Dreyer [Carl Theodor Dreyer], who acknowledges the former as a pioneer; and we join as well two very great cinematographers, Billy Bitzer and Rudolph Maté.

Bitzer is responsible for certain controls of photographic quality. It was he who originated the soft focus, the elimination of the sharp corners of the film frame and the use of gauze to tone the film to a mist (as in Broken Blossoms).

In America, again, we have not gone on with these modifications of the literal in film photography. It is in Europe we find their continuation and extension.

Cavalcanti [Alberto Cavalcanti] films The Petite Lily [La p'tite Lili (1927)] through gauze to depersonalize the characters, and Man Ray sees his characters through a mica sheet which grains the picture and renders it liquid in consistency.

There is one European device we have borrowed and abused to death: the rising mist. This appeared in The Flesh and the Devil, was used effectively in Sunrise, and then repeated in numerous Fox [William Fox] films. But otherwise our cinematographers have not learned the treatment that modifies the literal.

The mind of the American film, regarding both content and approach, is literal; and that is why the American film is still rudimentary, and why no one here has extended or even equalled the compositions of Griffith or logically developed the innovations of Billy Bitzer.

For instance, let us refer to the camera angle, a major instance of camera engineering. In Intolerance, in 1915, Bitzer used the angle and the mobile camera to descend, in the Babylonian scene, from a view looking down upon three thousand persons to a close-up of the central personage. America quite forgot this powerful method until the German film, “Variety,” introduced the angle as the determining structure of a film and sent all Hollywood into a frenzy from which it has only recently recovered.

Nor has there yet been very much learned by director or cinematographer of Hollywood about the angle as a principle, rather than as an effect device. We have few camera engineers, or camera estheticians; they are mostly cameramen.

Coupled with the name of Billy Bitzer is that of Alvin Wyckoff. Wyckoff is to the reputation of De Mille [Cecil B. DeMille] what Bitzer is to the realization of Griffith’s ideas. There is no knowing what Wyckoff might have accomplished had he worked with the creator instead of the barker. Nevertheless, what remains with one after an early De Mille film is, besides the sense of claptrap content, a memory of photographic, cinematographic splendor.

Wyckoff is especially noted for the invention of new lenses and for innovations in lighting. He is accredited with having first effected the reproduction in the film of the lighting of a cigar or cigarette.

Bitzer and Wyckoff

In 1928 the famous “originals” and olden rivals, Bitzer and Wyckoff, joined together to film (at the behest of George Barnes, the Goldwyn cameraman) the movement of men through a marsh in The Rescue. This itself attests to the fact that the “originals” have not yet been duplicated.

These two men, Bitzer and Wyckoff, belong to the category of camera engineers. The camera esthetician I term the cinematographer who is also an independent director. In America we may number among these, Schoedsack and Cooper [Ernest B. Schoedsack | Merian C. Cooper], makers of Chang; Robert J. Flaherty, the great lyricist of the cinema who made Nanook of the North and Moana of the South Seas; and Karl Brown, who constructed and realized Stark Love.

Brown is one of Billy Bitzer’s boys, and his record in cinematography includes The Covered Wagon, and Beggar on Horseback.

Was not the cinematography of these films largely responsible for their success?

Indeed, for me The Covered Wagon is a directorial failure and a cinematographic (cameraman’s) success.

Stark Love is not a directorial success either, but it marks the passage of the cinematographer into control, a passage we find common in amateur film-making and in Europe. In Stark Love, however, Brown turned the camera operation over to James Murray.

Lighting and Composition

Among the American amateur camera estheticians I note Dr. John Watson, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Jo Gercon and Louis Hirshmann. Their films are personal declarations.

When we come to Europe we find the cameraman’s contribution more generously credited. No one thinks of The Passion of Joan of Arc without remembering the work of Rudolph Maté: the intensive application upon the slow curve, the scrutiny of the physiognomy, the stark lighting, the composition in the lens, the resilient movement of the camera in the mob scene.

When one mentions The Armored Cruiser Potemkin [Battleship Potemkin (1925)], immediately the name of Tisse [Eduard Tisse] follows for his terrific impact-filming. These are, of course, cardinal instances. But so are Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation — yet who recalls Bitzer as responsible for much of these?

The point, however, has less to do with credit for the individual cameraman; the companies know of him. I am more concerned with a record of the work of these individual cameramen in the collective art of the cinema.

The most eminent of the Europeans in the contribution of camera engineering to the cinema is Karl Freund. Freund established the mobile camera in The Last Laugh; the camera angle in “Variety.” The numerous intermediate controls of the image, such as the multiplying and distorting prism, the haze-glass, the kaleidoscopic toy with its changing patterns in central balance, were introduced by Freund.

Again the Close-Up

He is responsible for the exciting edifices of Metropolis, all miniature models. We get here our milestones in cinematographic history: Bitzer, Freund, Maté. Bitzer uses the closeup for the first time in a film at varied arrangement; Freund first uses it revealingly in the structure in The Last Laugh; Maté, through Dreyer, makes it the structure, where it ceases to be a close-up and becomes a structure in relief.

Bitzer uses the angle as a detail in Intolerance: Freund uses it as structure in Variety; Maté renders it rhythmic and poignant in Joan. At the present moment there is another comparison between Bitzer and Freund. The latter is today sponsoring in America a new color process; the former is active in the promotion of the wide film. These are logical terminals for camera engineers.

Freund made with Walter Ruttmann the composite document of “Berlin: the Symphony of a Great City.” In this he is the innovator of a new form of motion picture which stems from the simple newsreel and travelogue.

In Russia, Dzige Vertov [Dziga Vertov] is broadening this form of objective, non-narrative film; and numerous young men in Paris are beginning their careers with such film arrangements. Among these are a number of young men who are cameramen as well as directors. The numbers include Vertov’s youngest brother, Kauffmann. A third Kauffman (this is Vertov’s family name) is a co-worker with Vertov, having made with him “The Man with the Hand Camera”, as yet the best example of what is called the montage-film.

The montage-film is a film assembled of separate sequences which is not immediately related to a single thing or event, but which, when joined out of these images or sequences, becomes a unit organized in a definite rhythm.

Foreign Cameramen

Russian film-making is stimulated by a social idea, and hence its camerawork moves on toward new areas of greater magnitude. I have mentioned Eisenstein’s cameraman, Edouard Tisse, who has worked under Eisenstein and Alexandrov (the latter must not be forgotten as a collaborator).

But one cannot overlook the great work of Anatoly D. Golovnia, who realizes the imaginings of Pudovkin, the romantic of the Russian cinema. Golovnia’s work in “The End of St. Petersburg” adds his name to the lists of the heroic in camera creation. Pudovkin’s “Storm Over Asia,” which I saw intact in Amsterdam, will shortly be released here.

The camera work of K. Vents Is eminently structural, with its general perspectives, its hyperattentive eye, its intelligence. And certainly the most beautiful detail of “The New Babylon,” that film of sustained tones and stylization, is the camera as A. N. Moskvin employed it.

To these names we must add those of Evgeny Shneyder for “A Fragment of an Empire,” distinguished by such camera achievements as shooting as many as four levels or planes, and getting them tonally, structurally clear and outstanding. The American technique has not often achieved this multiple-level filming. A Bitzer could achieve it; not many more.

Another name must surely be appended: O. Demutsky. cinematographer of “Arsenal.” The work of K. Kuznetsov in “The Village of Sin” actually transcends the directorial achievement itself.

It is in the Soviet cinema the camera engineer is recognized. His position in the collective scheme of filmmaking is equal to that of the director. He approaches his task not as one assigned to it after the plan is made and the scene set, but as one participating in the making of the plan.

Tisse, for instance, studies the scenario first, then consults the scenewright, together with whom the relation of camera, lights, and decor are determined, proceeds thence to the mapping of the “light-scenario,” which serves as a blueprint for his assistant, a sort of camera stage manager.

Cameraman-Engineer

Then, and only then, after the cameras and lights have been adjusted upon the basis of the camera chart does Tisse himself appear for the final relating of equipment to the thing filmed, to direct, that is, the camerawork just as the regisseur directs the players.

The rank of cameraman as engineer is the basis and aim of the course in the State School of the Cinema, where the students receive not only practical training, from menial tasks to the command of the camera, but also theoretical, in the study of the literature and principles of cinematograph as a medium.

Chemistry is taught in the second year, but not solely as a laboratory science; rather in relation to the art of the cinema. The course concludes with a study of optics. The camera engineer coincides, in the Soviet cinema, with the camera esthetician.

In France, as Mme. Germaine Dulac says, the successful film is found wherever the cameraman, director and cutter are one and the same. Such an identification we find among the American amateurs, but, in Continental Europe the distinction between amateur and professional is not made.

Most noted among the independents, the avant-gardistes, are Mme. Dulac, the American Man Ray, the Ukrainian Eugene Deslaw, the Parisian Andre Sauvage, the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy, the American Francis Bruguiere and the Dutchman Joris Ivens.

Germaine Dulac, recently named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, was among the first to introduce the screenpanel, where only a portion of the screen is used at a time.

Bringing Back Meliès

The effect is achieved by masking the lens to hide the portion that is not used. This is a simple instance of the treating of the initiating instruments, camera and negative, in relation to the screen. Dulac has also, in “The Sea-Shell and the Clergyman,” effected the illusion of a body dividing in half.

This simple device relates her to the father of film virtuosity, the Frenchman, Georges Meliès, the magician who used the movies in the nineties as an aid to his illusion-act. Dulac places a cord down the center of a man’s face. She moves the camera leftward from the cord as the limit of the lens.

The right half of the lens is masked to prevent light from striking that part of the negative which is not to be impressed. Then the other half is masked and the camera moved rightward from the limit of the cord. The spectator sees the body as dividing away from the center.

Dulac the Artist

Mme. Dulac does not end with virtuosity. These devices are contained in the fluid rhythm of the film. The camera virtuoso becomes the camera esthetician, the creative artist. Dulac was one of the first to use the prism, the distorting mirror, and similar devices as means to sensitive and descriptive detail.

Man Ray represents the entrance of the painter into the film. His entrance has come by way of photography, as is also the case with MohoIy-Nagy. These men belong in the history of the absolute film, the film of organized, non-human components, which begins with the Norwegian Viking Eggeling and his disciple Hans Richter.

The independent film includes other artists who have come by way of painting or photography. Francis Bruguiere, an American resident in London, has made part of a projected film, “The Way,” which, by means of simultaneous images or multiple exposures, tells the story of the life of man, from birth to death.

This is the work of a camera esthetician. At present he is animating abstractions in paper, illumined and transfigured by light. The artist of the still camera and the light picture becomes the artist of the play of light.

Study of Sombreness

Eugene Deslaw has turned his camera upon machines and electric lights and made them dramatic and compositionally significant. André Sauvage has turned his camera upon day-by-day Paris to study the movements about its subways, quays, and markets.

Joris Ivens of Amsterdam comes to film creation as a phototechnician. His first film was a documentation of the vertical opening and closing of the Rotterdam Steel Bridge. He then made a film of the oily Dutch rains.

With his hand-and-eye camera poking under legs and between wheels, he has produced the most interesting objective study of somberness I have ever seen. This is a phototechnician’s film, a film of filters and camera.

I have presented a summary of the diversified camera workers, the cinematographers. Inventors, engineers, estheticians, creators are comprised in the term cameraman. Today the newsreel has begun to give recognition to the cameraman as a creator.

The film-actor knows how important to him or to her is the cameraman, and Lillian Gish accordingly pays this tribute to one: “I have often been called a Griffith product. Well, in a way I am, of course. In a great many ways I am not. Nearly all my early pictures were directed by Tony Sullivan [Anthony O’Sullivan?] and Christie Cabanne, with the famous cameraman, Billy Bitzer, as valuable to the picture as the directors.”

Collection: International Photographer Magazine, September 1930

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Here an overview of persons and movies mentioned in this article

Cinematographers

• George Barnes (1892–1953)
• G. W. Bitzer (1872–1944)
• Karl Brown (1896–1990)
• Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982)
• Eugene Deslaw (1898–1966)
• Anatoly Golovnya (1900–1982)
• Karl Freund (1890–1969)
• Bert Glennon (1893–1967)
• Louis Hirshmann (1905–1986)
• Joris Ivens (1898–1989)
• K. Kuznetsov (18??–19??)
• Rudolph Maté (1898–1964)
• Oliver T. Marsh (1892–1941)
• A. N. Moskvin (1901–1961)
• Charles Rosher (1885–1974)
• Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979)
• Evgeny Shneyder (18??–19??)
• Paul Strand (1890–1976)
• Karl Struss (1886–1981)
• Eduard Tisse (1897–1961)
• Gilbert Warrenton (1894–1980)
• Alvin Wyckoff (1877–1957)

Directors

• Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959)
• Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968)
• Germaine Dulac (1882–1942)
• Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948)
• Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951)
• D. W. Griffith (1875–1948)
• Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973)
• Dziga Vertov (1896–1954)
• Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953)
• Man Ray (1890–1976)
• Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941)

Others (Actors, Writers, etc.)

• Lillian Gish (1893–1993)
• Mary Pickford (1892–1979)
• Harry Potamkin (1900–1933)

Movies

• The Mender of Nets (1912)
• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Intolerance (1916)
• Broken Blossoms (1919)
• Nanook of the North (1922)
• The Covered Wagon (1923)
• The Last Laugh (1924) [Germany]
• Battleship Potemkin (1925) [Soviet Union]
• Variety (1925) [Germany]
• The Flesh and the Devil (1926)
• Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) [Germany]
• Chang (1927)
• The End of St. Petersburg (1927) [Soviet Union]
• Metropolis (1927) [Germany]
• The Petite Lily [La p'tite Lili (1927) [France]
• Stark Love (1927)
• Sunrise (1927)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) [France]
• The Sea-Shell and the Clergyman (1928) [France]
• Storm Over Asia (1928) [Soviet Union]
• The Village of Sin (1928) [Soviet Union]
• The New Babylon (1929) [Soviet Union]
• Arsenal (1929) [Soviet Union]
• The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) [Soviet Union]
• The Rescue (1929)