Kennedy on the campaign trail

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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14 October

Not just because the documentary was covered in an edition of the Festival booklet TAKE ONE, I have relatively little to say about The Camera That Changed the World. The side of it that looked at the development of handheld cameras at around the same time in the States and in France, rather than the applications to which they were then put, was certainly made much more entertaining and less dry by the appearance of the delightfully eccentric Jean-Pierre Beauviala, who also spoke far more to the point than some of the others.

As to why a camera cut down from a model intended to be used on a tripod and which still weighed 30lb (the Auricon in the States) should ever have been a competitor for the ultralight Éclair, which was, I understand, engineered from scratch to be so, I could not figure. (Weight was not the only difference, as the Auricon had to be directed from the shoulder, and blind, at the intended subject, whereas I believe that the Éclair had an eyepiece.) And the wording of the title almost leads you to believe that there was one camera, not two...

However, although the preference for cinematographers to use one over the other was certainly touched upon, it was not in a very obvious or, to my mind, convincing way: that said, it did not seem to be a matter of mere patriotism, but to have some basis in experience of using the equipment, which, I do not think, was sufficiently explored (or capable of being) in the 62 minutes given to the topic.

Since the ambitions of the film were also to do justice to accounting for the first documentary uses to which the pioneers put their new machines, this was quite a tall order. Here, also, the commentary became unnecessarily emphatic (by way of repetition) in stating that, because the new cameras were light enough to carry, they could 'go with the action' and follow it into places that were inaccesible to the static models: if we had not grasped that this was the purpose of developing them, we would surely have been napping!

However, showing footage from the film Primary, which John F. Kennedy allowed Robert Drew's team in the States to make on the campaign trail (and, in a rather enigmatic formula, that he would not contact Drew, unless his answer to the filming were 'no') demonstrated this point admirably: in addition to what else we saw, the well-known long take, following Kennedy through a large group in a convention hall (full of people, all of whom wanted to shake his hand), was chief amongst the evidence.

As someone else had commented before I saw the film (possibly the Festival's own David Perilli, although I only recall speaking to him about the film afterwards), the French developers / film-makers were not given equal billing: we always heard about Drew and what he wanted to achieve first, and, in telling us about the filming of the first project (certainly not in terms of showing us what was shot, although various people involved in the project were shown interviewed), the film-makers in France got the raw deal.

All this apart, the film paired well with Pennebaker's film Dont [sic] Look Back about Dylan's UK tour in 1965, filmed by Pennebaker himself and others (using the Auricon), with which it was screened. (It could almost have been made too thin in places to allow the pairing not to be too long...)


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