Simon Wyss

About twenty years ago I thought I could direct. Twenty minutes short, a modern fairy tale in black and white. Most experienced DoP, an assistant spoilt in the ad business, a technician together with the crane I used completely out of synch with everybody. Half a dozen actors in complicated costumes, a nervous horse, bees. The worst of all was me. I was not able to manage it all, so one of the actors who had directed himself long before me took over. How I felt ashame! That is one of the reasons why I never did any play directing again.

I can double Tom's remark. Neither are the clothes brought to a bodily feel, nor is there a point in the people's doing. They (dis)appear as employees of the brand who paint a logo on a rock for no one. Abstract backward idea

Is it any wonder? Look, different films react differently with varying amounts of light. They react more or less in a linear fashion (simple black-and-white positive print stock) or with wild curves when plotted against the given time-intensity products. You cannot copy the figure 1 to 50 line without analysis of a defined film. It’s like calculating how the stew should taste. Does a cook work with a calliper?

Wonderful. I like the noise track. Funny production. Soothes the soul that old time rock ‘n’ roll.

Hello, Charlie Yeah, I know that Robinson sometimes is off by a hair. Still, his book is the most important source of information besides the products themselves. It's about reading technology. The Standard Camera, when it appeared, afforded such a tremendous leap forward or, let me say, significant difference in most respects of what a cine camera is, that one forgets all the other makes at once. The Akeley of same age looks crazy compared to a 2709, Universal, Ensign, both 1914, any other camera including the Leonard-Mitchell which wasn't that slim any more falls off. I think it is impossible that Howell or any other mechanical engineer had invented, designed, drawn and manufactured the camera within a few months, as Robinson writes. That is more journalism than historiography. I have no intent to diminish Howell’s œuvre. I believe he was the man who brought many ideas into working parts. But he didn't have the expertise nor the interest in making the motion-picture camera. Ask someone in the street what a movie camera looks like: still many people outline it with Mickey Mouse ears for the mag. That's the Bell & Howell Standard. Somebody brought its brilliant concept into the fresh little enterprise. Somebody who might have known about Léon Bouly (Léon Bollée?). Somebody determined, powerful, revolutionary, conscientious. Each and every element of the 2709 acts as part of a master plan. It takes time for such a OPVS MAGNVUM, long, long years.

SALVE ! I have a forty-page booklet in front of me with the title Standard Cinematograph CAMERA (sic). Page Two carries the FOREWORD (sic). Sentences Two and Three: “The Bell & Howell Standard Cinematograph Camera is not an experiment. The first Bell & Howell Cameras, built in 1907, are in use today by the side of later models.” Some of you remember. An official text available via this link http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Bell-and-Howell-Company-Company-History.html reads: During its first year of business, over 50 percent of the new company's business involved repairing movie equipment made by other manufacturers. What made the company famous, however, was its development of equipment that addressed the two most important problems plaguing the movie industry at the time: flickering and standardization. Flickering in the early movies was due to the effects of hand-cranked film, which made the speed erratic. Standardization was needed as divergences in film width during these years made it nearly impossible to show the same film in any two cities within the United States. By 1908, Bell and Howell refined the Kinodrome projector, the film perforator, and the camera and continuous printer, all for the 35mm film width. With the development of this complete system, and the company's refusal to either manufacture or service products of any other size than the 35mm width, Bell and Howell forced film standardization within the motion picture industry. In 1910, the company made a cinematograph camera entirely of wood and leather. When the two men learned that their camera had been damaged by termites and mildew during an exploration trip in Africa, they designed the first all metal camera. Others say that the so-called Black Box, the first Bell & Howell camera with wooden housing and black leather finish, was introduced in 1909 (George Eastman House). Jack Robinson in his 1982 company history book tells us that Martin Johnson took the first two BB with him to Africa in 1910. Only after his return “Bell & Howell learned ( . . . ) cameras had been destroyed by termites and mildew.” So about one and a half years time left to develop the Standard which became ready in 1912. There is still less time for Bell & Howell, first and foremost Howell, to develop a film perforator (1908), a continuous contact printer (1911) and more for a “complete system”. I don’t believe it. How did Bert Howell acquire the knowledge about aluminum alloy sand casting as a mechanic absorbed by repair work? Where did that Standard come from?

Between 1960 and 1963. I can tell by the fact that the 200 series projectors were manufactured since 1960 and that the H cameras' housing was modified in 1962-63, available mid 1963.

A pity in the city but also a chance for some venturesome youngsters Let there be chemicals ! (It’s Raining Cans)

I am sure you can purchase non-perforated stock with FilmoTec, I know the people, was their lab client and reseller. Other non-perforated film is, Brian is right, microfilm but there you need to take more than only hundred foot. http://www.fujifilm.com/products/microfilm/pdf/specification_sheet.pdf http://graphics.kodak.com/docimaging/US/en/products/micrographics/microfilm/source_document_microfilms/index.htm?_requestid=7650

John, you can buy unperforated stock in Germany. http://www.filmotec.de/English_Site/english_site.html

Dominic, thank you in my turn It's nice to feel your attachment to Longley as, let me say, relative in soul. Do you know what brought me to my semi-conclusion? It is the remnant 1888 camera of which I can download picture files and try to interpret them. Of course, some general knowledge of motion-picture film cameras helps very much. There's a draught of its mechanism with Rawlence, and I wonder who made it. A technician of the NMM, maybe http://www.leodis.net/display.aspx?resourceIdentifier=2005216_60421389&DISPLAY=FULL The other camera could have contained a better mechanism, perhaps with one or two sprocket drums, with freely acting loops, for perforated celluloid film. When founding Bell & Howell company Howell was 27 of age, Bell ten years older. http://books.google.ch/books?id=2PJICBnrpDgC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=donald+j.+bell+bell+%26+howell&source=bl&ots=8VtFiI70va&sig=tML1cYaUAOsjbqD_D60riHcbdGk&hl=de&ei=Hg1YTLitEpCmsQaI-8WOCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q=donald%20j.%20bell%20bell%20%26%20howell&f=false Note the phrase on page 48: “Within a year, however, the pair had innovated a film perforator, a camera, and a continuous printer, all based on 35mm width.” Fishy to me

Something? http://www.filmforever.org/Edgecodes.pdf

I'm not saying that Le Prince staged a train disappearance. Please read attentively, everybody. These are citations. Christopher Rawlence is the author of The Missing Reel, The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures, Collins, 1990. German translated edition 1991 This is all the information I have. Rawlence, page 263: “I am jumping to conclusions. Who’s to say what passed between them? People confess to sins other than failure and seek solutions other than suicide.” (On the last meeting at Bourges) Then: “One day, in the course of my long search, I tracked down a Le Prince painting in Wakefield Art Gallery. It was a large gouache portrait of an elderly in-law. In the hope of discovering some overlooked clue, I asked the gallery curator if I could look at the painting’s provenance. Someone else had been there before me. In the margin, alongside a typed ‘Painted by Le Prince in 1888’, I found a pencil-scrawled note which read: ‘Le Prince was gay. He was having an affair with his father-in-law. He engineered his own disappearance to avoid a scandal.’ The observation was signed.” What I am after is the language of the things. People can be lying, the world is full of crap and thunder and initiation stories. But technique doesn't swindle. Metallurgy was headed by Chicago 110 years ago. When I read Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Giedion, 1948, that time comes to life in me. Let’s not forget that social classes were still intact at the end of the 19th century. Although Longley might have been the cleverest guy, Le Prince remains the mastermind. Regime of the pen So, in one hand I can’t trust this Howell. I don’t trust that Kästner, either. Erich Kurt Kästner, born 1911, not to be confused with the author Erich Kästner, born 1899, was an employee with Arnold & Richter since 1932. He was credited with having part in the invention of the mirror shutter reflex viewfinder. Howell is credited with so many ideas. Some too frequent Where to do your thoughts travel?

Anyone else interested in pioneers? Scott and Rawlence state that Le Prince had built two single lens cameras by 1888. One (of them) is at home with the National Media Museum of Bradford, England. The other . . . In his 1985 L'affaire Lumière: Du mythe à l'histoire, enquête sur les origines du cinéma (Lumière affair: From myth to History, report on the origins of cinema), journalist Léo Sauvage quotes a note from Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library, “Le Prince died in Chicago in 1898, voluntary disappearance at the family’s request. Homosexuality.” This statement was made by a famous historian visiting the Dijon library, but kept secret. Gras showed this note to Sauvage in 1977. Wikipedia Chicago? Who actually built the devices? James William Longley, a mechanic of Leeds. Rawlence: “The metalwork was executed by Jim Longley. Of all the assistants, Adolphe remembered, Longley was the least dispensable. After working on the sixteen-lens projector at Rhodes Brothers, he began working directly for Le Prince. Longley was no mere helper, but something of an inventor in his own right. He was known locally for his ticket-issuing machines which were later fitted on Leeds omnibuses and on the turnstiles of a city cricket ground. One of his devices issued brass checks. A later machine produced boxes of matches. Le Prince found in Longley a mind already grappling with the mechanics of advancing identically shaped components. It was to serve him well when it came to problem-solving in the field of moving-picture technology.” (page 218) Albert Summers Howell was born April 17, 1879. He was nine at the time Le Prince turned the crank of a chronophotographic if not cinematographic apparatus. Howell is generally said to be the inventor of the famous shuttle movement known from the Standard Camera of 1911-12. My question is, why should Mr. Howell be the inventor of an intermittently acting pair of leaves when Longley or Le Prince might have worked with such twenty years before? That is what he took with him in 1890. Probably not physical, rather stored in his mind. Lots of european workers in Chicago, prospect of a World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Bell & Howell Company became surrected with a capital fault early in 1907 which nobody tells the implication of. Who held those 500 Dollars? He who fed the knowledge from behind? It's a small step from a brass plate slapping against the aperture plate to a shuttle moving up and down an aperture plate with fixed pins, isn't it?

Carlsons state 19 pounds with 400-ft. load.

I think an NPR can be compared to a EBM or an EL. Electric motors, crystal control, bayonet. A spring Paillard-Bolex H 16, although no longer my favourite, is something to itself. The simplest H 16 M is not heavy. It offers same mechanical features like a Rex, 12 through 64 fps, instant and time exposure, rewind, lace-up. Motors may be attached, crystal synch. One can also pimp up the spring drive by removing its stop(s). Better even is an opening in the housing for a rewind key to be attached to the spring core. The first H's in the 1930ies had this. But the Eclair is noiseless. Better viewfinder, too.

There have always been amateurs with standard film cameras, you know, 1⅜" wide film. Small gauge home cinema really began after WW I. Charles Pathé and George Eastman agreed upon that only safety stock shall be given into the hands of amateurs. The so-called Latham loop is the idea of Eugène Augustin Lauste (1857—1935), a former Edison employee. Hence the verbal-oral confusion with the “lost loop” in camera, to be found in Anton Wilson's Cinema Workshop for instance. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1859—1934), who left Edison in May 1895, teamed with Casler, Marvin, and Koopman to incorporate the AMC. Since Dickson was the one who designed practically all Edison movie apparatus as well as that 1⅜" pellicle, perforated along both edges with rounded-corner rectangular holes, he knew precisely how to circumvent the Edison patents and caveats. Thus, he had built the Biograph camera, a very special thing. This camera takes film 2¾" wide and perforates it right during the run. The outpunch drops nicely beneath the tripod leaving a trace which sometimes helped the Edison spies locate the enemy's activities. The camera had also a suction pump that secured an even film before the aperture. More wide film was in use before 1900. Oscar Depue purchased 60-mm. stock from Eastman in 1898. The Lumière prepared for the World Fair of 1900 with 75-mm. film. The first small gauge was the split format, Dickson's width cut in half. You have the Birtac in 1898, the Biokam of Darling and Wrench around 1900, “La Petite” of Hughes at the same time, Vitak of Wardell plus the Kino of Ernemann in 1902.

It goes beyond that: Außenaufnahmen waren zunächst gar nicht möglich. Abhilfe schuf seit dem 30. April 1935 das sogenannte Zwischenfilmverfahren, bei dem bei Tageslicht-Verhältnissen die Bilder zunächst mit einer auf einen umgebauten Möbelwagen montierten speziell umgebauten Arriflex-Filmkamera auf riesige Rollen von konventionellem 35mm-Filmmaterial aufgenommen wurden. Der belichtete Film wurde dann aber nicht mehr in eine Kassette zurückgeführt, sondern durch einen lichtdichten Kanal, der zugleich das Stativ ersetzte, in den speziell ausgestatteten Möbelwagen unter der Kamera (den sog. Zwischenfilmwagen) geleitet und dort sofort kontinuierlich entwickelt und fixiert. Noch in nassem Zustand direkt aus dem Fixierbad kommend wurde das Film-Negativ ohne weitere Unterbrechung durch einen Projektor geführt, mit Rückprojektion auf eine Mattscheibe geworfen und dort wiederum mit einer auf Negativ geschalteten Fernsehkamera aufgenommen. Wikipedia in German, article Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, section Technik, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernsehsender_Paul_Nipkow Translation Initially, exterior shots were not possible. Remedy came with the so-called intermediate film process since April 30, 1935, with which the pictures were taken on top of a modified furniture van by the aids of an adapted Arriflex camera and huge rolls of 35-mm. stock. The exposed material would not have been brought back to the magazine but through a light-proof channel that acted as support at the same time, down into the van where it got developed and fixed. Still wet directly out of the fixing bath the negative would be run through a projector in order to produce an image on a ground glass that in turn was scanned by a inversely switched television camera. More evidence: http://www.deutsches-museum.de/sammlungen/ausgewaehlte-objekte/meisterwerke-i/arriflex/ http://www.retrothing.com/2006/05/arri_breathes_n.html http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/0,1518,684584,00.html http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/zeitreisen/745437/ http://www.cinematographer.org.au/freestyler/gui/files/AC31_pt4_pp46-60.pdf

Thank you so far Injection moulding began in 1906 in the U. S. A. if not earlier and had a start in this country in 1919. Injecta Inc. had a license agreement with Dohler since 1920. The base for this can be found with printing letter moulder Mergenthaler. Sand casting is subject to some shrinkage. Not so injection. When I first made measurements on an ARRIFLEX I thought that there were a few percent to be added which is wrong. It would be very interesting to find imperial values in the mechanism such as distances, axles diameters, and the like. Can the ARRIFLEX have come into being in an enterprise whose 34 and 33 year old founders engage a 21 year old as designer? What about the fact that Richter as well as Arnold were more or less tinkerers while the design of a movie film camera in general is a thing of well trained specialists? Who of Kästner, Arnold, and Richter had enough knowledge in aluminum alloy injection moulding to feel at ease with the task? The ARRIFLEX has a closeness to the Bell & Howell Filmo-Eyemo. Its turret is similar. An integrated viewfinder in the lid. The claw movement near the “intermittent feed mechanism” in the U. S. patent 1,834,948 issued to Albert Summers Howell on December 8, 1931. The Arnold & Richter camera was at at the Olympic Games of 1936. Somehow a prototype could have been at the 1932 Games. Bell & Howell opened a branch in Los Angeles in 1932. The sloping top certainly goes back to the Debrie Grande Vitesse of 1921 (Méry).

Friends, I have a plea. Would anybody in possession of an old ARRIFLEX make some measurements on the camera body, on its mechanism, on the gears? I wonder if there are imperial values besides metrical ones. You know it's a German product but I still have the shadow of a doubt for it, namely that the cast housing or all cast parts would be American. The point is that passage of H. Mario Raimondo Souto in his book The Technique of the Motion Picture Camera, 1967 ff., on page 44: Viewfinding by displacing the film and substituting a ground glass does indeed provide an accurate image devoid of parallax, but it is not practical when shooting a moving subject. We have seen that when framing by this method, the camera cannot be operating, and if panning or travelling has to be effected, the operator must use the monitor viewfinder as a guide. To obviate this problem, August Arnold, engineer of the German company Arnold & Richter, developed in 1931 the ingenious reflex viewfinder system. Who would have mastered aluminum alloy casting in Germany around 1935? There is no ARRIFLEX without a cast housing, is there? Curious Simon

They should just not run like clockwork. A spring motor camera in fine shape purrs rather quietly. I've once heard or haven't a Bolex which stopped midst-take in the desert after it's been disassembled at Yverdon, cleaned, and reassembled. The fine sand together with the grease acted as a grinding agent. Those gears were lapped. Unfortunately, the axles and bearings were ground out. The H camera is not built for repair. In spite of all the accessories you mention the mechanism has to be primed to the housing in order to not leak in any light. Which other camera needs this?

I can only agree. Problem is that almost all amateur cameras have not been serviced as they should. A freshly bought camera could already have been one to two years old. The old time lubricants slowly oxidized, disintegrated with warmth, got stuck in the cold, so after another two years they would all have needed grease and oil in those critical places like the upper governor bearing, shutter bearings, gear bearings to the dozen, and the claw bearings. The Paillard-Bolex was sold using watchmaker's slang but it wasn't built for easy service. In the end it is a throw-away product like Pathé, Victor, Kodak, Nizo, Siemens, Agfa, Beaulieu, Eumig, Wollensak, Revere, Keystone, Emel, Ditmar, Zeiß. Only Bell & Howell has different stuff inside. Even after 80 or soon 90 years you give a Filmo a cleaning plus the right oil, it will run like on the first day.

With Bolex http://www.bolex.ch/NEW/contact.php?p=8

When I had your post on there was an ad, some electronic games, saying: Ancient Roman Empire Glory So let it be Millennium. The ancient roman annus hides in there.

Hey, Ted Sounds like an individual modification for animation work. A picture of that lever could help decide whether it is original or added. Classes were photographed on 120 film and bigger until the seventies, at least in my country. Please read the forum rules with regard to names. S.