Steve Gainer’s Everything Cinematography
YouTube, 5 episodes
Social media suffers no shortage of lifeless movie channels. Yet, Steve Gainer’s Everything Cinematography is a welcome break from anonymous YouTubers endlessly reshuffling the same old talking points. The canon has long since settled. Refreshingly, Gainer focuses not on the movies but on the cameras and the operators responsible for these classics. For some – including Gainer – the archaic technology housed in the American Society of Cinematographers’ museum is treasure that rivals any mediaeval reliquary.
Why would anyone care about antiquated cine-film cameras? Celluloid is a long-dead shooting medium, and the derivative slop filling cinemas today means the art form is becoming less relevant with each passing year. Of course, this isn’t just a curated eBay page of dusty old cameras from granddad’s shoe cupboard. These are the tools that shaped our cultural heritage and our visual grammar – forceps that birthed the movies. We’re talking the actual hand-cranked camera Billy Bitzer shot Griffith’s Birth of a Nation with, and the camera Greg Toland and Orson Welles dug into the floor for Citizen Kane.
However familiar with these films we may be, looking at the tools used to make such works offers a refreshing new angle. Gainer tells us about the practical issues the pioneers faced and asks who the crazy fools were who risked life and limb to make movies.
For instance, cinematographer Bernard Mather was killed by a blow to the head from a frozen block blasted away from the pack ice surrounding the ship on Amundsen’s Arctic voyage. It’s obvious that Gainer holds such people in the same high regard that others reserve for Picasso or Turner.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Citizen Kane, yet despite the reverence for it, few consider the tools – and by extension the legions of people who made them. Gainer’s channel is a celebration of the pioneering spirit, both technical and human. Someone innovated these cameras, and real needs were met. For an industry that celebrates artistic creativity, it’s nice to see a skilled cinematographer focusing on the practical issues – and the equally important technological innovation that made the movies possible in the first place. Whatever Welles’ talents were, he still needed a director of photography, a crew and cutting-edge equipment.
Gainer makes clear that analogue technology has its own lustre. Seeing century-old technology functioning has its own necromantic fascination. That Gainer jumps up and down with glee as it does so, makes these machines more human. If it’s hard to imagine yourself enjoying the talk of pull-down mechanisms and slide-over parallax viewfinders, trust that Gainer sells it.
With all the forgotten mechanical marvels on show, it’s clear no-one’s going to get excited about today’s solid-state digital cameras a century from now. Nobody reveres last year’s iPhone. Circuit boards don’t have animus.
Anyone who has ever looked through a still or movie camera, or lost hours in Lightroom, Photoshop, or Premiere Pro will recognise something of themselves here. It’s perhaps hard for many to imagine how someone might be singularly focussed on making images to the exclusion of everything else. We photographers know it’s an obsessive’s pursuit, and Gainer helps us recognise something of ourselves in those pioneering fellow travellers from a century ago – these marvels didn’t just show us the stars and dreams of yesteryear, they help us realise there but for the grace of God went we.
The introduction to the ASC’s camera collection starts here and continues on Steve Gainer’s Everything Cinematography. Interview here.
Lee Russell Wilkes 