Developments in camera mobility technique and practice were even more closely tied to self-conscious visual virtuosity. Handheld camerawork had become a common device in Hollywood films of the 1970s thanks to the influence of documentaries and the films of the French New Wave. But into the 1980s, other techniques, such as the Steadicam and the Louma Crane, offered a similar degree of mobility but without image instability; as the films themselves lost a narrative emphasis on realism, these other mobile camera technologies were preferred.
The Steadicam combined the practical attributes of hand-held cameras with the smoothness of dollies. In “Steadicam: An Operator’s Perspective,” published in two parts in American Cinematographer in April and May of 1983, Steadicam operator Ted Churchill provided an exhaustive discussion of the device’s prac-tical and stylistic advantages for filmmakers. While Churchill’s discussion was enthusiastic to the point of evident bias, his description of the Steadicam’s pos-sibilities points toward prevailing attitudes to stylistic flourishes more generally, and particularly with regard to camera movement. At first, Churchill stresses the apparatus’s practical advantages, noting that the Steadicam was often neces-sitated by “geographic necessity,” in sets and locations, rather than its use in creating “flashy” shots.42 Churchill’s professional investment in the device and its use comes out more markedly in his discussion of the Steadicam as a stylistic choice. On the heels of his discussion of practical applicability, he allows that the Steadicam “does have one important non-technical function: it encourages innovation.” This accounted for its use in television commercials to capture the attention of “a largely disinterested audience.”43 Regarding its use in narratives, he wrote, “There is little that can match a wide-angle Steadicam shot in pure kinetic energy. It makes for an eye-catching opening, is great for fast intercut-ting.”44 It could even replace the need for cutting: “actually charging into the ECU makes all the difference when it comes to exciting an audience as familiar with cutting as they are with breathing.” At the same time, “Steadicam’s ability to rapidly change perspectives, to make highly energetic moves, works wonderfully with quick cutting, creat[ing] enormous excitement for audiences.”45 However much Churchill’s professional enthusiasm got the better of him here, he none-theless isolated many of the uses to which the Steadicam had been put by 1983, and in particular its capacity and frequent use for kinetic, virtuosic movements.
As the period continued, Steadicam became an increasingly central com-ponent of the cinematographer’s arsenal, and its operators key members of a production crew. Robert Richardson reported that 50 percent of the shots in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were executed with a Steadicam,46 and Matthew Leonetti reported using Steadicam for 50–60 percent of his shots for Strange Days (1995).47 One celebrated example of the technique appeared in Scorsese’s Good-fellas (1990, d.p. Michael Ballhaus): a lengthy, flashy Steadicam shot proceeding
from the street through the bowels of a supper club to the stage area. The device’s use was not restricted to filmmakers as kinetic as Scorsese, Stone, or Bigelow, or even to films oriented toward action, like The Rookie (Clint Eastwood, 1990, d.p. Jack Green) or Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998, d.p. Robert Fraisse): con-tinuous takes snaking around characters could be effective in the context of
“naturalist” dramas like Fried Green Tomatoes (Jon Avnet, 1991, d.p. Geoffrey Simpson).48 Still, some began to react against “overuse” of the Steadicam; Ste-phen Goldblatt disliked Steadicam because he was unable to exercise a sufficient degree of control over the image, as he would be unable to look through the view-finder himself.49
While the Steadicam offered a flexible solution to camera movement in diffi-cult production circumstances, a whole new set of systems offered remote-control mobility, eliminating even the physical restriction of hands-on camera operators.
By the end of the 1980s, a computerized motion control system allowed for the easy replication of camera movements, useful for composite shots on effects-heavy films like Back to the Future 2 (Robert Zemeckis, 1989, d.p. Cundey) and Batman Returns. The Louma Crane, utilized extensively on To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985, d.p. Robby Müller), combined the functions of a remote-operating camera, a Steadicam, and a crane to effect its camera move-ments. In an American Cinematographer article, writer Ric Gentry enthused,
“What makes the Louma altogether revolutionary is its ability to obtain perspec-tives that are impossible for an operator, behind the camera, to otherwise assume, and, moreover, to move forward and backward, up and down, and turn 360°
in any direction with utmost fluency and speed.”50 The sheer variety of devices enabling types of camera movements, including the Pogocam (used on Point Break and True Lies, among others) and the Spacecam (used on The Shawshank Redemption [Frank Darabont, 1994, d.p. Deakins] and Waterworld [Kevin Reyn-olds, 1995, d.p. Dean Semler]), testifies to the value placed on cinematographic innovation in this arena.51
For cheaper productions, handheld camerawork remained an affordable alter-native to the Steadicam. Discussing The Terminator, Adam Greenberg stated that
“shooting hand-held gives an energy to a scene you can’t get any other way”; while he and James Cameron had considered using Steadicam, “budgetary constraints precluded that.”52 It was not until the end of the 1990s that one began again to see handheld used more widely, not only to import kinetic energy, but as an aspect of a documentary-influenced realist aesthetic. Whereas Janusz Kaminski used a handheld camera on about 60 percent of Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993), he esti-mated its use on Saving Private Ryan as 90 percent, so as to mimic World War II documentary footage, but in the most precisely calibrated, artificial manner:
“For handheld work, we used Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker, which is an ingenious device. You can dial in the degree of vibration you want with vertical and horizontal settings, and mount it to a handheld camera, a crane, whatever.”53
What motivations, or justifications, were offered for the abundance of camera movement in films of the 1980s and 1990s? In the action genre, camera move-ment equated to “energy”; a mobile camera could complemove-ment the movemove-ments of characters in the frame, but also impart kinetic impact to scenes with rel-atively little happening. The use of near-constant camera movement for pure kinetic effect can be seen in films like Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988, d.p. De Bont), Point Break, and indeed most action films and thrillers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Frantic characters in motion provided both opportunities for camera movement, and an alibi for it. Speaking of shooting Patriot Games (Philip Noyce, 1992), Donald McAlpine “notes that the thriller genre has evolved to a point where the audience expects to be dazzled by moving camerawork.”54 For Michael Bay, a constant level of motion became a signature. On The Rock, John Schwartzman said, “We shook the cameras a lot in action sequences, by banging on dollies or shaking iris rods. When we used car mounts, I told my grips, ‘Keep the bolts loose, we want these cameras to shake.’”55 Speaking of Eraser (1996, d.p. Greenberg), director Chuck Russell described his aim in terms that could describe norms of action filmmaking across this period and since: “Our overall approach to shooting this film was that if the shot itself didn’t have some energy, we didn’t want to do it.”56
The lesson of these films—that camera movement in itself can impart energy—
was taken up across genres, including period pictures. For Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), a society drama, Stuart Dryburgh told American Cin-ematographer that “the camera is in a state of constant motion throughout the film, as every shot was executed on a dolly.” The rationale for this was partly about the story, but also about breaking with convention. Dryburgh explained,
“Jane sees this as quite a modern story and therefore felt that it should be quite modern in its treatment. But we also kept the camera moving in order to main-tain a sort of emotional restlessness and a sense of not being quite sure of what is going on.”57 That camera movement was itself seen as a way of contemporizing the film speaks to a use of style as part of a film’s appeal to audiences. Speak-ing of a resolutely contemporary film, Clockers, Spike Lee perhaps indicates the economic importance of contemporary visual style more honestly than most: “I want vibrant energy, movement and life in my films,” he explains. “Shooting any other way, for me, is too much like television. It costs $7.50 to see a movie today, plus extra for parking, popcorn and soda. If you don’t give the audience some-thing interesting to watch, they’re going to stay right on that sofa at home, where they have 150 channels to choose from.”58
Likewise, independent filmmakers found that striking camera movements, if they could be created inexpensively, could distinguish their films in the market-place, and even garner mainstream and critical attention. Thus, creative solutions were the order of the day to achieve energetic motion shorn of the documentary feel of hand-held work. On Blood Simple, Sonnenfeld created camera movement
in one case by having members of the crew “[drag] me around on the floor hold-ing an Arri BL3 while lyhold-ing down on a sound blanket.” In other shots, he used Sam Raimi’s “Shakicam,” a two-inch-by-twelve-foot piece of lumber with a cam-era mounted on the middle carried by grips.59 At the same time, though, other independents distinguished themselves from the increasing hyperactivity of stu-dio films by using comparatively little camera movement, a relative degree of stasis signifying a certain kind of small-scale character drama, and a subdued classicism emphasizing dialogue and performance. An example is the minimalist aesthetic of a filmmaker like Tom DiCillo. “Camera movement was used judi-ciously in [Box of] Moonlight [1996, d.p. Paul Ryan], usually as a psychological exclamation point for important moments in the story. ‘Every single element of a film should serve what’s going on in the film,’ DiCillo declares. ‘Not one frame should be purposeless, and the same goes for camera moves.’”60 That independent cinema would become a home for this sort of unobtrusive craft, in contrast to Hollywood’s increasing hyperbolism, indicates how much cinematographic style had changed in the studio system since the classical period.