Foreword
I have just been on the most rewarding Steadicam job of my career. I’m 58 years old and I bicycled to work every day in Paris, as eager and excited as a kid. The last shot, at the end of the last day was, I believe, my lifetime-best work; and may have shown a glimpse into the future of my invention.
La Traviata, live from Paris, June 3rd and 4th, 2000. Four separate half-hour segments broadcast live to 120 countries from four historic Paris locations. Photographed by Vittorio Storaro, produced by Andrea Andermann, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and conducted by Zubin Mehta. The world press called it ‘a mad risky high-wire act’ on the part of the largely Italian crew.
Via microwave our shots flew across Paris to a monitor on Zubin’s podium in the ‘Salle Wagram’. A fixed camera beamed his conducting back to TV screens hidden on the set. The performers’ voices were captured by tiny hair-mikes and sent to Zubin’s earphone and we heard the RAI orchestra on hidden speakers. The whole works was mixed in real time, in six different video formats, and uplinked by satellite to every corner of the globe.
Act I, from the 17th century mansion which is now the Italian Embassy, was a ballet for three Steadicams and two dollies – each precisely choreographed to avoid being seen by the others. Act II required three Steadicams, two dollies and a crane in Marie Antoinette’s ‘Hameau’ at Versailles and includes an amazing 10 minute continuous Steadicam take by French master Valentin Monge (who shot part of it while walking on his knees in high grass!). Dollies and cranes were used exclusively for Act III, so we had time to get the Steadicams to the last location, and at 11.30 pm., in a tiny apartment on Isle St. Louis overlooking Notre Dame, I had the great joy of shooting the entire finale of Act IV as a single 25 minute uncut one-take Steadicam shot, in extreme emotional intimacy with the performers, as ‘Violetta’ approached her death at the window on the stroke of Notre Dame’s bells. I had never done ‘live’ before and had never ‘pulled’ my own zooms while operating Steadicam. The adrenalin rush of the former and the amazing power of the latter were a revelation to me.
After five weeks of rehearsal the live broadcasts came off perfectly, with but one brief video glitch in Act I, and the euphoria afterwards was astonishing. By the time my long, long shot faded to black most of our 90 crew members had made their way to the apartment and crowded inside, popping champagne corks and shouting our names as cheering rose from the crowd outside on the quay. The New York Times called this La Traviata production ‘a work for solo, orchestra and Steadicam’ and that’s just what it was.
Steadicam graduated from tool to instrument a long time ago but the New York Times statement implies that in the hands of an artist a brilliantly operated Steadicam can have an emotional impact of the same magnitude as music or lighting or art direction, and can seriously augment acting and direction. Storaro’s brilliantly designed Steadicam sequences could be profitably studied by people from all of the above disciplines, as well as, of course, Steadicam operators, for whom once again we may have inched up the bar.
The late Ted Churchill ‘invented’ the modern profession of ‘Steadicam Operator’ in 1980 with the publication of his famously funny pamphlet The Steadicam Operator’s Manual of Style. Ted was a genius of self-promotion. He anointed our fledgling occupation ‘The Last Great Job in the Business’ and became its first journeyman celebrity. Ted, in effect, invented Us (in the same sense, according to Harold Bloom, that Shakespeare invented Humanity).
Thereafter we were a profession. He imagined a future in which Steadicam Operators starred as the laconic, heroic cowboys of the movie biz (Ted called himself an ‘Arty Pack Mule’), and shucks, it all came true.
That summer I taught the first ever Steadicam Workshop, in Rockport Maine, to pass on what I had learned during my year on The Shining. Half of the students were beginners; the rest, including Ted, had either taught themselves or learned by lurching around my Philadelphia townhouse. Ted handed out the first edition of his pamphlet (to great acclaim) and his demeanour, wardrobe, dialogue and instant freeze-dried mythology were soon memorialized in his full page ads and much imitated to this day.
Ted himself would have loved the work on La Traviata but I’m not certain that some of our early cowboy-fiddlers would have had the patience for it. Practicing a single shot for four weeks, with the ensemble-artist discipline of the ‘violin-operator’ was a new experience for me, but as I settled into it, frame by frame, an intense collaboration developed between myself and the artists, between the intersecting optical and emotional trajectories of our work, which was simply more affecting than the sum of its parts. And there, I think, is where Steadicam is headed – beyond the physical stabilizing effect of the hardware to the undreamed-of artistry of its future operators.
Victorian gentlemen used to require a week of full-time instruction to wobble along on a bicycle, whereas kids today learn to ride in about 15 minutes. The trick of balancing on two-wheels was an exotic concept back then, but of course is now quite commonplace. Likewise, most people today have seen Steadicams being operated somewhere or other, and students now arrive at week-long Steadicam workshops already primed to acquire the basic Steadicam balancing trick – controlling the angle of the upper body so that the arm truly lifts ‘up’, thus floating the camera serenely within reach.
Steadicam operating requires, if not strength, an unusual combination of physical and mental agility – the ability to coordinate variously high exertions by the legs, back and hand, with delicate, artistically directed manipulations by the opposite hand (picture trying to simultaneously move and play a piano!). Your overworked brain has to ration and distribute your attention circularly between a dozen incompatible tasks; between composition and navigation, between the story-telling dynamics of the moving camera and the mundane need to not fall down. One reason it’s the ‘Last Great Job in the Business’ is simply because it uses everything you’ve got. A great Steadicam shot is, like other great human performances, primarily an act of the will. It requires feats of concentration and highly schooled instincts, yet (with the exception, of course, of Glenn Gould playing the piano) it usually ends up looking quite elegant, if seldom altogether effortless.
Serena Ferrara contacted me several years ago to request an interview for her Doctoral Thesis. I was impressed with her knowledge of film and its history, but certainly never expected her to show up as a student at the 1998 workshop in Umbria. I have observed that women, particularly those who have been dancers, are quicker than men to learn the balancing act that must be performed by the upper body, if the exertion required is to be manageable. However, Serena was the tiniest of all the 1000 or so people that I have taught, weighing herself not much more than the average Steadicam, and so we all expected her to be a dilettante, to give it a brief ‘doctoral’ try and retire to the sidelines to take notes. Serena, however, never backed off – her nerve and perseverance were inspiring, and she made it through the entire course, looking improbably graceful, if, at times, a bit like a miniature Margot Fonteyne trying to hold Nureyev aloft for minutes at a time.
Serena has gone on to write an important and equally graceful book about what we jokingly called, and now are beginning to believe might actually be, the ‘Noble Instrument.’ Steadicam: techniques and aesthetics is an uncanny literary companion to my long-term fascination with the physics, aesthetics and history of camera movement. I think ‘obsession’ is too strong a word, but I admit to having been inordinately preoccupied with these matters for most of my adult life. I am therefore gratified to see how comprehensively she has assembled all of it: the fossils and bones of my first experiments, the early instruments with their vestigial bumps and bits, the most complete deconstruction yet of the parade of models that followed, and all the stories and anecdotes and diagrams in between, including obscure interviews that light up missing pieces of the story and abundant references to the movies that tie it all together.
Serena advantageously arrived at the workshop with her thesis in hand, and was therefore able to test her academic conceptions of ‘cinema’ against torrents of real-world information from the front. Her book will therefore be invaluable to anyone who expects to learn how to operate Steadicam, since it straddles the intellectual chain-link fence that often separates theory from practice. I give a lecture periodically on the ‘Moving Camera’ at film schools and festivals, and I plan to crib shamelessly from her chapter on ‘Semiotics and Narrative’, and from her numerous, sometimes surprising, interviews.
Altogether, Steadicam: techniques and aesthetics is an excellent book in a field that is still distinctly under-populated. It is the first to combine insights from the world of film scholarship with hard-won Steadicam skills and lore obtained from real, and distinctly analog, life.
Garrett Brown
Philadelphia, September 2000
© Garrett Brown 2000