The Story of Camera #1
In the video below, Kartemquin co-founder and artistic director Gordon Quinn describes the history, technology and practice behind “Camera #1” — the very first Kartemquin camera. Used to film documentaries from our early years such as Home for Life, Inquiring Nuns, and Marco, the camera is unique due to its custom-modified crystal-sync sound set-up, created by Danny Auerbach in the early 1960’s at a fraction of the cost of other similar models in existence.
For more on how Camera #1 works, and some of the other historic technology we still keep at 1901 W Wellington, read Heather McIntosh’s article “A Visit to Kartemquin Films: Uncovering a Documentary Technology Trove.”
Video Transcript Below:
Gordon Quinn 0:06
This was Kartemquin’s first camera. We used it on Home for Life, Thumbs Down and Inquiring Nuns, and Marco and all of those films. And we were all very excited by cinema verite, by what we saw happening with people like Leacock-Pennebaker, Drew, The Maysles and this idea of filming reality as it unfolded before the camera.
When we started making Home for Life, that was really the beginning of this kind of filmmaking for us. And the thing that’s critical is how you record the sound and the relationship between the camera and the audio.
Leacock-Pennebaker cameras were $20,000 and we never could have afforded that. And Mike Shea, the old LIFE photographer that I was learning to shoot film from, had bought one in New York brought it back to Chicago, and it had all the elegance of the slat magazine in back and it balanced a little better than this camera.
They were crystal controlled or they were tuning fork controlled in the very beginning. The camera was running at an absolute speed, and the recorder was running at an absolute speed. So you didn’t need a wire between the two, you would be able to sync the sound to the picture later, because both had been recorded with a way of getting back to an absolute speed. So what I did was I got a General Camera II conversion of an Auricon, initially it was $2,000, they put this little adapter on the top, they slice off the top of the camera, so that you can put a Mitchell mag on it. I bought my first lens from Al Maysles, this is the lens that film Sophia Loren.
You see how short the finder is here on the lens, there’s a prism in front of the lens, most of the light is going to the film, but a little bit of it’s coming into this finder so that I can see.
I used to have these big rubber rings on the lens, so that my hand would come up like this, I’m actually zooming and focusing at the same time. But I had to have a cord going to the audio guy, it didn’t have the crystal control. If you were following real action, and there were two of you, and you had this cord, you know, one guy goes on one side of a telephone pole and the other guys it goes on the other side of street pole and it was just a very awkward situation. And I’m talking to a friend of mine, and he’s a physicist, Danny Auerbach and he says, “Well, you know, if you give me the crystal signal, I can build you an inverter, you know, that’ll fit right on the camera.” And so I figured it was worth the risk.
And Danny built this, this was the prototype, this is the first one that we had. And it was just way ahead of its time, this converts the battery power. So here’s the battery. And this converts the DC power to AC, the crystal signal was right on the camera, it went into the inverter. And I was wireless.
And that was one of the dreams you wanted to be able to set the camera down and be like a human being with the people that you were dealing with. Because a lot of what we were doing was creating relationships with people. And you could walk around with people you, could get in their car and film in the car. You could go anywhere and do anything.
Gordon Quinn 4:14
Okay. Right and do you reframe when you get, you know about that, like from editing?
Morgan Johnson 4:23
Like?
Gordon Quinn 4:24
If you reframe…and you can record these parts too and then you can make a little comedy. This is the thing that happens when you film a filmmaker, they’re always saying well maybe the light should be over there and maybe you should do this and you know they’re always interfering with whatever you’re doing. I’ve I saw someone who actually made a little comedy out of it.
