Movies and Film: Tracking the History of Camera Movement

Tracking the History of Camera Movement

The camera has not always moved the same way in all film eras. Conventions, technologies, and audience expectations change from decade to decade, and sometimes from year to year.

The Primitive Era

In one sense the camera moved very early in the history of cinematography even while seeming very still. It could be made to move to catch the light of the sun. This was the idea behind the Black Maria, the moveable shooting stage Edison used to keep daylight as long as possible.

For the most part, however, the earliest filmmakers made film with a largely stationary camera. Despite the fact that some of the most important photographic moments leading up to the invention of moving pictures—the Eadward Muybridge motion experiments and the Edward Marey camera "gun"—were all about the movement of birds, horses, the human body, the early moving picture cameras were stationary because it was thought by early moviemakers that a moving camera would only confuse spectators (much the same way that the early filmmakers thought that editing would be confusing to audiences.)

As well as being concerned about confusing the audience, early cinematographers wanted to keep the camera fixed in a particular place to make the audience feel privileged. The camera was stationed several feet away from the action, in a perpetual medium shot, in order to give all members of the audience the illusion that they had a front-row center seat at the theater. Though containing some interesting examples of editing, the silent Sarah Bernhardt vehicle—Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la reine lisabeth, France, 1912)—is quite without camera movement, putting the spectator front-row center.

Further, the technology was so tricky that moving the camera could be rather cumbersome. (Because Edison was wedded to the idea of a motorized camera, his equipment was not as mobile as the hand-cranked cameras of the silent era.) It is also generally more expensive to move the camera both because it takes more time to plan moving shots, and because movement often requires its own technology: Steadicam equipment, tracks, helicopters, airplanes, trucks, and so on.

Shot of camera, crane, and boom microphone in exterior location for Sweet November (1968).

However, cameramen eventually became more adventurous. Cranes and dollies were widely used by the 1920s, and the steadicam became a standard item by the 1960s (enabling, for example, the Vietnam War photography that brought the sounds and movements of the war into the living rooms of middle America for the first time). The camera became progressively more mobile as each decade passed, so that even standard Hollywood light urban comedy could easily contain exterior shots. (A slight hiccup interrupted this mobility when early sound equipment made the camera stationary once more in the late 1920s.)

The continued evolution of film technologies offers at present digital and special effects that enable illusions of camera movements not previously possible: being able, for example, to fall to one's death from atop a skyscraper in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) or, with 3-D modeling, to navigate in virtual spaces like the computer CPU in Tron (1982).