Newsletter
The Bewitching Machine
by A.Cetrángolo
I must admit that having an ARRI in an enclosed area could be quite intimidating for a regular person. Like a fighting bull staring at you in the arena; standing there, fixed on you, defying, calling you, provoking… you can’t just ignore its presence once it’s set on a tripod.
It doesn’t speak, but still steals the conversation requesting personal attention. Its beauty and its possibilities demand a response from you, but it takes your breath. Then, when you finally subdue to its attraction, you walk closer in hesitation, mesmerized, circumventing it from a distance while considering how to approach it, thinking if you’d ever had a chance to touch it, to tame its power, to make it yours, to dream dreams together about a better world, about building bridges among peoples, and about bringing beauty, peace and hope to the nations, to remote and unknown places where you can’t go. You feel been caught under a spell. Lost. Bewitched. But it shouldn’t be so.
Surely ARRIs are dream machines; and once putting your hands on them, will cause you never be satisfied by the work of any other camera again. As they’re rarely alone, here comes the crew, and soon as you see it working, you notice that the ARRI is rather meek and humble like a plow ox; it would subdue its power to your will with precision and grace. You’ll see it floating smooth and sweet down from a crane and halting on a pose with majesty, and traveling silently on silvery tracks like a spirit in motion. It’ll respond to you just like this.
The first time I handled an ARRI was at a film school in a hands-on camera lesson held by Photography Director and Cinematographer Alberto Basail, who was at the moment working on the film Gatica in Buenos Aires. I was the only woman attending his course, but the love for photography is highly contagious and my father passed it on to me telling me that there was no remedy for it. I played with his Rolleiflex camera from an early age, my older brother dismantled it many times so I knew its mechanics intimately from the inside out; cameras did not exert intimidation on me. But ARRIs are much bigger and impress 24 images per second continuously from when pressing down the trigger until you press it again which will bring the shooting to a full stop. I stepped in naturally when PD Basail called me saying ’You sit here and hug it like a friend, as an extension of you. Until you don’t conceive it like a part of your body, you won’t be able to produce good images', and I knew from his eyes that he too was in love with it. The camera wore many scratches and bumps; who knew what terrains was challenged to cross… PD Basail was being praised for having caught on high slow motion, (80fps to be precise, he said it was) the facial expressions of a pro-boxer when being hit on the jaw to a knockout. PD Basil certainly knew how to make an ARRI deliver what he needed from the get-go. I wanted that too, I wasn’t shy about it. Soon enough I was granted the funds to produce my final project on 35mm film at Universidad del Cine, and I brought the ARRI home for a long weekend. I could barely sleep. ARRIs are rarely bought; they’re either rented or stolen. Both are popular in practice since film directors don’t consider theft as a crime, but a necessity. In fact, all my crew knew that Dir. Werner Herzog stole a camera from the Munich Film School in order to shoot his opera Prima Fitzcarraldo in the Amazonian jungle, and I didn’t want to be a cause of this disgrace. On a rolling schedule, the crew settled the ARRI on a rolling platform of a curved traveling track and my father built a simile steady-cam structure with rubber tensors to swing it to cause a flowing effect with a 135mm lens. I had 35mm film stock in 4 tin cases, 30kilo lights, a gorgeous location, and a large crew to bring things to an end. We went with the team heads to the Kodak Color lab to see the final impressions of the light on the film emulsion. The images were so beautiful, that right there I felt terribly ill. I had many opportunities to see ARRIs at work afterward. But then, film productions became too expensive, labs and screening theaters had a hard time surviving, people watched movies at home, and the film industry inevitably rolled on a downfall. Film directors were utterly displeased with the results of the explorative efforts caught by the raising magnetic videotape productions. Most like me just didn’t even try. We all knew that images produced in any other format would take a long while to catch up to the standards of film aesthetics. At the time, I moved to New York City and after a few years working with visiting crews from California, I went back to work on television. With TV studio cameras you have to work with intention if you expect images to be produced in a pleasing manner; they tend to be flat, so directors chose to emphasize more on the narrative aspect of the medium. Everything has its beauty I guess. I moved about with other brands, but there was ferocious competition all along out there in the image-making industry for big companies paring up with digital technologies. And they did catch up on quality when they started designing image recorders on 4K with data that could be stored in a manageable format and all at an affordable price, and finally ARRIs became no longer an unreachable dream for producers.
When life brought me to China some years ago I never thought of encountering an ARRI. Last weekend I was struck by its presence in a hallway crowded with film equipment and a busy crew. Was it real? Was it stolen? Here you see it working at YIAA Shenzhen, with all its magic, hypnotizing everyone around with its moves and meekness, ready to effortlessly make anyone shine when the lights turn on.
If you’ve been caught in its spell, you can learn to understand how it works, how to master its art, to make it like an extension of yourself, to process your dream burdens, and to let it create so strikingly beautiful images that will make you cry.
By A. Cetrángolo for
The YIAA Insider - Newsletter, 2023
Creative Media Department
Btec Int. Film, TV & New Media
Shenzhen, P.R.C.
April 2, 2023
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