The Zoom

Nick Hall

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813587219
• eBook ISBN: 9780813587226
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. In The Zoom, Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television. From late 1920s silent features to the psychedelic experiments of the 1960s and beyond, the book describes how inventors battled to provide film and television studios with practical zoom lenses, and how cinematographers clashed over the right ways to use the new zooms. Hall demonstrates how the zoom brought life and energy to cinema decades before the zoom boom of the 1970s and reveals how the zoom continues to play a vital and often overlooked role in the production of contemporary film and television.  

1

Introduction

Zoom is an unmistakably twentieth-century word. It is an onomatopoeia of the late industrial age, brought into language by the steam train, the motorcar, and the jet engine. In one of its original meanings, it described the rapid upward flight of an aircraft—a sudden, noisy, bracing surge into the heavens. No wonder, then, that when an invention made it possible for cinematographers to quickly magnify their images without moving the camera, it should be called a zoom lens. On-screen, or through a viewfinder, the zoom shot creates an impression of being transported forward or backward at high speed. Not only is the zoom lens the creator of a special effect, but it is also a labor-saving device. An early advertisement promised that it offered “drama at the touch of a lever.”1 This bald overstatement is typical of one of the strangest, most interesting, and most divisive of film techniques. Both a technology and a technique, the zoom was available before the birth of cinema and developed alongside the industry. Breakthroughs in zoom technology have exerted a significant influence on film and television style and production logistics, yet the zoom has never been an industry changer. It is not irresistible, as sound and color have proved to be. Nor has it been abandoned or marginalized, like 3-D, CinemaScope, or Smell-O-Vision. Instead, since the 1930s, the zoom has been a constant and controversial presence in the notional kitbags of directors and cinematographers. For some, the zoom is a vulgar time saver, inherited from television and beloved of hacks and corner cutters. For others, it is the tool that most strongly distinguishes Robert Altman, Roberto Rossellini, and Alfred Hitchcock from their contemporaries. There are few cinematic techniques so immediately recognizable by audiences and fewer still that can elicit such violent and visceral objections.

This book presents a historical account of the zoom lens and zoom shot as it has developed and appeared in American film and television. It explores the zoom’s precedents in precinematic entertainment and first appearances in late silent and early sound features. It traces the complex web of inventions that led to the breakthrough zoom lenses of the twentieth century: in television, the Zoomar lens of the mid-1940s, and in film, the Angénieux 10:1 zoom lens, which followed in the 1960s. Alongside this account of technological history, the book discusses and analyzes the stylistic consequences of these inventions and improvements. This is not achieved exclusively through analysis of film images and sequences; the book discusses the ways in which filmmakers—especially directors and cinematographers—have accepted or rejected zoom lenses through negotiation and experimentation. The stylish, self-conscious use of the zoom by New Wave and TV Generation filmmakers in the 1960s presented a powerful challenge to the established “self-effacing” mode of filmmaking preferred by Hollywood cinematographers. But the story does not end with the dramatic and much-lampooned shock zooms of the 1970s. Afterward, zoom technology brought more subtle changes, playing a part in the “intensified” style of post-1980s cinema and enabling a refreshment of television style. Zoom lenses have become more commonplace in recent years, while zoom shots have been woven more successfully into film style and accepted more readily by the production culture. This book brings the story of the zoom lens and zoom shot as close as possible to the present moment.

Three broad periods can be discerned in the history of the zoom lens. Almost a century of development in zoom technology is made up of numerous individual case studies of new technologies, each of which follows its own path. Broadly, however, it represents a familiar pattern of invention, innovation, and diffusion.2 Until the late 1940s, zoom shots only rarely appeared in Hollywood features, and their use was no more widespread in newsreel or documentary film. This was largely because the zoom lenses that did exist were made in small batches and could not offer the optical clarity or brightness of equivalent prime (fixed focal-length) lenses. Despite the rarity of the zoom, the device was used in interesting and highly creative ways. When zooms do appear in late silent and early sound features, directors and cinematographers generally limit their use to one or two shots. But it is not reasonable to describe such shots as mere “trick shots” or “special effects”: they were carefully woven into broader stylistic and narrative choices. As the case studies in this book’s second chapter show, the use of the zoom to save effort in craning or dollying the camera, to emphasize the subjective psychological reactions of characters, and to emphasize moments of high drama or lavish production design were all rehearsed on a limited scale in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In the 1940s and 1950s, zoom lenses were manufactured in greater numbers than before. It is possible that in the 1930s, little more than a handful of Varo zoom lenses were manufactured by Taylor and Hobson. By contrast, after the Second World War, hundreds of Zoomar lenses were manufactured. Most of them were initially destined for electronic television cameras, but the successful film camera zooms manufactured by SOM-Berthiot and Angénieux—which arrived a little later—were similarly mass-produced and mass-marketed. In the broad history of the zoom, this is the point at which the technology was innovated—the moment when it was successfully introduced to the market as a stable, lasting product. That period laid the groundwork for the third, and current, phase in the history of the zoom lens: commercial production, diffusion, and ultimately ubiquity. If hundreds of Zoomar and Pan Cinor lenses were manufactured, then thousands of Angénieux 10:1 lenses were produced; since then, consumers and professionals alike have witnessed a rapid proliferation of zoom lenses, attached to and integrated within everything from professional motion picture cameras, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, to cheap camcorders.

Because the nature and application of these inventions as well as the industrial response to them changed across the decades, the nature of the evidence differs during each period. As my discussion of the zoom lens in the late 1920s and early 1930s demonstrates, the early history of the zoom lens is rather mysterious. Many of the earliest efforts to develop zooms have left little trace in the archives. For example, we know a little about the lenses developed at Paramount and by Joseph Walker. However, it is possible that other studios developed their own zoom lenses but never shared these trade secrets beyond studio walls and used their zooms (which they may have called by another name) only in films that have since been lost. In this case, such technology would be entirely invisible to the historian. The earliest history of the zoom lens, therefore, is an incomplete history reliant on what was written down, patented, or recalled years later. Almost completely absent from this part of the history is the “industrial debate” around the use of the zoom lens. It is safe to assume that the appropriate use of the zoom was a topic hotly debated by cinematographers. However, little to none of this debate was recorded in trade periodicals. The cinematographers of the day have died and cannot be interviewed. We can, therefore, only imagine discussions among the producers, directors, and cinematographers involved in the production of the 1920s and 1930s films highlighted by this book.

By the end of the book’s historical range, the problem is reversed. In the 1990s, the zoom—often rebranded as a “variable prime”—was more prevalent than ever. In twenty-first-century film, television, and digital media, there are so many zoom shots that describing them comprehensively would be an impossible and unrewarding feat. If the final chapter—which looks at the uses of the zoom since 1980—seems compressed, it is because a great deal of the “debate” around the zoom is no debate at all; rather, it is the continual restatement of attitudes, preferences, and received wisdom first developed in the 1970s. However, the conclusion of this book traces two gradual shifts: one toward the use of “variable primes,” the other toward the settling of the zoom into a number of specific referential categories. With some decades of history behind it, the zoom now evokes moods, eras, and genres in a way that was not possible when the technology was new and had a scant history of usage on which to draw. Recent ways of using the zoom make readily apparent what has always been true: the zoom is a device that, for much of its history, has been intermedial in its design and usage. Therefore, though it would be easier and tidier to look at film in isolation, as if there were not a porous border between film and television production, this book considers film and television together. It also looks out toward amateur filmmaking and video recording to consider the effect of the zoom across the broad field of the popular American moving image.

Across the chapters that follow, this book draws on three types of evidence. First, where possible, it delves into primary evidence of the research and development of new inventions, referring to original documents including patents, court papers, and studio scripts in order to trace the early development of zoom technologies. Second, the book examines discussions of the use of the zoom lens in the trade press in order to trace the ways in which directors, cinematographers, and other Hollywood film and television craftspeople have responded to the availability of the zoom lens at various points since the late 1920s. Third, alongside traditional trawls through paper copies of these periodicals, this book has benefited considerably from a wide range of technical journals now available via the Media History Digital Library and David Gleason’s American Radio History website, among other electronic sources.3 Finally, because it is unwise to take craft descriptions of creative practice at face value, this book analyzes films and television programs themselves so as to examine the impact of the zoom lens on the audience in the cinema or the viewer at home. Not all of the films and television shows significant to the early development of the zoom are available to the researcher—the gaps are especially problematic in early cinema and early postwar television—and so, like all histories, this book is to some degree an account of what has survived and been remembered. I have no doubt that there are “forgotten” zooms in early American film and early postwar American television; I hope that, where they survive, this book may help draw them to the surface. Equally, later chapters of the book aim to offer a detailed overview of developments in technology and style rather than an exhaustive account. While this book introduces new evidence and discusses the zoom from a range of new perspectives, the territory is not entirely untouched. In addition to the range of critical essays discussed in the introduction, several important works of film history have broadly mapped the history of the zoom. Most textbooks that discuss the zoom trace their evidence to some combination of Barry Salt’s perennially useful Film Style and Technology and John Belton’s important Film Comment essay on the subject. This book is no different: it builds on, extends, and in some cases questions these foundational accounts.4

More recently, Patrick Keating’s collection Cinematography has been an indispensable historical reference to the complex history of the art and craft of cinematography. Keating and his coauthors rightly shift the focus of attention from the director to the cinematographer, but such a focus comes with its own risks. It would be no more useful to suggest that the decision to use a zoom shot falls exclusively to the cinematographer than to cling to the idea that the director must be responsible. As Chris Cagle points out, since the beginning of the 1930s, the role of the Hollywood cinematographer has been primarily managerial; directors of photography tend not to “run the camera,” leaving this job to assistants.5 As a result, assistant camera operators or focus pullers are far more likely than directors of photography to physically operate the zoom. This was particularly the case for early zooms, because before motors or electronic controls, the simplest zoom shot required the coordinated effort of a team. Today, unless a camera operator shoots “documentary style,” twisting the zoom ring manually while operating the camera, the same teamwork is required. However, to the frustration of academic film historians, the minuscule details of who made what decision when and why are rarely recorded for posterity. The efforts and ideas of the assistants and grips instead accrue to their team leader, the director of photography; as a result, some cinematographic auteurs have emerged, their elevation encouraged by the very trade that is so essential to this history.6

In any event, the decision to use a zoom lens is not always made on a film or television set. Decisions made far away from a soundstage or location shoot can have significant bearing on whether a zoom shot ends up in a finished film. A film may feature lots of zoom shots because of a creative decision made by producers at the time of its commission. If a producer today wants “vérité,” a “documentary effect,” or a “cheesy 1970s aesthetic,” then the chances are he or she has the zoom at least partly in mind. Production accountants and other budget setters play a passive role too: when a tighter budget means fewer setups, there may be less time to adjust prime lenses and cover action from multiple angles. In these circumstances, a zoom may be the most expedient way to get the required footage in the can. When zooms were newer and more expensive, the reverse was sometimes true: newer, high-quality zoom lenses were reserved for higher-budget productions. If the cinematographer did not have his or her own zoom lens and the production would not fund the hire of one, then zooms were unlikely to appear in the film. Not that the lack of a zoom lens precludes a zoom: in postproduction, zooms might be added or subtracted from a film’s final edit. An optical zoom, effected during printing, can focus on a particular part of the frame in a way never envisaged by the director or cinematographer. This approach may be applied years after production: “panned and scanned” home video releases, which adapted widescreen movies for squarer television screens, sometimes added zooms to films in which they never originally appeared. Inversely, with a slice of the razor, an editor can excise any trace of a zoom shot, however meticulously constructed and carefully executed it may have been; such decisions are easier than ever thanks to nonlinear editing and CGI special effects. Therefore, to the extent that any zoom appears in a film by “choice,” that choice is informed as much by myriad technological and economic considerations as by aesthetic and stylistic concerns. As a result, the history of the zoom lens and zoom shot is diffuse, complex, and often highly contested.

“Use and Abuse”

The zoom shot divides opinion. Many people—professional filmmakers and casual film fans alike—simply hate it. Sometimes this is for artistic preference: the jolt of a rapid zoom is thought to remind the audience that they are watching a film or (worse) that the film was made under the supervision of a director and cinematographer. The zoom is further tied to a series of artistically negative cultural associations, especially television and amateur cinematography, both of which are discussed in the chapters that follow. This book does not advocate for the zoom lens; it is not a call for the rehabilitation of the technique. Nevertheless, it does call for a cautious assessment of strong arguments against the zoom, especially when trying to understand the history of the technique. This is particularly the case when such arguments link mass or amateur media to the zoom. For example, television was a key incubator of the zoom lens. Television has often been considered artless and vulgar. But as the following chapters make clear, the cultural status of television means little or nothing to the place of the zoom in cinema. Of equal importance—though this book does not extensively discuss the zoom in non-Hollywood cinema—is the significance of the zoom in cinema industries across the world. Both Indian and Nigerian (“Bollywood” and “Nollywood”) cinemas make lavish use of zoom shots. In these contexts, the zoom has its own technological imperatives and stylistic implications. Yet by embracing too uncritically the notion that the zoom is amateurish, vulgar, “televisual,” and self-conscious, we might easily end up sneering at unfamiliar cultural products and failing to assess them on their own terms.

Aside from debates about the zoom in film and television scholarship, an entirely different debate can be observed within historical industrial discourse. Filmmaking professionals—principally directors and cinematographers—have debated the merits of the technique in trade journals such as American Cinematographer. Yet these sources must be investigated with caution. A single issue may display both the enthusiasm of a zoom lens manufacturer and the entrenched caution of a cinematographic grandee but never quite reflect actual industrial practice. In light of this complexity and confusion, the following pages establish the precise technological, stylistic, and conceptual meanings of the zoom alongside a critical account of existing industrial and academic responses. Out of these debates emerge a series of key issues that shape the history of the zoom lens. Often these have broader implications for the way in which we consider the historical handling of new and controversial technologies and how academic history and criticism interacts with industrial discourse. Despite the contradictions and lacunae in these accounts, the zoom has inspired passionate and wide-ranging debate that touches key issues in the very meaning of film and television. It is precisely the controversy of the zoom that makes it a valuable target for attention.

Few documents better illustrate the confusion surrounding the development and use of the zoom than an article published in Daily Variety in March 1990. Written by the film historian Joseph McBride, it recounts a disagreement between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the daughter of cinematographer Joseph Walker. The academy had announced its intention to give an award to the French lens designer Pierre Angénieux for designing “the first practical zoom lens.” Marjorie Walker, on learning of the citation’s wording, protested that “her father’s much earlier work on the zoom was being slighted.” As a result, just prior to the broadca...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Drama at the Touch of a Lever
• Chapter 3. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
• Chapter 4. Unlimited Horizons
• Chapter 5. Creepers and Neck-Snappers
• Chapter 6. The Zoom Boom
• Chapter 7. Contemporary Zooms
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author