THE EYE OF IMMEDIACY, TAKE ONE : BUILDING THE FIRST MACHINE OF NEOREALISM

The 1928 Designs for the Camera Alesandro Blasetti

The drawings catch your eye immediately – detailed, intricate, drawn with a sure hand yet ... you ask yourself, what is it? Is it a surreal exercise, some strange marriage of a gas-mask and a birdhouse? No? Then what are these drawings? They are not blueprints, exactly – they don't agree with each other, even on basic things like proportion and fit - but still as you study them you realize they convey an idea, an image, a detailed and well-thought-out vision. In fact, it's a practical plan for a radical new kind of camera, one especially rich in history and mystery, an early hands-free camera (perhaps the world's first), designed in 1928 by the legendary Alessandro Blasetti and Ernesto Cauda, two figures who would become giants in the Italian film world but who would both mysteriously walk away from this early example of their brilliance and inventiveness. Seven years after submitting this design to the Italian patent office, Blasetti would essentially invent Italian NeoRealism, an aesthetic that would transform cinema and arguably have effects beyond cinema to embrace journalism, fiction and photography.

While on a casual visit to the Bologna Cineteca in March 2012, I fell in love with this design the instantMichela Zegna, the Curator of the Blasetti Archive, showed me these drawings. The questions came immediately; Did he build it? Michela said no. But why didn't he build it? No-one knows. Then why,I asked, don't we?

Since then I have worked with three other people, and with Michela's ongoing enthusiastic encouragement and comments, to make those drawings real by finally building the camera. We have done this in 2013 while largely limiting ourselves to the technology that would have been available to young filmmakers in Italy in 1928. At the Conference I will present both a talk on this object's role in Blasetti's formulation of NeoRealism and also the physical camera-rig itself; the conference attendees

will be encouraged to try on and directly experience this long-dormant and finally-living piece of cinema history.

Illustrations : Building the Blasetti Camera, first prototype

This camera is important in the history of film Aesthetics for two very different reasons. The first is technical and relates to the history of cinema – this is perhaps the first hands-free camera, a new kind ofpaintbrush for directors, a crucial tool for contemporary cinema. The second, however, is in a sense farmore profound; this design is also, as is clear from the patent document filed by Blasetti in 1928, a kindof early thought-experiment in NeoRealism, an early instance of the fiery impulse that propelled Blasetti to reinvent the very nature of cinema some seven years later. It is thus crucial and important tounderstand this design, his first real attempt to grapple with issues of authenticity, direct raw experience, and the piercing of old dead forms of representation.

So when we ask ourselves the question why was the camera abandoned, in fact the answer might lie in another question; why was the camera designed? Because although in hindsight we might think that this camera simply represents a serious intelligent attempt to solve some specific technical problems and limitations of the cameras of 1928 – which it does – we must first focus on one truly remarkable fact. The fact that it is the forefather of the Steadicam, allowing for new forms of dollying, camera movement and cinema-time, does not seem to be the reason it was conceived and designed at all; from the patent it seems utterly besides the point, a kind of strangely-coincidental engineering innovation.

Normally, of course, when a craftsperson invents a new tool for his or her work, it is done to solve certain specific technical difficulties or limitations he has actually experienced in his work. This is the basic dance of technology and experience that drives most technological Progress. But that particular dance is not happening here; remarkably, this very ambitious design for a camera was created by Blasetti before he had actually made his first feature film.

In fact, as we examine both the writings surrounding this camera and the utopian passions of that day and then balance them against Blasetti's contemporaneous lack of experience as a director – in his case a kind of freedom from the dead weight of experience - something dramatic becomes clear. We come to realize that the remarkable inventive energies going into the making of this camera are actually not primarily Experiential but rather Ideological; this camera is more of a beautiful expression of two young men's aesthetic, political and utopian passions than an intended, pragmatic solution to problems of technology. It is really a pure expression of a young person's hopes to reinvent cinema from the ground up, a radical life-project that years later, after many formal experiments, Blasetti will finally succeed in when he creates the foundations for the NeoRealist movement.

Poster and Still from Blasetti's film 1860, which many consider to be the first NeoRealist film.

This passion becomes clear when we examine the patent application, a very strange document that reads more like a manifesto than a plan for building a machine. Here's how Blasetti himself put his hopes for this camera:

"In order to guarantee a shot that in projection would be able to give the spectator an effect as close as possible to the vision that he would have had if he was present in the original filmed scene, we devised a camera which substitutes exactly the gaze of the cameraman while shooting. The camera's substitution of the cameraman's eye will be as perfect as possible, with the optical axis of the camera firmly tied to the axis of the cameraman's eye, so that any movement or adjustment of the cameraman's eye - either determined by movements of the head or by movements of perambulation - will be faithfully followed by the lens and therefore by the camera."

In other words, with this camera Blasetti wanted an immediate relationship between a) the subject being filmed, b) the cameraperson, and c) the viewer of the final shot in projection. He hopes this camera will directly connect the perceived scene with the cameraperson's eye and then somehow with the viewer's experience of the projected image. This is a melding of consciousness rather like a spark arcing repeatedly and purely in an axis across the gaps between scene, cameraperson's eye, cameraperson's consciousness, the projection and the viewer's eye and consciousness. This dream is connected with Blasetti's often-stated hatred for staged historical epics which he found emblematic of the falsifying conventions of bourgeoise cinema that his generation had inherited from theater and earlycinema.

From Tripod to Handheld to Unsteadi: The UnSteadicam and the Early History of the Camera:

Putting aside this specific impulse of Blasetti, we can also see how revolutionary this camera was from another Aesthetic point of view; the new forms of camera-moves and cinema time that it would allow. To understand the importance of this camera on such terms, it is best to review it against the cameras ofits time.

In 1928 a director had only two basic choices when choosing how to work with a camera: to put it on a tripod – either standing alone or itself on a moveable dolly - or to take it off the tripod and use it handheld. (The camera crane would not be invented until 1929).

In that limited landscape, Blasetti's and Cauda's camera is actually a remarkable and groundbreaking example of what we might call the third stage of cinema cameras. The first stage was defined by absurdly-heavy cameras affixed atop the tripod, while the second stage was marked by bulky, shaky, difficult-to-control handheld cameras that, due to their parallax viewfinders, presented major challenges for framing the shot. Handheld was a major trade-off with the tripod; in breaking free of thetripod, a handheld camera essentially makes the camera-person's arms and body into a tripod, giving a radically-expanded freedom of movement and control. But because the hands now held the camera itself, they become no longer free to crank the film and focus the lens, as they are when the Tripod holds the camera, and this very severely limits the quality and nature of possible shots.

There were also two other major problems with these early handheld cameras. The first involved looking through the eyepiece; unless the camera was mounted on the shoulder it was impossible to lookthrough the viewfinder, so that in closeups and medium-closeups shots, framing and focus were all only approximate and very hard to control. Secondly, these heavy cameras were often quite hard to

handle for the long hours that film shoots sometimes requires- the spools of silver nitrate film were alsonot light.

All of these problems severely restricted the use of handheld cameras in silent cinema, which is why the aesthetics of the early cinema period is almost devoid of effective and complex handheld movements. This was simply not part of the cinema language until much later, largely because of thesetechnical limitations.

But Blasetti's and Cauda's design represents a new, entirely different approach that goes well beyond these limits. Their camera is actually configured to leave the hands free of supporting the camera so they can instead operate the crank and the focus, freeing the camera operator from the need for a second assistant during movement. Yet in their design the freedom of the handheld camera is in fact expanded upon, with far more control of framing and less shaky movement. With this innovation, cinema language can change as the vocabulary is substantially enlarged.

So as you can easily see when you try on our prototype, this camera offers three great advantages over a handheld camera. First, it distributes weight to the neck and chest, making it less exhausting and far easier to operate for long periods. Second, it offers a new mobility of movement, allowing the entire body to become a flexible moving tripod, giving shots a certain steadiness that handheld does not offer.Third, it leaves the hands free to both crank the film and also adjust focus for moving shots. All of these advantages allow this design to explore new aesthetic territory. In fact, had this camera not actually retreated from history – if it had been built and used in the film industry in 1928 - it would have introduced much of the sinuousness of the Steadicam to the language of cinema some four decades earlier than actually happened.

The Mystery of the Forgotten First Steadicam

So these lovely striking design drawings reveal an ingenious attempt to radically expand the nature of camera-shooting in its day. But for some reason the design's day never came; the plan was put forwards for copyright in 1928 and – after Blasetti and Cauda spent a sizeable sum for the Copyright Office fee – the copyright was granted in 1930. And yet the camera was never built, even though the inventors' first film Il Sole (1929) clearly shares some of the passions that went into this camera's design, and Blasetti himself would become one of the most prolific and experimental directors in Italy for decades to come, with many opportunities to realize this design if he'd wanted to. For some years he had all of the resources of Cinecitta at his disposal. And yet he never did build it, raising the question; why was the design abandoned?

Perhaps it was killed off by the birth of Sound; the patent was granted in 1930, the same year the SoundEra began in Italy. After all, the sound era's dawn would have been bad – though not fatal - for this idea. The new need for sound cameras as the primary film cameras for feature film shooting - and the radical technical challenges and added weight of early sound technology – certainly made this idea less useful. What would have served as a primary camera in the silent era would, in the Sound era, now be only helpful as a b-roll camera for non-synch shots.

And yet the camera is still an obvious advance in the invention of camera rigs. Had it been built, this advance would have allowed new kinds of camera shots and movements, even if confined to non-synchshots (shots where the sound could be synched up later in editing). At a minimum the camera would for example certainly have been perfect for traveling shots, point-of-view shots and action sequences.

So, in 1928 and even in 1930 when the patent came through and simultaneously Sound technology came to the Italian film industry, it would still have made practical sense to build this camera. Also, there is the more pressing personal reason for building the camera in 1928; at that time synch sound was still two years off for Italy, and the filmmakers were actually about to shoot the silent feature film Il Sole, a formally-exploratory film that was clearly intended as a great experiment in shot framing, panning and movement. This radical camera would have been a remarkable contribution for such a formally-ambitious film.

Perhaps the reason is there in their strange manifesto-like patent application. As we will show in our presentation, this radical goal is a rather remarkable and complete failure in one particular aspect of the design – their naively-engineered replacement for the parallax viewfinders of their day is a striking impossibility. Light from the lens simply cannot pass through film and the film gate to the cameraperson's eye in this manner; in fact this viewfinder reflects their actual ignorance in 1928 of certain basic physical rules of cinematography. There would be no pure arc of experience as Blasetti wished for this design; this camera would only work if a ten-standard parallax viewfinder were incorporated into the radical design.

Perhaps that failure to get beyond the parallax viewfinder, with it's close-but-not-perfect approximationof the lens's frame, helps explain Blasetti's abandonment of this otherwise-successful concept. Yet, though as a technical goal this hunt for immediacy and direct connection may not work here in this specific instance, still we can find great inspiration and foreshadowing even in this naïve mistake. As abroad aesthetic philosophy Blasetti's hunt for immediacy, his penchant for experiment, his ability to throw out all existing models and start from the ground up - all these tendencies that we see here in thisdesign - would find passionate realization in his later invention of that NeoRealist Aesthetic which would change filmmaking forever.

Our Living Past / Living Futures Manifesto

In conclusion, this project is partly about the history of cinema and partly about the alternative historiesthat were not explored, perhaps because of apparently-unstoppable parallel developments - in this case the invention of sound technology - and perhaps because the filmmakers' own disappointed passions simply blinded them to their real concrete success in this design. We are also presenting this object as a seed of the same deep impulses that would lead Blasetti to invent NeoRealism. Our concept is that technology and the art it inspires is not simply made of many small streams feeding one unstoppable river leading us inexorably in one direction. As the truncated, contingent history of this particular unique object's life shows us, sometimes this history is more like a tree with many small branches. Here we are exploring one such unnoticed budding branch that was lopped off the tree some 96 years ago; we are here asking why it was pruned back while we simultaneously re-graft it onto cinema to see how it might grow again.

Lastly, this project is also about the film archive. I think we should experience a Cineteca not simply as a repository of cinema's past but also as a living fertile garden, a marvel-filled dreamspace for ongoing experiences and growth in cinema. With that in mind, I did not simply want to realize this camera, some 8 decades after it was designed and abandoned, in order to put it into a glass case, nor to throw some light on a particularly opaque chapter of Blasetti's development. Nor did I build it simply to shoot films with, though that is an important goal as well. In the very spirit of Blasetti's hunt for immediacy, for direct connection, I wanted also to offer it to you to try on, to put it on your head and experiment with it. The goal is to experience a piece of cinema history, not simply visually or through

its written history but rather phenomenologically and Kin(o-)aesthetically. This is an attempt to come into a true physical contact with Blasetti's and Cauda's remarkable energy and passion, realized througha living relationship with this almost surreal time-machine-like object that finally, 85 years after its original conception, now at last can film us.

INVENTION : A SHORT DOCUMENTARY ON THE 1928 BLASETTI CAMERA (Roughcut, approx. 12 minutes)

Written and Directed by Amedeo D'AdamoProduced by Nevina Satta and Amedeo D'AdamoFeaturing:Michela Zegna, Curator of the Blasetti Archive at the Bologna CinetecaMichael Silver, Architect, Professor of Architecture and Consultant on 3-D ManufactureRicardo Costa, Leather Artisan of Nuoro, Sardinia

The first Prototype of the 1928 camera design