Museum Piece Or A Sharp Shooter?
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 26, 2007
THE buyer of Charlie Chaplin's camera had better not be planning to make silent films. The Australian director Rolf de Heer, whose silent comedy Dr Plonk opens in cinemas next month, says the old hand-cranked Bell and Howell might be of more historic than practical value given how much film stock has changed in the past century.
The amount of emulsion means cinematographers can no longer see images through a strip of film, which makes getting shots in focus impossible with a silent-era camera.De Heer, whose other films include Ten Canoes, The Tracker and Bad Boy Bubby, faced this very dilemma when he set out to make Dr Plonk, a comedy about a scientist from 1907 who travels a century into the future. He bought a hand-cranked Universal camera from 1920 for $2000, but found it unusable: "The change in the nature of film stock means that we couldn't focus through it."De Heer was able to resell the camera - for the same price - and then he customised a 1940s Mitchell camera by adding a hand-cranking mechanism. The result is a black-and-white film - starring Paul Blackwell, Magda Szubanski and Nigel Lunghi - that looks like it was shot a century ago - except for the time travel scenes.While a film supplier could possibly develop a new translucent stock for Chaplin's camera, de Heer thinks it will be more a significant purchase for a collector.Long a fan of the silent era, he was inspired while making Dr Plonk by the films of the Little Tramp, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. "There's an innocence about them," de Heer says. "There's no cynicism. It's a very simple form of entertainment that's like an antidote to tent-pole cinema."Dr Plonk opens on August 30.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald