The Invisible Eye

I’m about to do something I warn my students against — replace an interesting mystery with a boring solution.

But it’s a slow news day — and I don’t have much time — working on three video essays and soon it’ll be marking time at the Art College.

In Projections issue 1, George Miller is interviewed, and says —

“I saw Lawrence of Arabia the other day. On tape — God forgive me. There’s a stunt where a steam train rolls onto its side as it comes to a halt across the sand, with the smoke pouring out of the stack filling the screen. Now, if you watch the wide shot, it’s flat desert. There’s no evidence whatsoever of a second camera close to where the train finally comes to rest. I wound back two or three times and I could not see the second camera and I cannot imagine that it was done twice. So how they did it I don’t know, but whoever put that camera in the second spot put it in the perfect place.”

Miller is a great believer in the idea that there’s only ever one perfect spot for the camera. He’s staged several stunts that seem to draw inspiration from David Lean’s locomotive, notable the spectacular car roll in scene one of FURY ROAD.

On to the mystery. I had the advantage of watching not on tape, but Blu-ray, God forgive me. I can only frame-grab from the DVD though.

And there it is: just ahead of the engine, the second camera position, hidden behind a mound of sand. Miller couldn’t see it on VHS because the definition of that format is so poor. And audiences at the cinema don’t register it because it doesn’t look like anything, just a slight variation in the hue of the desert, and by the time the cut reveals we have a second camera there, the steam train is hurtling at us and like those mythic Lumiere patrons we’re a bit startled.

The second camera’s mostly buried, the lens at exact ground level, so John Box or Eddie Fowlie or whoever’s wrangling the sand doesn’t need to build it up very high to conceal the thing. The only crafty thing worth noting is that it looks like they haven’t just built a mound, but a gentle slope, so that there’s very little for the eye to go by.

(On Blu-ray, however, the mound is more noticable.)

The other thing that rewards re-viewing of this spectacle is that, an instant after the moment of detonation, the number one camera gives a one-frame shudder — everything blurs — as if an actual earth tremor were felt in the soft sand or the hot air, or as if the operator got momentarily overexcited by Lean wrecking the second steam train of his career (putting him even with Buster Keaton, who dumps locomotives into rives in OUR HOSPITALITY and THE GENERAL).

Fowlie

In Projections 4, John Boorman interviews legendary props man Eddie Fowlie, known as “David Lean’s dedicated maniac.” Fowlie is pictured above, taking Lean’s photo. The whole thing is worth reading but the ending is extraordinary:

“I got arrested a couple of times. One time they locked me up in Spain because I said to the chap, ‘I’m not going to answer any bloody questions.’ So they locked me up in the dungeon for the night. And when they brought me out in the morning, they said to me, ‘You, know, this is life, You’re not making a film. This is real.’ And you know, we do feel like that. We treat people differently. It’s all a game. It’s like a dream. The whole fucking thing’s a dream. We’re still playing Cowboys and Indians.”

I miss Projections. I never bought it at the time, I’m ashamed to say. I just read it in Waterstones. but I think I might start collecting it secondhand.

Quiver

I picked up John Brosnan’s book on special effects, Movie Magic, which seems to have been staring at me from various shelves for all my life, after finding it in a charity shop. Obviously, a book on VFX written before the advent of digital cinema wasn’t going to be selling at top prices.

It’s a fun, breezy read, though. Not too technical. The best stuff is the interview with jobbing films craftsmen. Brosnan’s prose is more serviceable than immortal (though still superior to that of Mike Evans in The Making of Raging Bull, another recent cheapo purchase, where potentially fascinating material is rendered practically unreadable) but when he hands the page over to doughty practitioners like Les Bowie, things get mordantly amusing:

‘We were working with these two American effects men on that picture [IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS] and they had […] all sorts of fancy gadgets, including these special mortars that were used to fire clumps of arrows through the air. These, along with their other equipment, had been flown out from Hollywood at great expense. One day one of these men told me to go and practice firing arrows out of this mortar. So I did, I carried one of these gadgets away from where we were based, set it up, put some arrows in it, fired it . . . and the arrows went about ten feet before dropping to the ground. I was rather upset about this because it meant I was going to have to tell the other fellow his gadget wasn’t working any more. In desperation I just grabbed a handful of arrows and flung them in the air . . . and they just flew and flew. After a few more tries I even worked out a way of throwing them so that they separated in mid-air and like a swarm of arrows would if they’d been fired by several bows. Anyway I went back and confessed to this bloke that his mortar wasn’t working, so he came back and checked it out and said it was working perfectly. “But it only propels them about ten feet,” I said, “do you know that you can throw them much further by hand?” And I demonstrated to him how far I could throw them. He was shocked. “For God’s sake,” he said, “don’t do that on the day of filming!” But when the day came an assistant and I were hidden in the woods, throwing the arrows out by hand. All that equipment shipped out at such a high cost and yet no one had tried just throwing the things!’

There’s more about this kind of UK-US rivalry and bickering on Disney locations in props man Eddie Fowlie’s account of making THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON in his memoir David Lean’s Dedicated Maniac: Memoirs of a Film Specialist, though Fowlie inexplicably omits to make any reference to being sent home early after seemingly injuring one of his opponents in a knife fight conducted over the affections of Janet Munro.