Camera That Changed the World

This is the story of a quest to capture reality.

Of how filmmakers gained the freedom of movement.

Which allowed them to shoot real life on the hoof.

It all happened in 1960.

The dawn of a new era.

Two teams of filmmakers, one in America

and one in France, each developed a new camera.

It was a real revolution.

They shared the same dream.

Of a camera that could capture life as they saw and heard it.

That was an outstanding...

In the history of storytelling, that never happened before.

They changed the way we saw the world.

Factually, cinematically.

And poetically.

1960, that's when everything started.

It started with a camera and the camera changed the world.

DOG BARKS

Oh, doggie.

Richard Leacock is a giant of documentary filmmaking.

His work spans its history.

Today he's 89.

But in his youth he helped invent a portable camera that sparked a revolution.

The revolution happened in 1960,

in France and in America.

When a handful of filmmakers pioneered a new kind of documentary.

They made it possible to simply pick up a camera and follow the action.

They made it possible to record a person's voice in the moment.

Bonjour.

They wanted one thing.

To capture the immediacy of life.

I know I was obsessed with it.

I was looking for something that gave you the feeling of being there.

In the 1950s, Leacock's dream was impossible to achieve.

The problem was the equipment.

It's Alexander Palace, here.

Can you get the silent camera up in Plymouth to St Mawgan?

Now, we're going to send sound down from London.

Tell these chaps to get a move on, will you?

Cameras were designed for shooting drama in a studio.

They were as heavy and cumbersome as a lawnmower,

so needed the support of a tripod. And there they remained.

BBC calling Harrods.

Hello, Harrods. Can you hear me?

The sound gear was even heavier than the camera,

needing two or more men to cart it around.

The result was documentaries as stilted as the equipment.

There's the country solicitor,

the sort of man whose clients stop him in the street.

I've got a problem with these coach parties

coming past the farm and throwing their rubbish over the hedge.

Come in and seen me this afternoon at 3 o'clock.

Let's see what we can do.

Much of Ukrainian folklore's quaint appeal

is to be found in a favourite song of its peasant girls.

THEY SING

Oh, god!

Leacock dreamt of following the action as it happened.

But the bulky camera equipment of the '50s made this impossible.

We didn't have the equipment, it didn't exist.

It was hopeless.

God help you if you had to move.

HE WHISTLES

In 1958, a French filmmaker thought he'd found an ingenious way

around the technical problems.

Jean Rouch was France's leading ethnographer.

I try to make films about man.

About the life of the everyday,

of the small villages where I spend weeks and weeks, months and months.

This way, I made the film Moi Un Noir.

Moi, Un Noir follows the lives of immigrants

living on the Ivory Coast.

It seemed to capture the feeling of being there

that Leacock and others were after.

In the late '50s, Michel Brault was another cameraman

desperate to revolutionise the documentary.

Jean Rouch, he's a pioneer.

I see Moi Un Noir and I am in full discovery land now. You know...

You have to realise that film-makers

were longing to see people themself.

Their sound of life,

their language.

Their music, their rhythms.

That was

a very important goal.

Moi Un Noir is full of life

in a way that was extraordinary for its time.

Rouch achieved this by ignoring conventional camera technology.

Instead of the bulky equipment used by professionals,

he shot solo with a small wind-up camera, the kind used by amateurs.

I used only a very light camera. A 16mm Bell and Howell.

With his tiny handheld camera,

Rouch could follow the action wherever it took him.

But the wind-up device had serious drawbacks.

You have to wind it and the action is going on.

Then you can shoot. 20 seconds. That's it.

The problem was that Rouch could only capture

the world in 20 second chunks.

And that wasn't all.

CAMERA WHIRS It makes noise.

Can you record sound? Yes, you can.

But you hear the camera running.

OK? Impossible.

So you don't record sound at the same time

as you record the camera.

It has no sound.

So the film was shot silent.

Its soundtrack created after the film was edited.

Rouch had brilliantly found a way

around the limits of camera technology and made a classic film.

But he knew that to really capture life on the hoof,

he needed a different camera.

One not yet invented.

At the same time in America,

by strange coincidence, another man was about to join the revolution.

This is a head swipe.

Journalist Bob Drew was working as a picture editor for Life Magazine,

famous for its spontaneous photo essays.

I worked with Life photographers.

With them, we could go anywhere with our little camera

and nobody would even see the camera.

And we could record pictures that had emotion and power.

In the '50s, Drew began wondering

why these qualities were missing from documentary films.

Documentaries couldn't record the kind of drama that we were getting.

To capture real life and convey it.

Seeing opportunity, Drew came up with a blueprint

for a new type of documentary as dramatic as any fiction.

It would be a theatre without actors.

It would be plays without playwrights.

It would be recording without summary and opinion.

It would be the ability to look in on people's lives at crucial times

from which you could deduce certain things.

And see a kind of proof

that can only be gotten by personal experience.

A film that would put across a feeling

of what it was like to be there.

Drew had ideas, but he was no filmmaker.

To realise his ambitions

he knew he'd need to join forces with someone who was.

I found Richard Leacock

because I saw a film that he made on television.

'Unloosen it, take it off the bag.

'Take the bag off, pull it down.

'That's it. All right.'

Leacock had made a film

about a travelling tent theatre in mid-west America.

It gave Drew the feeling of being there.

The way the film was made,

it made you feel like you were in the tent with the show.

That really knocked me out.

We had drinks together.

He came down and found me.

Over drinks, Leacock came clean with Drew.

The film's spontaneity was an illusion.

One involving many months of filming.

I manage to get a semblance of being there by cheating.

And I cheated all over the place.

Because of the heavy equipment,

Leacock had carefully choreographed every shot.

Drew wanted to capture real life as it happened.

Leacock explained how it was impossible

with the cameras of the time.

I found out a couple of things.

That anybody with ideas can't do anything.

Because it was technically impossible.

But Drew was a man who would not admit defeat.

If no portable camera existed, he'd find a way to make one.

The problem was, it was going to cost a bomb.

I needed a million dollars to make the equipment smaller.

Drew made Life Magazine a proposition.

If they gave him the money to create a new camera,

he'd make gripping films

that would break into the lucrative television market.

In 1958, Drew got his money.

That's how we finally got started.

Ricky Leacock was quick to point Drew

in the direction of a group of co-conspirators.

Ricky was a kind of Godfather.

He helped guide me.

The first person he led Drew to was Don Pennebaker.

Oh.

Here it is.

These days he's seen as a founding father of American documentaries.

Wonderful.

Back then he was a 19-year-old engineering graduate

messing around with cameras.

Oh, God, you see the case is in poor shape. OK, this is it. It's heavy.

I haven't done this in so long.

The equipment was still just old-fashioned equipment.

Nobody had got to the next step.

But Drew came in.

He had the money.

And that was interesting.

From then on it was really a do-or-die effort

to get a camera that would work.

There must have been an million dollars of purchase order issued

and nobody was on to us, you know?

There was a sense of doom, you know? I'll just do it if I want to.

Work on the equipment began with a critical decision.

To take an existing camera and adapt it to their purposes.

The camera that we started with was the Auricon.

The Auricon was the smallest camera available,

but it was still too heavy, weighing over 30 pounds.

The problem was we had these Auricons,

which were meant to go on a tripod.

They had a little hole underneath

and you put it on the head and you cranked it.

And I could see that we weren't going to use tripods ever.

The tripod was something we didn't want anything to do with

because you couldn't set them up,

you couldn't carry them around, you couldn't deal with them.

To get a camera they could carry,

the Auricon would require brutal adjustments.

He made the camera lighter

by cutting off pieces of it and throwing it away.

After months of ruthless adaptation,

the camera had lost a third of its weight.

It was now light enough to carry.

But how?

I drilled a hole in the front and threaded it

and we put the handle on the front of the camera

and that was it.

When we did that, suddenly the whole thing became like that.

The handle on the camera.

I should have patented it right away

but I didn't know how to patent anything.

But that was the thing that changed the whole camera operation.

Everybody could put it on their shoulder.

Here they are. Well...

here's the camera.

Always the handle from the very start

so that we didn't put it on a tripod, we put it on our shoulder.

But I just would hold the camera like this

and I learnt by looking in a mirror and watching,

exactly how to hold it to know that I was getting you or you or you.

And that was very helpful in many instances.

And getting it on your shoulder meant it was going to be steady

because as long as you could lock the camera against your cheek

and support it with your shoulder, you could shoot anything.

The Auricon probably wouldn't recognise them,

they'd probably disown them, actually.

But they worked.

And they worked in ways that you could carry them around easily.

It didn't look like much, you know?

It still is a pretty good camera.

Well...

By early 1960, the team had transformed the Auricon

into the first professional lightweight handheld camera.

This is basically the Auricon camera,

which weighs at least a third...

The Auricon weighs at least a third more than this baby.

And this one has been cut down.

There's probably 100,000 of special engineering in that camera alone.

Drew and his team could now go out with their new camera.

And if people moved, they could follow them.

That camera took months and months to make.

That camera made the revolution possible.

But just barely.

At exactly the same time in France,

a small group of engineers were facing the same challenge.

Jean-Pierre Beauviala has had a lifelong passion

for handheld cameras.

He's one of the great technical innovators of camera history.

You know, every time a TV team are coming here

and they're asking me, would you sit?

They have prepared with lamps, a stool.

Please, sit on that stool.

And the camera was there and there and the lamps and other stuff.

And I said,

you are doing that to me?! You know?

You are doing that to me?

You're talking to me? You're doing that to me?

And I say, no, au revoir, and I left.

And I left them with their cameras. You know?

I had developed the most mobile camera in the world.

Through the shape of the camera. And they want me to be on a stool?

Don't make this mistake!

Yeah? I think so.

If I remember. If I remember.

France's legendary camera manufacturer, Eclair,

employed Beauviala straight out of engineering college.

Alors. I think the film is in the reverse.

He followed in the footsteps of another gifted camera inventor,

Eclair's chief engineer, Andre Coutant.

In 1960 he was on the same quest as Bob Drew,

but with one major difference.

Instead of adapting an existing camera,

Coutant was making a new one from scratch.

He was very smart. He was a very good listener to people's requests.

Coutant learned from listening to filmmakers

that standard cameras were too noisy.

The cause of this was the mechanical claw

that pulled the film through the camera.

The secret was in the claw movement.

These claws must enter the perforation,

pull down on the film and then get out. You know?

Doing this.

Down, out, up, in.

Understood?

And the way Eclair invented the silence, the quietness,

is that while you are entering the perforation,

you are slightly gliding.

You are not doing this, boom, noise.

Noise, noise. Like in the older cameras.

It was landing like this.

The claw...

OK? Down, in.

Up.

Out.

So you only had this nice gliding noise, which is virtually noiseless.

Voila.

It was a real, real, real revolution.

Real revolution.

The change to this tiny part of the camera

was an engineering masterstroke.

It would become the foundation for a completely new camera.

The prototype was designed for carrying around

and weighed a mere four pounds.

This was a major step in the camera revolution.

Portability, the magazine, the viewfinder,

the position on the shoulder.

But the revolution was the quietness of the machine.

Back in America, Drew was under pressure.

In 1960, having spent vast sums of Life's money,

it was time to deliver a film.

I had to find a story.

But finding stories was my job at Life, I knew how to do that.

And I looked at the country and I looked at what was going on

and what the stories were. And I liked this young senator

who was running an impossible race for the presidency.

I said, we won't ask you to do anything, we won't light,

we won't interview you,

but you'll have to let the camera be with you all day long, every day.

And you can't think about the camera,

you can't worry about when it's on and off.

Just forget it.

He thought that over for a while.

And he said, are you out to get me?

I said no. He said, if I don't call you tomorrow, we are on.

He didn't call me.

We went to Wisconsin and made Primary.

Primary follows the story of a young senator's campaign

to win the Wisconsin Democratic Primary,

the first stage of the race for the Presidency.

The candidate was John F Kennedy,

a millionaire outsider from the East Coast.

Drew's team were about to make filmmaking history.

We were having a wonderful time.

Primary was filmed in just four days with four two-man crews.

Ricky was shooting with the new camera

that had been silenced and made smaller and so forth.

I'm Richard Leacock.

This camera is as light, quiet and portable as we can make it.

Drew was recording sound with an early portable recorder.

Another young filmmaker, Albert Maysles, had joined the team.

Like Pennebaker,

he would become one of the great documentary cameramen of his time.

Pennebaker, Leacock and Drew were about to do something revolutionary

in film-making and be great if I came on board.

Pennebaker and Maysles were shooting with Aeroflexes.

Just a regular camera. They made a racket.

We had Terry Filgate, who was terrific.

The final man to join was Terry Macartney Filgate,

an ace cameraman from the Canadian Film Board.

So, I was fortunate to have

really good cameraman who were gung-ho.

There was just one rule.

Follow the unfolding action.

That meant no tripods.

If someone moved, the camera would go with them.

CHEERING

When you see Primary,

you feel that you are in the shoes of JFK or Jackie.

The films had such a sense of freedom,

being in a real place with real people.

We weren't directing people, they were doing it for a huge audience

and we were just getting what the audience got.

That was very exciting.

I was really able to get close to Jackie.

And I walk round the back and her hands were going like this.

Because it was the only thing by which you knew she was nervous.

You try to be witness to all of the driving forces of the story.

So that later when you edit it and put it together,

you have the material. It's just like the material you'd have

from actors, if you're working with actors. It's no different, really.

Like in that wonderful scene where I hold the camera from up high,

down onto the back of Kennedy's head.

One of the most remarkable shots in Primary

shows the power of the approach

that Drew and his team were pioneering.

This 85 second shot reveals Kennedy's star power.

This could never have been understood

without seeing it in real time, as it happened.

Up to now, all presidents were old farts.

And suddenly here was this young guy who might be president.

That was sort of interesting.

You kind of wanted to hear him and see him as a person

and not as a sort of public aperture.

It was the newly-adapted Auricon used by Leacock,

with Drew recording dialogue,

that really went beyond the public figure to reveal Kennedy the man.

There's Ricky.

Get him? That's my little Ricky-poos with his big ears.

OK, on we go.

In this scene, the Auricon faced its first test.

In the middle of the first day, John Kennedy jumped out of the car,

ran into a photographer's studio

and sat down and posed for a photographer.

Ricky and I were right with him,

we went through the doorway and shot everything that happened.

Then we stopped and looked at each other and grinned.

This was the first time.

This was what we dreamed of forever.

INAUDIBLE

It was a feeling of being there.

It wasn't telling you what it was, it was just showing it.

It was the first moment when we really fastened on a character,

went through a doorway, into a room,

shot what happened and came back out.

It exorcised all the difficult things

that should be done to shoot and it worked.

It was with the Auricon that Leacock captured one of the films most powerful moments.

On the last day of filming,

his camera was in Kennedy's private suite

as he awaited the final result.

One question... What did Nixon do in the fourth and fifth?

In the fourth and fifth...

Leacock got the whole thing.

PHONE RINGS

There's the microphone.

You can see it there.

In the ashtray.

Thanks a million for calling.

Yeah?

SHE WHISPERS

Yeah. Now, it could go on. The third, we have a chance in.

But just a chance, it depends on the cross. We have a chance, yes.

Just a chance.

Now, get the... Hi.

How are you?

317 for Jack? 92 for Humphrey?

20-and-a-half through 10-and-a-half

would be a two to one victory for Jack.

It would be a great victory, actually.

THEY SING

Kennedy won the Wisconsin Primary and moved on,

taking his campaign to other states.

But Drew and his team were going nowhere.

As they began cutting their material in a makeshift edit suite,

their problems had only just begun.

Watching their footage,

they feared their new method had failed to deliver a film.

None of the sound recorded by Drew matched the images they'd shot.

All of the stuff that Drew had done on his tape-recorder,

none of it was in sync.

The problem was that Drew's tape recorder ran at a different speed

to Leacock's adapted Auricon.

This meant that all the voices,

though recorded, weren't perfectly synchronised with the pictures.

He shall determine what shall be our policy on Berlin.

He shall determine whether we shall be...

Even the slightest breakdown in sync

is painfully obvious on the screen.

And I run for the Presidency because, like you,

I have strong ideas about what this country must do...

A huge job now faced the team.

Every spoken word had to be synchronised

to the image of the person speaking.

I had to set up a way of getting it to be in sync.

So I had to set up this transfer arrangement in this hotel room.

Pennebaker devised a machine that would adjust the speed of the sound

to lock it in sync with the pictures.

He sat there for weeks, turning the crank,

with all of us behind him saying, "No, turn it to the left,

"turn it to the right, turn it faster."

The problem was that it could vary.

It could go in and out and you couldn't keep track of it.

So it would drive you nuts. But we all sat there.

Even for Al, who never edits,

Al just grinds it through and looks at it over and over again.

Editing is not interesting to him.

Every night we would collapse on the floor of the hotel

without even getting to bed,

without even getting undressed, you know?

For Drew, the pressure to overcome the technical problems was intense.

About three weeks into the editing, I went blind.

I couldn't see.

Maysles had to lead me around to a chair and so forth.

And I thought, well, it's finally happened.

I finally broke under the strain.

Well, it turned out I had broken for a day.

I got my sight back the next day.

He shall determine what shall be our policy...

After weeks of work, they managed to sync up people's voices.

But some scenes escaped them.

And I run for the Presidency...

In Primary you will see some scenes that are out of sync.

-Now, anybody I didn't get, could I just relay?

-Me!

You can hear that thing straining to get voice into sync.

That's because we were just too tired to synchronise that last scene.

Anyway, we were able to synchronise enough to make Primary.

While Kennedy went on to make history,

documentaries would never be the same again.

Leacock, with an adapted Auricon on his shoulder,

had given birth to the fly-on-the-wall documentary.

That was April 1960 in Wisconsin.

But in May in Paris, another new camera was about to turn over.

A bunch of intellectuals and filmmakers were soon to embark

on a major film production.

The director was France's most famous ethnographic filmmaker,

Jean Rouch, the man behind the ground-breaking Moi Un Noir.

Last spring, one of my friends asked me a very embarrassing question.

He said, why are you always making films in Africa?

Maybe we can try to make another film here in Paris?

An anthropological film in Paris.

In the Paris June. Summer people in Paris.

Chronique D'un Ete was an experiment in documentary filmmaking

that set out to explore the lives of ordinary Parisians

and follow them over a summer.

It was a collaborative effort.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens was one of the film's protagonists.

She also helped out behind the scenes.

At the start of filming they shot with a standard camera

that weighed over 40 pounds.

Too heavy to carry, it had to be put on a tripod.

Rouch soon became frustrated by a familiar problem.

The restrictive and bulky equipment.

A few weeks into the shoot,

Rouch got a message from Eclair's chief engineer, Andre Coutant.

He'd just produced a prototype for a completely new kind of camera.

It was portable and it was silent.

Would Rouch like to try it on Chronique d'Un Ete?

But Rouch needed a cameraman

equally obsessed with handheld cameras.

A man like Michel Brault.

So I go as fast as I can. I'm there.

I arrive in Paris and Jean

puts in my hand a camera

designed by Andre Coutant from the maison Eclair.

The first camera that I have in my hands

that can shoot out in the open.

Without a tripod. And it's light.

It's silent.

With Coutant's prototype, Brault's handheld skills

and Rouch's desire to experiment, the camera moved

from the dinner table into the streets.

What was exciting was that we could finally shoot

in the streets, in the houses, without bringing a huge camera.

There's no difference between life and shooting.

One of the first to see the impact of this handheld style

was the film's editor, Nena Baratier.

All the handheld material was shot by me.

I had the camera on the shoulder and walking with that.

Like a tiger, you know? It was a special dance, you know?

You have to put your legs like this.

That is the trick.

You cannot walk like that.

You didn't do that.

You had to invent the dance with the camera.

ALARM RINGS

Brault filmed a factory worker as he wakes

and is brought breakfast by his mum.

Capturing a tender moment in everyday life.

Jean wanted the camera to see the people,

the French people, in their homes.

All these new techniques

that made it possible to go behind the official aspect of people.

The French fell in love with having the freedom to follow real life.

But as the camera developed, Rouch wanted to push its role further.

In one scene, he asked Nadine Ballot and Marceline

to collude with the camera to ambush reality.

THEY LAUGH

There were laws of film-making.

But Jean said ... the laws!

You know?

After Chronique d'Un Ete, the rules of filmmaking lay in tatters.

With the Eclair prototype, Rouch had shown that a handheld camera

could bring real life to the screen.

Rouch's camera had probed deeper into the lives of ordinary people

than anyone before.

By the end of 1960 there were two films, one in France

and one in America, each made with a revolutionary new camera.

It's a pivotal date, 1960.

That's when everything started.

But the films had something else in common.

Like the Americans with Primary,

Rouch had failed to record sound

that synchronized with his pictures.

The reason was that portable sound recorders were unpredictable.

It was Swiss engineering that solved this problem.

BELL CHIMES

Ah! 12.

In Switzerland, a new kind of portable tape recorder was invented.

It was run by a precise motor

which played back sound at exactly the same speed it was recorded.

It was the brainchild of Stefan Kudelski.

He called his new device the Nagra.

Stefan Kudelski is one of the...

best engineers I have ever met.

The nautic mechanical design.

He is a genius, Stefan Kudelski.

And we fell in love of each other.

He was a real master.

Kudelski's genius was to discover

that the answer to synchronous sound lay in clocks.

This is the first time this lady is wearing a Longines.

Inside this watch is a quartz crystal.

It emits a precise electrical pulse, the most accurate in the world.

This was the secret to the Nagra's precision.

It, too, had a quartz crystal controlling its motor,

making it as reliable as the camera.

The crystal is a reference.

The crystal beats with very high precision.

So it means that after ten minutes,

you have the same signal in the camera and in the recorder.

Simple.

In late 1960, the Americans took delivery of their first Nagra.

My doggie.

Now they were armed with a new handheld camera.

With a Nagra recording sound in sync with it,

nothing could stop the revolution.

One of the first films on which they used this combination

was Yanki, No!

Filmed after Castro had swept to power in Cuba,

Drew and his team went to document the political and social turmoil

erupting in Latin America.

There was one wonderful moment when there was a big meeting.

Everybody from all the various states was there.

This tense meeting between the US and Latin American states

was filmed by Leacock and recorded by Drew.

There was the American Secretary of State.

Can you hear me now?

And Raul Roa, the Cuban ambassador at the UN.

I rejected completely and utterly

the allegations made in this resolution

by the Cuban government.

I am going to say no more

and I'll be glad to have the vote taken on this resolution.

There came this fantastic moment

and the entire Cuban delegation got up and walked out.

And Ricky, with his camera, walked right out with them.

So we got them walking in the streets, singing and going to...

THEY SING

And all the others, you could see them all with their big tripods.

They couldn't move.

THEY CONTINUE TO SING

That's what you could do with a camera that you could carry.

With the Auricon and Nagra,

they captured the radical decade of '60s America.

In their films, you hear real voices as you watch the unfolding stories.

They followed the drama of a lawyer's fight to save a man

facing death by electric chair.

The second doctor and the third doctor,

they proceed around and then they give you their findings.

You turn to them, all three agree, walk out and pronounce the man dead.

Has he said to the five victims whose skulls were bashed in,

"I'm sorry I have treated you, my former employees, that way?"

We got to make interesting films.

We got to prove a lot of our points.

They captured the extreme reaction

to the desegregation of white schools in the Deep South.

We feel that this is a communist front movement

pushing these coloured people to try and destroy our nation.

THEY SHOUT

That's what they are - niggers.

We gave those niggers all what they got.

We are the white people, they are the negroes.

He said negroes. I would have said niggers.

It was the most frightening situation I have ever been in.

When the crowd is after you.

It was scary as hell.

The films revealed pivotal moments of American history.

But for the television networks, they seemed shockingly raw.

It was like what they were doing was some sort of thievery,

that it wasn't really television and we were pretending it was.

Or something. I don't know what they really thought.

We were never accepted by television in America.

None of our stuff was shown.

It turned out that the networks

were never going to be able to make these films like these.

I wanted to be total theatre and TV was never going to go that way.

TV was just going to sell soap.

As fast as it could.

In 1963, Drew gained unrivalled access

to the most famous man in America.

But the television networks still weren't interested.

One of them said, you've got some good footage, there, Bob.

And without a narration and a correspondent,

they didn't see the story.

They didn't want to have any part of it.

They didn't even want to see us.

They wanted to be as far away from it as they could get.

In 1963, Drew and his original team of filmmakers

went their separate ways.

Their ambitions too big for television.

In France it was a different story.

At Eclair, the prototype evolved into a fully-developed

professional camera, made by engineers for the mass market.

In 1963 it was released with huge success as the Eclair NPR.

So that's the Eclair that made most of the cinema verite in the world.

It was a very popular camera.

I even think that for one year

it was the biggest exportation of France.

The biggest item of exportation in France.

They conquered the whole world with this.

By the end of the '60s

the Eclair was the world's most popular handheld camera.

The Auricon remained the tool of a handful

of arthouse documentary filmmakers,

but the Eclair conquered the world.

Voila.

Au revoir.

# Johnny's in the basement Mixing up the medicine

# I'm on the pavement Thinking about the government

# The man in a trench coat Badge out, laid off

# Says he's got a bad cough Wants to get it paid off

# Look out kid... #

Beauviala may caution modesty,

but since the invention of the handheld camera,

the world has never looked the same.

# I wish I were a rich man. #

The camera changed the world but it wasn't really the camera,

it was the idea that changed the world.

From the '60s onwards,

the handheld camera became witness to a rapidly changing world,

capturing history as it happened.

We could see the people running everywhere. It was fantastic.

Documentaries could now take their audiences into places

that were previously inaccessible.

You could see him because I filmed him.

That never happened before,

in the history of whatever it is, of storytelling.

That was never possible before.

That's something so amazing that that should take place.

I feel lucky to have lived during that period.

Don Pennebaker and Al Maysles

went on to make classic cinema documentaries.

Drew, Leacock, Brault and Rouch

also went on to make films.

Each true to the spirit of their early ambitions.

The handheld camera gave us a window on the world.

But it would also give us something else.

As time went on, this window on the world

became our window on the past.

When I've looked at these films so many times,

it's just part of my life.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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