Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

!)()( I Ml N 1 MM 1 II \l M \\S ileeordinti Angel? A CLOSE-UP OF KEN CAMERON The Story bv Vlex Shaw shah jehan lavished every care on the building of the Taj Mahal. He sought perfection. Another seeker after the same quality is building his dream palace in an isolated corner of the Crown Film Unit Studios at Bcaconslield. Locally known, affectionately or derisively, according to the feelings of the speaker, as Cameron Castle, it is one day to be the hub of an eventual Palace of Perfect Sound. Indeed, were it not for the Ministry of Works, there is no doubt that its designer also would have insisted on porphyry, alabaster and lapis lazuli being used in the construction (always provided, of course, that they were acoustically suitable). This building represents the latest step in Ken Cameron's efforts to record better and better sound, an ideal which he has fanatically pursued ever since he started in films. Sound and music are his masters and seldom has there been a more willing slave. Presumably he takes in food (although it is possible that this, in his case, is done \ ia the ear and that the nourishment is sound waves). And there would not seem to be much time for sleep in a spare time devoted to concerts and the esoteric literature of sound recording. In any case, sleep for him is not the waste of time it is with lesser mortals; he can hear in his sleep as I have many times proved. Sleeping peacefully at concerts or the opera he will yet, on waking, comment sourly that the flutes were a bit rough in the slow movement or that a singer was off-key. And lo and behold, they were! The fact that he strenuously denies having slept at all is nothing to do with the case. I have witnesses. Not content with listening and then trying to reproduce the perfect sound, he takes a passionate interest in musicians and will talk of a Walton, Britten, Alwyn or Abady with a critical enthusiasm usually reserved for football teams In fact that is what they probably are to him, for in his mind there seems to be something very much akin to the football divisions up and down which the composers move according to their latest works. Players he is not so interested in. I think he feels that they stand between him and that perfect sound he is always seeking, yet, in spite of this, few of us who lived through the terrible da> when the signed photograph of Dame Myra Hess fell from his office wall will ever believe that he is quite blind lo their talents. No ominous geese ever created such a feeling of impending doom. He often appears to be a forecast of the Man of the Future; highly specialized, obsessed, an Ear-Man. Certainly a list of the films which he has recorded — Coastal Command, Target, Listen to Britain, V.\. and Instruments of the Orchestra among them -suggests a vast range of sounds hunted, caught, dissected and put on celluloid. But his passion for American stage musicals shows that the man is still human. Anybody who can fly from Ottawa to New York for a few hours specially to see Allegro, is clearly an endearing character. Ken comes from the fanatic-producing city of Glasgow. While studying to be an electrical engineer he spent his spare time at the mov ies and particularly those shown by the Glasgow Film Society. Here he heard Grierson and the inevit BOOK REVIEW We Made a Film in Cyprus. By Laurie Lee and Ralph Keene (Longmans, Green and Co, London — New York — Toronto. Ms. bd.) for the undoubtedly vast body of people interested in how films are made, this book should have considerable appeal. It is conceivable, however, that the discriminating reader of travel books will find it even more absorbing. The film fan will look for rather more technical detail than is provided by Ralph Keene in his half of the text, but no-one could call for a livelier portrait of Cyprus and its people than sparkles from the pen of Laurie Lee. Lee was the script writer for Cyprt i is an Island, and he is less concerned to reveal the processes of cinematic gestation than to provide us with a visually exciting picture of modern Cyprus. Sometimes his indefatigable search for the dramatically evocative word or the unexpected visual analogy leads to over-rich writing but the volume is slim and the problem of digestion not, therefore, acute. The illustrations are lovely and generally to the point of the text, and most readers will be interested in the film's scenario which is printed as an appendix. W e should do well perhaps to prepare for a spate of such books (scratch a documentary film-maker and you will find a literary man) and future practitioners would do well to study this rather fine example of what may prove to be a much misused genre. They will observe that one problem remains unsolved. Should the book be intimately done, written about the film-makers in their spark-striking relationship with their actors, or should it be a travel book about the place? Can it be both, as is here attempted'.' It is significant that the whole book comes suddenly and brilliantly to life when Laurie Lee wine about the film-makers' Easter Day partv with their Cyprian hosts. Here is something of the necessarily picaresque qualitv of such documentary film-making. And, finally, what are we to make of 1 Lee's penultimate words' 1 thought ol the film we had prepared, which was now ready to be made; but I thought more of that film we could UCvei make, of the things that could not he said ' Heaven help us if film-makers start to come back with their real achievements in then books and not in their films The Drawing In W \ able spell was cast over him. From that day forward he determined to be a sound recordist Ikspent the next summer as an apprentice at the GPO Blackheath den shillings a weeki and then joined the unit as what he himself calls a sound stooge (eighteen shillings and ninepence a week). Those were the days of The Fair) oj the Phone and Bill Blewett. ken did a lot of stooging. Then came that strange hiatus repeated in so many of our lives when he went and stooged on quota quickies at Welwyn instead. Cavalcanii recalled him to the GPO and finally, a BS< salelv under his hat, he did his first dav's work as a fully fledged sound recordist in Manchester with the Halle doing a score of Gaillard's for Forty Million People. From then on it was a pursuit of better sound. With frequency and modulation, decibel and supersonic, by mike and bv cycle, through trial and through tears, he sought prefection. The human voice, the orchestra, the natural sound, these weie his raw materials I heir impeccable reproduction, his aim. An enthusiast himself he is a connoisseur ol other enthusiasts. Thus the stormv collaboration between himself and \1uir Malhieson has been more than usually fruitful I ach sees in the other a fellow-maniac and together the) have done much for our films. Now, at the almost tender age o\ 31 (he has been described as 'the oldest thirty-oner in the world') he finds new enthusiasms I he National film Board of Canada has found in him an ardent gospeller; bigger and bettei scoring are planned; new materials aie to be used for walls and ceilings; stereophonic sound is m the offing Where it will all end is a mattei for coo jecture. Will he go mad Irving to record the unbearable or will he find new worlds lo conquer? I think 1 shall telephone him and ask him if he can get on the track, the squeak ol a bat or the noise ol the stars, lor the new. the difficult, the impossible, is his ,.. I | much to this pioneering attitude of his