Camera Movements

Camera movements (especially when done badly) are reminders we’re watching a movie. A brief history of camera movements: 

1897: tracking

The Lumière brothers filmed from a moving train in Liverpool in 1897, probably the first experiment in camera movement. https://youtu.be/UysiqXjGCP4?feature=shared&t=54

1901: close-up 

Before cats invented the internet, they invented the close-up. In "The little doctor and the sick kitten" from 1901, director George Albert Smith used one of the first close-ups in cinema. He wanted to show us the cat eating in more detail and moved closer. 

1903: panning

Considered the first narrative film, "The Great Train Robbery" from 1903 was directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter, a former cameraman for the Thomas Edison Company. Primitive by modern standards, the 10-minute action picture depicts 14 distinct scenes filmed at various locales in New Jersey intended to represent the American West. In the second half of the film, at 8min 36sec, Porter’s camera turns to follow the robbers running away from the train, considered the first panning shot.

1914: a drifting camera 

Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), a hugely influential epic, was the first film in which the camera moves without tracking the action of the characters. It just starts drifting. Pastrone had built a device—basically a big cart—and simply started moving it. (In Hollywood after the film’s release, arbitrary extended moving camera shots were called “Cabiria shots.”) 

According to Martin Scorsese, in this work Pastrone invented the epic movie and deserves credit for many of the innovations often attributed to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Among those was the extensive use of a moving camera, thus freeing the feature-length narrative film from "static gaze".

1952: a dancing camera

As cameras get smaller, they can start dancing and Singing in the Rain (1952.)

1958: dolly zoom 

Famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1958 film Vertigo, a dolly zoom (also known as a Hitchcock shot, Vertigo shot, Jaws effect) is an in-camera effect that appears to undermine normal visual perception.

The effect is achieved by zooming a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view, or FOV) while the camera dollies (moves) toward or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout. The zoom shifts from a wide-angle view into a more tighter-packed angle. In its classic form, the camera angle is pulled away from a subject while the lens zooms in, or vice versa.

1976: steadicam

In the mid-seventies, Garrett Brown created the Steadicam, a counterbalance system positioned right next to the operator’s body. The camera floats just as it floats on a crane. It was used to make the opening credits of Marathon Man (76); a long shot of Dustin Hoffman running. 

flying cameras 

(now cameras fly)

sources 

Schrader, P. (2015) 'Game Changers - Camera Movement', Film Comment Magazine, 52(2)

& other sources