Where Do You Put the Camera? Re-filming The Battle of the Somme
Where do you put the camera? This is the first question that a director or cinematographer must think about when setting up a shot. Imagine that you are filming on a Great War battlefield. You have limited light and unpredictable weather. You are using a heavy, hand-cranked, 35mm film camera, you must set the focus and the exposure by hand, and the enemy might shell you. These were the conditions under which Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell shot much of the 1916 feature film The Battle of the Somme. Where Do You Put the Camera? shows how a cinematographer thinks about this, and how Malins and McDowell photographed a film of outstanding quality. The talk by Andrew McCarthy and cinematographer John Adderley will put The Battle of the Somme in context. It will include a short 35mm black and white film shot by John Adderley on a vintage hand-cranked camera. John will give a practical demonstration of the camera.
Andrew McCarthy was a BBC film editor. He has produced and directed short films. He is the author of The Huns Have Got My Gramophone: Advertisements from the Great War (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014).
John Adderley FRGS was a BBC cameraman for 24 years. He has photographed over ninety BBC films and specialises in filming with historic hand cranked wooden cameras. At present he is shooting with replica cameras from the Race to Cinema collection, 1888 to 1995.
- this seminar is free to attend but advance registration is required.
This session is a hybrid session and in-person tickets are limited.
This page was last updated on 29 April 2025
