That was Then. This is Now.

I have always been interested in making movies. I bought my first movie camera when I was 15 years old. My first production was called, “The Scratched Corpse or Don’t Eat Crackers in Your Bed”.

Ten years later I am newly married and living in El Paso, Texas. With two incomes, there was money “burning a hole in my pocket”. My new father-in-law, a camera buff, helped me buy my dream movie camera, the classic Bolex H-16.

To me, the Bolex looked like a movie camera should look. It was big, heavy, black and chrome and had a 3-lens turret like this picture. My camera was “previously owned” and came with an optional big, heavy electric drive (normally, the camera operated from a wind-up spring motor). I only used the electric drive once when I took these clips of President Johnson. He visited El Paso in October 1967 for a ceremony returning some land to Mexico. That small parcel of land had become separated due to the meanders of the Rio Grande.



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It is astounding to compare that old film camera to today’s easy-to-use video devices.

Perhaps the biggest difference is production cost. A 50 foot roll of 16mm film for that camera cost $10 and processing was $5. Since each 50 foot roll yielded only about 3 minutes of movie, that movie cost $5 per minute in 1967 dollars! Compare that to $0 for today’s digital methods.

How about weight. Did I mention the camera was big and heavy? The optional electric drive system included a leather case for carrying the batteries over your shoulder. It required 6 lantern batteries for 11 pounds right there. My wife can take video with her 1.3 ounce iPod nano.

The old Bolex did not have a through-the-lens viewfinder. The aperture had to be set manually using a hand-held light meter. There was no zoom lens. To change lenses the turret had to be rotated to change between normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses. There was no auto focus system. Focus was by estimating distance to the subject. And it took silent movies and editing 16mm film is done by cutting and pasting pieces of film.

Wow. The comparison is stark. I would not want to go back. On the plus side, one could take “professional” movies with the Bolex. Movies made for the theater use 35mm film but movies made for TV used 16mm. There was at least one commercially-released film made using 16mm film: The Endless Summer, 1966.

For the truly geeky, this video shows how to load the film in the Bolex.

How to load the Bolex H16 Rex 4 16mm camera from SVA Film/Video on Vimeo.