Norris Pope, Palo Alto, California, is program director for scholarly publishing at Stanford University Press. The author of Dickens and Charity, he has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University. He owns—and often uses—an Arriflex 35.
Norris Pope's Chronicle of a Camera reads oddly like a thriller documenting how a collection of ornery and independent visual storytellers used a remarkable tool, the Arriflex II, to change how films are made and to change what kinds of films are possible in America. Pope is an oddity, an academic who illuminates the story of a camera he uses and loves. The Arriflex II allowed cinematographers and directors to work on location, telling stories outside of Hollywood's sound stage production formulas and practices. From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, these artists created a film counterculture that was a worthy artistic competitor to the European cinema. That counterculture in turn provided heroes for a film school generation that wanted to believe that independent and personal cinema is possible in America. Europeans knew the Arri was tough, reliable, portable, and affordable. How it enabled our own new waves in America, despite industry opposition, is a story Pope tells accurately and readably. Chronicle of a Camera should be essential reading for anyone interested in how independent narrative cinema became a reality in the United States. - Charles V. Eidsvik, author of Cineliteracy: Film Among the Arts