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Born in Germany, cinematographer Walter Lassally (1926-2017) was best known for his Oscar-winning work on 'Zorba the Greek'. He was associated with the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s, and the British New Wave in the early 1960s. [Listener: Peter Bowen; date recorded: 2004]
TRANSCRIPT: So we always had to make this choice. Is it more important to be hand-held, have the freedom, improvisation, or is it more important to have synch dialogue, because you couldn't have both. You had to choose. So in 'The Lambeth Boys' there's one sequence where we wanted some of the dialogue to be usable, and I devised this blimp, portable blimp, which was made out of a sleeping bag. We just cut up a sleeping bag and we made various pieces. One went around the hood, one went around the motor, one went around the whole body. There's a picture of me somewhere operating this camera, which was bulky but... but not heavy. And, so you could get synch-sound... pseudo synch-sound, I'll call it. But it's in the film. It's perfectly effective. And then there's a proper synch-sound sequence in that film where the group of young boys featured in the film... because it's all... it's all centred on a youth hostel... on a youth club in... in South East London, Lambeth. And, so this one sequence where... where they all get together for this weekly discussion. The day we did it the theme was capital punishment and they were... my God, were they for it! They were all, to a man, for capital punishment on... on the basis of an eye for an eye, that is it you know. Yes, that's the way you should be, definitely. It was quite frightening. You see these 14- and 16-year-olds being so, so definitely for capital punishment. So that sequence was a natural synch-sound sequence where it doesn't hurt if you have a... a camera on a tripod and lighting set up. But in many situations, if you... if you need to set up a camera and lights, by the time you've done that, your subject has evaporated. It's very often the case. So you have to have two techniques available, and you have to choose between the spontaneity and the ability of capturing that spontaneity, or synch-sound. You couldn't have both. Now you can have both, but then you couldn't. And there's a very interesting sequence in 'The Lambeth Boys' where they go to play their annual cricket match with a... with a very high-nosed school in North London. And there's a nice lorry ride... ride on the back of a lorry on the way to this cricket match. And then you have the cricket match itself which, again, is... is... there is no commentary at all on the cricket match. It just sets the scene. It tells every year they go to this place and they have a friendly cricket match with these high... with these public school boys, with these public school boys. Because, in England, as you know, public school is a private school.
Anyway... and that is a very interesting sequence because you have the... you have no need for commentary. You have these two groups and they sort of eye each other warily, and then they play this match. 'The Lambeth Boys' are in street clothes and sort of thrown together bits and pieces, and the... the public school boys are all in... and they've got their proper whites and their knee guards and their... one small pause for refreshment. So that's... seeing that sequence is quite instructive because it shows that one of the parts of the Free Cinema manifesto has a... has definite meaning. Because in that manifesto it says, the image speaks, sound amplifies and comments. And that ought to be framed and hung up in every producer's office across the land and across the world. Because the- nowadays, the... the sound speaks and the image might just as well be turned off. A lot... lot of films these days are like illustrated radio plays. All the information is in the dialogue. And there's a coda to all this again, where many years later the BBC made a film, 20 years later, roughly in the 80's I think it was. The... the BBC made a series called 'The Lambeth Boys', which was about the... the making of this film and what happened to the people in it. And it was in three parts. Each part was an hour long and it was in colour, because the BBC had gone into colour by then. And, the first part... the first programme was a re-showing... a re-showing of the original film. And then they... the second part was following... they'd done some research, and they'd followed up on what happened to those boys who are now grown-up men. And they showed... they... they found half a dozen of the people who'd been in that club in that film, and they showed what they were doing nowadays. [...]
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