Behind every exciting film image is a cameraman.
Behind his camera he is unseen
and forgotten by viewers
but dangerously exposed to his subjects:
Animals the could easily maul or kill him,
cataclysms of nature that could swallow him up
tumultuous human combat
pulling him closer and closer
to the epicenter of violence.
Sometime with only the camera
between himself and mortal danger,
other times separated from danger
by the flimsiest of protection,
but always driven to shed protection,
to get out of the cage and push even closer.
Stretching the limits,
pioneering in places where the limits are unknown,
stretching luck and boldness
ntil limits are found and exceeded.
The cameraman is David Breashears,
shooting a climb on an ice face in New Hampshire.
Action.
Just watch your left leg on my
To do it right, Breashears must climb
as well or better than the climber.
Keep going.
While the climber thinks about climbing,
Breashears thinks about climbing and shooting
about camera position, angles,
focus and changing light.
About storytelling, lenses, equipment.
He thinks ahead and climbs ahead.
Breashears is one of the top
mountaineering cameramen.
He's been on six Mt. Everest climbs,
twice getting to the summit with his camera.
The job is never over.
You don't crawl into your sleeping bag at night
and just go to sleep.
There's always some fooling around with equipment,
loading a magazine for the next day,
being more prepared than the other people have to be,
and also getting up earlier to get that extra shot,
to be in position
when they begin their ascent or when they leave camp.
It doesn't matter if you're cold;
it doesn't matter if you're tired;
It doesn't matter if you're hungry;
you just do it.
By the 1920s,
cameraman were traveling to exotic and faraway places
to film wildlife and adventure,
and one of the most spectacular locations
was Africa.
Americans at home had never seen such images as these.
They were thrilled by them.
This was the golden age of photographic exploration.
Carl Akeley
as an extraordinary figure of the times:
An American taxidermist who went to Africa
to collect his own specimens.
Trying to shoot a leopard, he only wounded it;
it counter-attacked,
and he managed to kill it with his bare hands.
Akeley's insistence on recording accurate details
for his taxidermy led him to photography,
and his frustration in filming
fast-moving African scenes led him to invent
a better camera for action photography.
The distinctive rounded Akeley camera
revolutionized nature photography
and was also used to film newsreels,
combat in World War I
and Hollywood movies.
In Africa Akeley joined forces at times
with the celebrity filmmaking couple
Martin and Osa Johnson.
As filmmaker the Johnsons were less interested
in documentation
than sensational entertainment.
They raced about Africa elaborate photo safaris,
seeking thrills and narrow escapes,
heightening their adventures when necessary with deceptive
film editing or staging,
Occasionally lapsing into antics that,
seen today, seem like satire of a very bygone era.
The Johnsons were a glamorous pair.
Martin was an all-American guy from a small town in Kansas
who started out as a cook for Jack London.
Osa was a singer who'd never been anywhere
until Martin carried her off
to a life summed up
in the title of her autobiography,
'I Married Adventure'.
In the water, crocodiles are especially wicked.
They would pounce upon the unfortunate
victims of a capsized boat
like a pack of wolves.
If a person were to fall into the water here,
he would not last one minute.
We begin to feel uneasy lest one might charge the boat
and this surly monster does, almost upsetting us!
For all their showmanship,
the Johnsons are recognized today as
intrepid and talented filmmakers.
They developed film in the field and
overcame a vast array of logistical difficulties
and personal hardships.
Their movies,
even with moments that now seem silly,
were remarkable achievements.
It must have been incredible to go there
with primitive cameras,
Primitive transportation,
and how they actually got any material out of it,
out of Africa at all, was a miracle.
Wolfgang Bayer, who's photographed wildlife
in all sorts of conditions, all over the world.
Of all the animal that I filmed,
I must say the primates
are probably the most enjoying
enjoyable ones
They are so much like us.
Like the orangutans:
We had to climb 15 ft. Tall trees in Borneo
in order to go up in their environment.
Everything else before has been filmed from the ground up.
We wanted to go back and we brought mountain-climbing gear,
and we went up into the trees and all of a sudden we were
face to face with orangutans.
Then they came over and they climbed up and down our rope.
They were right above us; they peed on us, you know.
I'm looking up there, and what are you gonna do?
You hang, you're totally helpless
and some orangutan decides to pee on you.
All you can do is just keep your head low
and hope he doesn't do it too long.
And we'll be hanging up 15 ft. On the ropes
which actually came up over our branch
and we would tie the rope off down at the bottom
on a different tree,
And we'll be filming upthere
And we looked down all of a sudden
there's an orangutan trying to untie
our rope on the very bottom,
and it's not a very good feeling.
We of course had to try to shout and throw things down
and then get down as fast as we can to chase'em away.
Looking through a camera when filming wildlife or anything
that could be potentially dangerous,
It puts a barrier between you.
It's almost like watching television,
and you don't realize
that danger could be just feet away from you.
I was filming and I got in the middle of a fight
and I just was an innocent bystander.
But a female came by at full speed
and she just grabbed my hand and bit me.
And drew quite a lot of blood.
The only weapon I had along was my camera,
Which is a, you know, $50,000 piece of equipment.
But in a case like this I used it
and started on hit the chimps
over the head with my camera and get out back in the water
where I was supposed to be.
Chasing animals over the years I've been bitten, scratched,
attacked and uh, other-wise mutilated by coyotes,
cougars, leopards, jaguars, baboons, chimpanzees,
and of course numerous little creatures.
Lucking nothing really poisonous.
Nature and the animals give me so much enjoyment that,
what the hell, a few bites and a few diseases
and a few injuries here and there are not gonna kill me.
You go out on these films and you're with very professional
people who really stay out of trouble,
and of course part of the fun for an audience is too see
how people handle trouble.
Filming an Alaska's Yukon River,
Jim Lipscomb came up against a conflict familiar
to action cameramen:
Things were too safe.
The Yukon raftsmen navigated smoothly post all perils,
and Lipscomb was filming an uneventful trip.
But then they came to Five Fingers Rapids,
and suddenly they were losing control.
It was sort of a funny, perverse pleasure as I realized as
the raft was swinging out,
swinging out...
I could line up the shore behindit
and I could see they weren't,
they weren't gonna miss it.
Looking pretty bad, boy.
So I realized, oh boy,
these guys are into it at last.
They've really got themselves in trouble and I'm so glad.
And then I thought, but I'm with'em!
And the 10-ton raft stopped with the loudest noise
I think I've ever hard in my life.
And we knew we had it and we had it
with three cameras going.
So it made a marvelous scene in the film.
Jim Lipscomb has made films about people and about animals.
He says people are more treacherous.
But it was the animals he photographed
for "Polar Bear Alert"
that taught him a personal lesson about fear.
It began with his own brave
insistence on getting closer to the bears.
When he decided against filming
as planned from the safety
of a vehicle called a tundra buggy
his guide stared getting anxious.
And so I said to the guide,
"We're gonna have to get outside of
that tundra buggy in order to film.
And he said,
Well, I can't let you outside the tundra buggy
if the polar bear is closer than 60 to 80 feet,
Because they're very unpredictable animals.
You don't know what they're gonna do,
and they can get to you in three bounds
and then look you over.
And by the time they get finished looking you over,
you're gonna be dead.
And I don't want any National Geographic photographer
dead in my tundra buggy.
So we said, okay, we'll build a cage.
Yes, please,
lots.
I didn't think when I got out there in the cage
that I was going to feel any particular feel
or that I was in any risk.
And I thought I was going to be very calm.
But then when that big bear walkup to the cage,
Something happened in my mind that was an
entirely different kind of experience,
and I think it's the first time
I've ever identified it in my life.
I felt fear.
Oh, boy.
I was breathing hard and I was trying not to tremble
because I wanted to hold that camera still.
The polar came right up and licked the lens.
He wanted to see what this thing tasted like.
And I felt what it must be,
an atavistic fear I think, that there was in,
Inborn, and through centuries,
through eons of evolution into the human species:
This is not the place to be!
You gotta get out of here!
This thing, this thing is gonna get you.
And I, I was just atremble with the sense of fear of that,
That thing, knowing all the time
that I was presumably safe.
There's tremendous charge of adrenalin and excitement
coming through to you.
And you're, yeah, you're thrilled to be there, uh,
and to be experiencing it.
I don't know that it's addicting,
because in retrospect after you think about it,
you think, well, that was a high
I maybe just don't need anymore.
I don't need that one again, you know.
In 1914
motion picture photography reached into a new realm.
Underwater.
John Williamson,
a cartoonist and photographer for a Virginia newspaper,
Had a showman's ingenuity and a father who'd built a 30-foot
flexible steel tube designed for underwater salvage work.
Williamson climbed down into the tube.
Through the window of an observation
chamber he called a "photosphere",
he took still photos in 1913
and, in the next year,
the first moving pictures ever taken underwater.
Only one year later,
Williamson made the first theatrical
movie produced underwater.
These scenes are from his version of
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Audiences were fascinated by these images.
Others were fascinated by the Williamson
"photosphere" itself.
The eminent Alexander Graham Bell,
inventor of the telephone,
visited in 1922 and spent a half-hour
peering through the underwater window.
Williamson emphasized the safety
and dryness of the device by taking
his wife and baby daughter below.
He filmed them gazing at sea life
including divers hired to swim before his cameras.
Shooting in the Bahamas,
he lured sharks into the picture
the sharks attracted by the scent of chunks of horsemeat
dangled in the water over the photosphere.
What remained to be done, of course,
was filming by a cameraman who swam freely underwater.
An Austrian zoologist, Dr. Hans Hass,
was among the first to try to connect diving
and photography.
Dr. Hass experimented with many different cameras
and housings,
some of which leaked disastrously.
But this was true pioneering:
Equipment was devised from scratch,
Mostly hand made,
improvised with little sophistication
in diving technology
and near-total ignorance of undersea dangers.
How would sharks react to a diver taking their picture?
The only way to find out was to take the plunge.
In 1939 Dr. Hass filmed underwater scenes
that enthralled audiences and fired
the imagination of future divers.
When Hass first went in the water
with his little wind-up sixteen
millimeter camera and started to press,
you know, six, eight-foot,
ten-foot sharks in the Mediterranean,
no one had ever done it before.
So he was not only using new techniques
and worried about the bends
and an embolism, and this and that,
but he was also the first to ever engage those animals.
So today we know that most of them are approachable,
but those guys, those early people-Hass,
Cousteau hadn't clue that that was gonna be the case.
Very bold first efforts. Very exciting.
Al Giddings has shot countless ocean documentaries
and the underwater segments of features
including James Bond movies and "The Deep".
Doing so, he's amassed a vast library of underwater footage.
But he's best known for his work with great white sharks,
Shooting them at first from inside a protective cage...
later going outside the cage.
The first time in the cages most of us dropped
to the bottom of the cage,
hands and knees and sort of cowered for a time,
Because these 3,000-pound eating machines were pounding
the bars and pushing the cages around.
Today, um, I know that if you maintain good eye contact,
you're fairly aggressive, and on the bottom,
you can get out of the cage,
And I have, and, and really fend a two-or three
thousand-pound great white away.
The first time out of the cage
was certainly a ticklish experience.
And I went out six or eight feet
and kept the cage at my back,
and the first animal that came near I lunged forward a bit,
not totally convinced that he was gonna move off.
But it worked, and I continued to move
further and further away from the cages,
And eventually, the last time we were in Australia,
I had five whites circling the cages and me,
and I was thirty, forty feet away,
with animals swimming between me and the cages.
You always have apprehension,
but driven a bit by the hum of that camera and the spectacle,
you take a calculated risk.
Giddings has taken his chances
not only with the ocean's most fearsome creatures
but also with its most formidable places:
Like the hypnotically beautiful
but perilous waters beneath the thick ice
at the North and South poles.
Diving the North Pole,
and for that matter, Antarctica,
I think represents the toughest diving
that I've done anywhere in the world.
Surface conditions north and south, 60, 70 below zero,
water temperature 28.5,
a canopy of ice over your head
in most cases, 8, 9 feet thick.
Antarctic diving is very, very, very tough tough on the gear,
tough on the people.
You're still concerned about bends.
You're still concerned about all the problems of shooting
and making images but, again,
You're going through a hole that's 30 inches in diameter,
40 inches in diameter,
and you've got a limited air supply.
And you're on the bottom perhaps 40 minutes
and you've got, you know,
You're gonna run out of gas
and you've gotta find that exit hole.
If you are in trouble
or you're confused as to where you entered,
that you wanna go deeper,
if you surface under the ice
and you're trying to see the exit point
and you're just under the canopy, of course,
You can't see anything.
So, you know, in most cases if you have an emergency
you're off to the surface.
In this case if you have an emergency it's usually deeper
to get a quick vantage point on
where the exit hole is and out.
Arctic diving is also some of the most beautiful diving
that I've done.
It's really a fairyland of sorts.
You have to be gutsy and you have to be motivated.
The best ones are driven.
They want to excel.
They want to come back with images the likes of which
no one's ever seen before.
The camera goes to war!
Each day it records the courage
and heroism of our troops in battle.
But rarely do you see the camera,
and the men behind it,
who risk those same dangers
to send back their stories and pictures.
This is "Cameramen At War", made during World War II
but with an admiring salute to the filmmakers of World War I.
In the last war they set up their cameras
60 yards from the German front line.
The man in the tin hat and bow tie is D.W. Griffith,
responsible for that silent epic.
The Birth of a Nation.
The get-up may look a bit odd now,
but they thrill the audiences of their day
with the first shots of a tank going into action.
In World War II,
top filmmakers including John Ford, John Huston,
William Wyler and Frank Capra produced war documentaries
working in Hollywood with battle footage
shot by military
and civilian cameramen.
Meet Jack Ramsen of Movietone.
His assignment is a daylight raid over occupied Europe.
His main care is his camera.
It's carefully and accurately fitted
to the door of a Flying fortress.
It's covered with an electric blanket
to prevent the motor freezing up.
Every precaution is taken to
insure you're seeing good pictures
If the cameraman gets back.
All set now except for his oxygen mask
and heavy gloves not easy to work
in but necessary at these terrific heights
if he's to get pictures like-Bombs gone!
Caravan's Jim Wright in another Fortress takes up
where the bomber leader leaves off
over an Italian cove,
pattern bombing it for enemy submarines.
Wouldn't you think his fingers would tremble with excitement?
The pictures are steady as a rock!
The amphibious invasion of the Pacific island
of Tarawa in 1943,
one of the bloodiest battles in the history
of the U.S. Marine Corps.
A documentary film about the battle shot
by Marine combat cameramen
later won an Academy Award.
This is the Army-Navy Screen Magazine cutting room,
where combat film taken by Army,
Navy and Marine cameramen
comes in from battlefronts all over the world.
The Marine staff sergeant with the expert medal is
22-year-old Norman Hatch from Boston, Massachusetts.
Sgt. Hatch went in
with the first wave in the landing at Tarawa,
armed with a pistol and a hand camera,
and brought back a filmed record
of the fighting at that island...
you know that's the best frame of combat film
I've ever seen. Hey, that's okay!
And when an Army man says that to a Marine, brother
he means it. Oh, they're just luck.
Today, Norm Hatch has vivid memories
of hitting the beach at Tarawa
with other Marine cameramen who had no idea
what a fierce battle they were walking into.
They didn't know they'd have the extraordinary opportunity
of seeing the enemy from so close
that both sides in the fighting
would be shown in the same frames of film.
They didn't know that, despite their training,
combat photography was something they'd have
to learn as they went along.
When we went in on Tarawa, the only experience that anybody
had in the Marine Corps
doing a war story on film was Guadalcanal,
and that was almost nothing at all.
And so, consequently, when we got ready to go,
it was sort of like an improve situation, you know,
everybody makes it up on his own.
My thoughts were basically that if those guys can go out
there and fight and do a good job fighting,
we had to go out there and do a good job in photography.
We had the exit covered with machine guns and rifle fire.
The Japs kept coming out
trying to knock out the machine guns.
There's one of them.
That sniper's got a bead on another.
There's a squad of them!
A lot of good guys from the outfit weren't there anymore.
I'm glad I got these pictures,
because when you remember the roaches
you've been fighting and the things they represented,
And when you saw the flag go up and remembered the freedom
that flag stood for, you knew you were in on a good thing.
Vietnam a different war and a different breed of cameraman.
Cameraman Norman Lloyd, on assignment for CBS News,
filmed and recorded these scenes
when Bravo Company moved
into a large Communist bunker complex
six miles north of the Vietnamese border.
The main enemy fore had apparently pulled out,
but a rear guard element was left behind
to slow down the American advance.
Norman Lloyd, from Australia, was a school dropout,
a kangaroo hunter, a bar fighter, a loner.
He went to Vietnam on his own,
replaced a CBS cameraman who was missing in action,
and stayed four years.
He won two Emmys and made a reputation
for courage verging on craziness.
General Westmoreland was making a tour,
and there was a firebase that was in deep trouble,
and, uh, and I really wanted to get in to that firebase.
It was, but it was, they were in terrible shape in there,
and I wanted to get in and I,
I walked up to him and I said,
"General, I want to get into that firebase".
And I said the name of the firebase and he said to me,
and then he said
"son, you don't want to go there"
Then I say "Yes, I do, sir"
He said, "No you don't".
And that firebase was overrun like,
uh, you know, the next day or so, it, it,
but, uh, but I really,
I really wanted to get in there but,
uh, I went as high as I could to try.
There was a lot of competition between the three net works
for "bang, bang" footage.
It was very important to get "bang, bang" footage.
It was action, it was what they really wanted.
The pressure coming from New York,
there was a lot of pressure on people,
On correspondent, uh, on crews,
if someone wasn't getting the story,
and, and, and this led to deaths,
where uh, where people would,
would so silly things because of the pressure on them.
And they'd go out, and they'd get killed,
and this definitely happened, and, and
and other people were killed
with them because of the pressure.
Norman Lloyd's countryman, Neil Davis,
reported and filmed combat is southeast Asis for 11 years.
He was a legend among Vietnam cameramen
a master at covering combat.
I would always try and go to the extreme front line,
because that's where the best film is.
You can't get the spontaneity of action if you're not there.
You can't get it if you're 100 meters behind
the soldiers trying to get it with a telephoto lens
you don't see the faces,
The expressions on their faces.
You don't see the compassion that they may show
for their wounded comrades or their enemy, for that matter.
I wanted to show all those things,
and the only way to show them was being in the front line.
The real front life.
And the idea is for a news cameraman
to get the film and keep it rolling,
no matter what happens.
When Saigon fell, Neil Davis was there
filming the panicked attempt
to escape the bloodbath expected
when the North Vietnamese recaptured the city.
Most camera crews departed in the helicopters lifting off
from the U.S. Embassy
helicopters that were later dumped into the sea
to make room
on aircraft carrier flight decks.
Neil Davis chose not to escape.
He stayed behind, awaiting the conquering army
and making some of the most powerful images
of the Vietnam war.
I didn't believe that there was a great danger as long as
I survived the first few minutes
of the Communist occupation,
Where it's always very dicey, where there might be flare-ups
and fighting immediately.
Most people had left the streets.
The civilian population had gone inside their houses
and waited.
I decided the presidential place was the place to be.
And I went there alone and waited for them.
And, I thought, I wasn't gonna miss this end to the story.
I had a moment's hesitation as the tank was approaching,
and the tank column was approaching,
because they fired a few times
to let people know they were about,
I think, and crashed through that gate.
And a man with a weapon raced toward me,
screaming in Vietnamese, "Stop, stop, stop!"
Then I kept filming, and he got quite close,
and I rehearsed my bit before, which was in Vietnamese,
"Welcome to Saigon, comrade.
I've been waiting to film the liberation".
And I had qualms about that;
I had it all right.
And he said, "You're American".
I said, "No, I'm not, I promise I'm not.
I'm an Australian and I've been waiting for you".
So he hesitated, and then some troops were coming out
and surrendering from the palace, and he hesitated,
then dismissed me and ran past.
And I was able to then start filming again.
In 1985
Neil Davis was shooting a coup in the streets of Bangkok
a tame event compared to the heavy combat
he'd survived so many times.
But on this day,
an exploding tank shell hit Davis and his crew.
His camera, dropped on the pavement,
was still rolling as he was dragged away.
But he was dead,
and his soundman died a few hours later.
Neil Davis was a guy that really had seen it all.
And it was just a shame. Everybody misses him,
but if it had of been in a firefight somewhere and,
uh, you know, he would have liked it better,
I'm sure, instead of some dinky goddamn coup,
you know, that meant nothing.
After you see so many people get killed,
after you see so many civilians get killed,
after you see so many children get killed,
you go a little insane,
and I used to drink all the time.
I thought of suicide a lot,
uh, the, uh, the only,
the only reason that I, I really um,
didn't, uh, do it, was uh,
I really didn't want to hurt my mother, you know.
If I had the opportunity to be a Vietnam cameraman again,
I would do it
because I know what effect it had on the world.
It's taken years for me to, to get myself back together.
But, uh, but I'd do it again because I know that people
have got to see what war is,
and, and, what means, and the futility of it.
Mount Everest a symbol of towering,
irresistible challenge.
Its grandeur has always inspired awe and noble effort,
but Everest is also a killer.
Over 80 climbers have died on it.
Many more have come down broken and defeated.
The summit was first reached in 1953
and then by a second expedition,
before an American team tried it in 1963.
This team 19 men had a dual objective:
To reach the summit but also to film it,
To create a documentary that would
become the first National Geographic Television Special.
The climbers were punished by Everest's devastating weather.
Temperatures 20 below zero,
winds blowing at more than 60 miles an hour.
The altitude and cold induced nausea and headaches.
Climbing was hard labor.
Thinking was hard, operating the camera,
even remembering the camera, was hard.
And then things got worse.
The expedition's professional cinematographer, Dan Doody,
was stricken with a nearly fatal blood clot.
His climb was over,
but lying in his tent he taught a crash course
in mountain cinematography to a pair of climbers
who now got the job as moviemakers.
Lute Jerstad,
who till then had never worked a film camera, remembers.
So we thought he was gonna die,
and he thought he was gonna die.
So Doody got out scraps of paper,
and got Barry Corbet and I by the neck and began to diagram,
I think it was 18 different shots,
and was teaching us how to become cin, cinematographers.
So we'd take these little cameras without film in them
and we'd go outside and shoot and then we'd come back in
and tell him what we did and he'd critique it for us.
On May 1st climber Jim Whitaker
and the Sherpa Gombu reached the summit
planting an American flag but taking only a few snapshots.
Lute Jerstad, with the movie camera,
and his climbing partner,
professional still photographer Barry bishop,
were still a long way from the top.
Climbing is scarcely the word for what they're doing now.
They're barely creeping.
Five breaths to a step and then a rest
Then more steps. More breaths.
Bodies aching. Minds numb.
Even with the flow of oxygen they can barely breathe.
They can barely move their leaden feet.
But still they do move.
You become so single-minded,
the rest of the world is just gone.
Nothing, nothing matters any more.
I am going to get there if I have to crawl.
So you just keep putting one foot in front of the other
and breathing as well as you can
and trying to stay as warm as you can.
On the morning of May 22nd they launch the final push,
as alone as two humanbeings can be
on the face of the earth.
And then, before them is a sight to lift the heart
and bring tears to the eyes.
After three weeks
Jim Whitaker's maypole still stands fast,
with Old Glory streaming in the winds of space.
These are the first moving pictures ever taken
from the summit of Everes.
Lute Jerstad has his camera propped
on the head of his ice axe.
And the blur at the bottom is his furry glove.
Now a blast of wind strikes.
The earth quakes: Lute almost falls,
then steadies himself.
He completes his panorama.
They have won their victory.
They're filled with a great surge of joy... and gratitude.
We probably spent 45 minutes to an hour on top,
and all that was taken up by filming, really.
And filming that long,
certainly you pay a price for it.
And Barry's price was that he lost parts of
both little fingers and his fourth finger.
And then in the bivouacthat night,
as a result of that,
he lost all 10 of his toes and,
And part of his foot bone in both feet
And we finally were flown back to Washington
sometime at the end of July.
I guess, that year to get medals and awards and things.
And part of this was to go to the Geographic,
and they were gonna show some raw footage.
And I walked into this room not really paying a lot of
attention to it
and looking at the great pictures that had been taken,
and all of a sudden on the screen came my summit footage.
And I started to cry.
I couldn't believe it had come out.
And then I remembered what it looked like.
But I couldn't, I hadn't remembered what it
looked like until I saw that,
and it's because of that single-minded attitude of,
you know, get this job done, forget everything else,
and then you can turn around and go home.
Twenty years later
David Breashears reached the summit and beamed
a television picture to a satellite station
for broadcast
a week later on an American network.
Twenty-five years later 1988 pictures from the summit
were seen live on TV around the world.
Thus the dream
of Capt. John Noel was fully realized
Captain Noel who carried the first movie cameras on
Everest in the unsuccessful British expeditions
of the early 1920s.
His film continues to amaze mountaineering cameramen
not only for its clarity and coverage
but also his pioneering ordeal.
He lugged heavy equipment.
He developed the film himself,
on the spot, working in a mountainside tent,
filtering glacier water,
burning yak dung to provide heat to warm his chemicals.
He worked on his own,
getting little cooperation from other climbers
who resented his presence,
regarding his camera as a vulgar intrusion
on the purity of their sportsmanship.
And yet his film preserved the memory of the climb
and made a legend of its tragic climax
climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine struggling
to within 600 feet of the summit
before disappearing forever,
Noel and the others watching through telescopes,
then waiting anxiously as a search party led
by N.E. Odell went up.
Crossed blankets in the snow was the visual signal
to those below that there was no hope,
for Mallory and Irvine were gone,
a signal first seen through Captain Noel's long lens.
The emotion of that moment 64 years ago
is still keenly felt by Captain Noel.
Hi is 98 years old.
The top of the North Col was a shelf of ice,
and Odell, when he'd made the search
and determined after two days
and two nights that the men were dead,
just lost, he went and he found their tent,
and he found these pieces of oxygen cylinder,
and he came back and he gave a message by signal.
We had no wireless telephone
in those days; they weren't known.
He put a signal out of crossed blankets.
And the photograph I got,
the best photograph I made in my life,
was a circle made by the, this high-powered lens
at one-and-a-half-miles range showing the crossed blankets
and showing the men walking away.
And people asked me, "What do you see?"
I couldn't tell; I was overcome.
I couldn't tell them, but you'll get the signal.
The crossed blankets meant Mallory and Irvine were dead.
That is clearly shown.
Almost 30 years passed before men reached the top of Everest,
almost 40 years till
Lute Jerstad fulfilled Captain Noel's dream
of moving pictures from the summit.
Captain Noel, filming a heroic quest on a great mountain,
was one of the first of his kind.
As the era of the action film cameraman was just beginning,
he embodied explore and adventurous spirit
and made lasting contribution
to the tradition of cameramen who dared.