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ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY EMMANUEL LUBEZKI, ASC, OWES A great deal of his success to the Steadicam camera stabilizer.1 Whether operated by Chris Haarhoff, SOC, in Birdman (2014), Jörg Widmer in Tree of Life (2011), or P. Scott Sakamoto, SOC, in The Revenant (2015), Steadicam and its practitioners create the freedom of movement so often admired in Lubezki's work and the intangible "organicity" so often described by the films' critics. Steadicam's smooth mobility-relieving the camera from the confines of a dolly track and stabilizing the bumpiness of a hand-held shot-has been its industrial selling point since its invention by Garrett Brown in 1973. Yet the formal possibilities of its embodied quirks subtend a more complicated and contested institutional history.
What contemporary directors or critics might call "organic," many operators might call inelegant, even "bad," technique. Take, for example, a 2010 YouTube video entitled Steadicam Op vs. Director, uploaded by user lisagav1.2 In this humorous industrial critique, an unnamed Steadicam operator used the ExtraNormal Movie Maker generator to highlight misunderstandings between a director's aesthetic demands and an operator's technical, artistic, and professional craft. In the video, the director explains the vision for the Steadicam shots to an operator: "I guess what I'm looking for is for it to be a bit more organic. . . . Does it have to be so smooth? Can you rough it up a bit?" The operator responds, "So you don't want a handheld shot? I can just operate badly if that's what you want?" The unspoken but heated miscommunication between director and operator revolves...