The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever (Techniques of the Moving Image)

The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever (Techniques of the Moving Image)

From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength , from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. In The Zoom , Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television. From late 1920s silent features to the psychedelic experiments of the 1960s and beyond, the book describes how inventors battled to provide film and television studios with practical zoom lenses, and how cinematographers clashed over the right ways to use the new zooms. Hall demonstrates how the zoom brought life and energy to cinema decades before the zoom boom of the 1970s and reveals how the zoom continues to play a vital and often overlooked role in the production of contemporary film and television.   " T he Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever should prove a lasting and novel contribution to the historical poetics of film technology and style. The mind reels comprehending the number of films and television programs, most of them hard to access, that Hall watched, analyzed, and synthesized into such an original and comprehensive narrative history" - Zachary Zahos, The Velvet Light Trap NICK HALL is a research officer in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London in the United Kingdom.