My Bolex Ate My 7D

Today was the day I reconnected with my roots. One hundred feet at a time...

When I took 16mm Filmmaking in college, everything changed. I fell in love with cinematography, and it was a Bolex H16 that pointed the way forward. It was a dream of mine to own one someday, and a few weeks ago it happened. I purchased a Bolex SBM, complete with 400' mag and motor. Made in 1971, it lived through everything from Apollo 14's moon landing to Jim Morrison's tragic death. Forty years later, it still looks and runs like new. Honestly, I think it will outlive me. In fact, in the event of a worldwide nuclear catastrophe, I wager it will be the cockroaches and the Bolexes that emerge from the rubble unscathed. 

Now, electronics have their place, but personally I don't think I can ever fully appreciate a camera that 1) I can't take apart, 2) I know will become obsolete in a few years, and 3) can't function without batteries. Enter the Bolex. It can run at 7 different frame rates with Zero electronic circuitry. Completely tangible, mechanical operation. You know another great thing about it? It also doesn't try to tell me how to shoot. Completely and beautifully manual.

Today I put a 100' spool of Kodak 7222 through it for testing. I performed a few low-light tests and also tried out the different frame rates. Everything ran great and I'm stoked to get the film back from the lab.

After the test shoot, I decided to hook up the motor and 400' mag and see how that ran. Now before you call me on it, this does run on a battery. The MST motor is powered by a 12 volt battery, made up of 10 cadmium-nickel alkaline cells. However, it's not a battery that has disappeared into the archives of planned obsolescence. You can still buy them from Bolex. Plus, if you really wanted to, you could hook a car battery up to the motor instead. Crazy, right?

So I hooked up the motor and all the connectors (you have to unscrew the hand crank and rex-o-fader), and held my breath. Thankfully, the motor purred immediately. So the next step in the testing will be to buy a 400' core and run that through the camera. The pictures below are of the beast on its roost. That's a Cinevate Atlas 10 on top of a Manfrotto 503HDV head, attached to a 536 tripod.

So there it is. Would anyone like to shoot something? I'm dying to break this out! :)