It’s a presidential function at Uhuru Park in 1982. The president is the late Daniel Arap Moi, and a battery of journalists is eager to document the event. Security agents mingle with the crowd and press, alert to every movement.
Among them is cameraman Henry Bwoka, who unwittingly commits what could have been a grave verbal misstep. He urges his soundman to prepare.
“Let me know when you’re ready so that when the president begins delivering his speech, I shoot him,” he says. Instantly, a sharp-eared, smartly dressed man whirls around and demands clarification: “Unasema nini wewe? (What did you say?)”
Bwoka is jolted to his senses and quickly recants, “No! I mean filming!”
At that time, it wasn’t far-fetched to imagine a few young film students animatedly discussing magazines, loading cartridges — and, as in Bwoka’s case, shooting. In the tense political climate of the early 1980s, such terms could easily be misconstrued. Security agents were ever-watchful for suspected subversives, and careless language could earn one a long interrogation in a nearby installation.
Several underground movements, such as Mwakenya, had been outlawed. Words had to be weighed carefully, lest one be mistaken for a dissident who deserved to be “locked out of sight.”
It often fell to instructors to rescue anxious film trainees from overzealous officers, explaining that their jargon had nothing to do with ballistics. Indeed, many expressions used in filmmaking took years to be understood beyond the industry.
“The shooting ratio for film was 1:1,” Bwoka recalls. “Each action was to be shot only once — you either got it or never.” In a sense, he adds with a wry smile, a cameraman had to be a marksman.
Mbarack Ambe, now a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya, was a producer in the 1980s and 1990s at the Voice of Kenya (VoK). He reminisces, “Deletion was unknown. These days you shoot, preview, and delete if the image isn’t satisfactory. Back then, you lived with your mistakes.”
Bwoka, now a farmer in Bungoma County, retired from the Ministry of Information in 2016 after more than three decades behind the camera. He still occasionally freelances, though he notes with some resignation that what most colleges now call “film production” is, in truth, video or television production.
“The original definition of film explains why,” he observes.
WHAT FILM REALLY IS
Film is a thin flexible strip of material coated with a light-sensitive emulsion (silver halides) on one side. The emulsion could be silver bromide, chloride or a combination of the two—silver bromochloride. The other side has a gelatinous base. Older generations of filmmakers refer to film as celluloid, to distinguish it from the later entrant, video.
What’s currently taught in colleges is either video or television production. The principal medium of image registration is not film.
Bwoka joined the film industry in the late 1970s as a trainee at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication (KIMC), where the Film Production Training Department had been established by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation. He was part of the second intake, from 1979 to 1981.
Five core classes covered production techniques, camera work, sound, editing, and laboratory processes. He vividly recalls being rotated through each section — a foundation that furnished him with a broad mastery of the craft.
KIMC was fondly described then as the only college of its kind south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo. During Bwoka’s time, each class had no more than ten trainees of various nationalities. His camera class, for instance, had two Kenyans and three others from Zambia, Ethiopia, and The Gambia.
Today, the market is flooded with countless brands and models of digital video cameras, but back then, training focused on 16mm and 35mm film gauges.
“It’s unfair to compare film with video,” Bwoka insists. “Film is superior. The celluloid used to manufacture raw film stock is special — the picture quality is incredibly high.”
He maintains that film cameras required only minor servicing, whereas video cameras had multiple parts that wore out easily.
“A 35mm camera in the 1990s cost about KSh 50 million,” he recalls. “Hollywood has stuck to film for a reason.”
When film reigned supreme, a cameraman referred exclusively to one who operated a motion-picture camera, while photographers dealt with still images. Today, the boundaries have blurred, and the Director of Photography (DOP) in a motion-picture production now “calls the shots.”
Bwoka was trained to operate Arriflex 35ST and 35BL cameras, both released in 1972 and famed for their durability. They dominated production for nearly two decades.
“The 35BL weighed about 20 kilograms with a standard lens,” he remembers. “The tripod alone was 12 kilos — sturdy as a rock. A smaller one would have been like an elephant sitting on a pickup truck,” he laughs. “That’s why it was important to have a friendly sound operator — to help carry it.”
FILM FOOTAGE
The cameras’ final version, the 35BL4S was birthed in 1989. Bwoka’s operations outlived the cessation of the 35mm camera series’ production.
The most well-known raw film stock manufacturers were the Eastman Kodak Company of the USA, Fuji of Japan and Agfa Gevaert of Germany. Material from Kodak was the most dominant.
These films were supplied in 200, 400, 800 or 1200 feet. It’s from these feet that film donated the word footage to video. The raw films were mostly for black and white negative and positive, colour reversal, negative and positive.
“One roll of 35mm 400ft, around 2000 was costing about Ksh. 20,000,” Bwoka says. “Imagine having gone out with two rolls and you mess one.”
“Once raw film was exposed to light, that would be the end of it. It became fogged,” he says. “Unless exposed film was processed, it too was to be treated with utmost caution.”
Since film raw stock was sensitive to light, it was loaded into a magazine in pitch darkness either in a darkroom or a black loading bag. The bag was also employed to offload an exposed film and securely place it in a can.
After loading the magazine, Bwoka mounted it onto the camera and engaged the transport claws to dip in and out of the sprocket holes as the film ran through the camera gate. The film wound around a take-up spool.
Picture and sound could either be recorded separately or jointly depending on the camera. During the first three months of training, Bwoka was in sound. “We used to record using the Nagra 4.2, powered by 12 size D batteries,” he says. “The recording was reel-to-reel and was of very good quality.”
He later narrowed his focus on the camera. His sound operator took care of the audio. Sometimes a cable connected the camera to the Nagra for synchronization.
A clapperboard was labeled indicating the date, take, scene and roll. When the board was slammed while the camera rolled, the contact of the two sides guided the picture matching with the sound produced. During post-production, the picture and independently recorded sound were merged.
MOTION PERCEPTION
Instead of using a cable to sync the sound with the picture, the alternative was to use synching gadgets that were inserted in the Nagra and the camera. A retired soundman, Lawrence Musyoka says, “There was the double-system where the pictures and sound for a scene were recorded separately.” He adds, “A signal was sent to the camera to trigger the recording of synchronous picture and sound.”
This is the method that Bwoka and his colleague used at Uhuru Park, before shooting the president. The mode was ideal because of the masses of people crisscrossing around.
Automatic settings were non-existent on 35mm film cameras. Every operation was manual. Before Bwoka took his shots, a hand-held exposure metre determined for him the amount of light falling on a subject or scene.
Calibration of the light metre was contingent on the sensitivity of the film measured in ASA (American Standards Association). “We had high-speed material for indoor and low-speed for outdoors. The light metre guided the operator on the correct aperture,” Bwoka says. A 200 ASA film was less sensitive to light than a 500 ASA. The lens general aperture opening was from 2.4 to 16.
Even though Bwoka was shooting ‘motion pictures,’ the movement was and still is in video, just a notion. There is no movement. Shooting with film enabled one to understand this concept best.
The camera Bwoka used to operate had the standard option of shooting a filmstrip at 24 frames per second. A frame is a single still picture. The frame divisions on a film are distinguishable. If there were some actual movements registered with the eye, the 24 frames were a series of 24 still pictures that were each slightly different from preceding ones. When all these frames were projected in one second, motion perception arose.
“If I recorded 12 frames per second, that would be fast motion,” Bwoka says. “If I were to get slow-motion, then I would calibrate the camera to 50 frames per second.”
For 16mm film, the camera Bwoka used was the Bolex series. “The 16mm is ideal for documentaries because it’s meant for room projection,” he says. “The 35mm is for big screen projection like in theatres.”
Cinemas such as Kenya, Nairobi, 20th Century, Cameo, Odeon, and Fox Drive-in, among others had silver screens. Before the main movie’s projection, Bwoka’s 12-minute documentary shots were viewed. These shows were known as the Kenya Newsreel.
Regarding the content of the newsreel, Bwoka says, “I used to travel outside the country to cover presidential functions for posterity purposes.” This was especially during President Moi’s tenure.
FILM PROCESSING
By that time, it was evident that Bwoka’s shots were harmless to the president. “The presidential team would do it for TV news and my colleague and I on 35mm film,” he says.
Bwoka fondly reminisces about his visit to Swaziland. “I was the only one with a 35mm film camera,” he says. “One white journalist came over to me, parted my back and said, ‘Gentleman, you are the only one here with a camera. The rest have toys.'” Bwoka understood what his admirer meant. “I just told him, “Thank you.””
Before illuminating the silver screens, there was a long process of post-production. After exposure, the images were latent; they couldn’t be seen unless processed. KIMC had one of the three 16mm film-processing laboratories. The other two were at the broadcasting houses in Nairobi and Mombasa.
Ambe, the producer, recollects one Safari rally shooting. A racing car veered off its track and spectacularly ploughed into a mound. His crew instantly fast-forwarded to a juicy news item. “We stopped filming and alerted the laboratory staff at the Broadcasting House that we had a great clip to be processed.”
The laboratory technician, Sylvester Okondo (deceased), processed the film. “He told us, “I can’t see anything.”‘ Ambe was bewildered. “I asked, “What?””
When previewing, only a tiny spec of light flashed. The shot was a miss. “Nobody went to the newsroom to tell those guys that there was no picture,” Ambe says. “We just quietly went home.” Disappointment masked their faces.
Kenya never had a 35mm laboratory. The material that Bwoka shot and the corresponding soundtracks were initially processed in Austria and later in Great Britain. “In 1985 my colleague (now deceased) and I visited the Austria lab. Editing, laying of the sound and commentary took place here,” Bwoka says. “The two-week trip was fascinating.”
In 2000 the running of Kenya Newsreel ceased because of the high costs involved. The creeping in of cheaper tape-based camcorders further compounded the problem. Video would be edited in Kenya. A sign portending a death knell for film was on the horizon. “I was still glued to film,” Bwoka says. “I had no choice but to join the video group.”
In Africa, the last countries to operate on film were Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. Though film has been shot dead by video in Kenya, the medium remains firmly etched in Bwoka’s memory.
By William Inganga
