Jeff Kreines

Here’s the stereo Nagra III from the National Film Board of Canada.

This may be the first sighting of a Nagra II in a popular film: Godard’s Breathless. FullSizeRender.MOV Has anyone seen this bizarre stereo Nagra III in person? Made by the National Film Board of Canada.

I don't think anyone can read Arri 16mm timecode. It never really caught on. And I do have a 416...

The earliest scenes in films showing Nagras that I can think of are both French. If you look carefully, a Nagra II is visible in Godard's Breathless in the scene where the famous person is meeting the press. Blink and you'll miss it. In Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, some scenes were shot with the subject schlepping a Nagra III and wearing a mic. These were photographed by Pierre L'Homme using a prototype Eclair KMT camera -- 1959-60 IIRC. You may be able to see a Perfectone recorder in the first American cinema-verite film Primary -- it was before they got Nagras. Klute shows that Nagra SN lookalike, the Edwards, years before an actual SN appeared in Coppola's The Conversation. Of course there's a Nagra III wielded by Peter Bonerz in Medium Cool -- who knew Chicago news crews in 1968 shot double-system? 😉

I have heard tales from (forgive me -- can't type a capital "r") of this mic from ricky and Penny. Drew Associates had one in the early days but it never got much use. I would love to see a photo of it. And roger, you are correct about it being Sennheiser.

Occasionally I see a Nagra III on eBay that says SONY on it. Anyone know the story behind those? (Sony made Nagra copies, the EM-1 and EM-2 (I have the latter and regret losing one of the former ones long ago).

We used the Nagra SNN with Ryder 30Hz crystals a lot in the 70s and early 80s, and I have to go back and re-transfer a lot of tapes from that area for an archival project. The Ryder TSR-260 resolver really wasn't very good -- the audio path especially. Has anyone ever modified the Kudelski 10Hz SN resolver to work with 30Hz tapes? Of course, I suppose that I could just use the Ryder resolver to resolve the speed and split off the audio and filter out the 30Hz either with a Little Dipper (UREI 565) or digitally. Cody did make the first resolver for the SNN -- we had one at the MIT Film Section -- but as I recall it didn't work all that well. We also had a terrible device that let you resolve the tapes using a Nagra IV and an SLO and reel adapters -- but of course there were no tape guides so the azimuth veered all over the place. The Ryder was the first real resolver that worked, but they were buggy. Not looking forward to getting one working properly again! Bill Day at Cody also developed a remote start-stop system for the Nagra SN that let you plant the SN on the person you were filming, with an ECM-50, and use it like a wireless mic. This was built for Ed Pincus for his Diary films, but it had a lot of disadvantages. We always argued with him about the disadvantages of being tied to whoever was wearing the SN -- the ridiculous running discussion was how you'd film a murder (!) -- Ed's line was that he'd wait for the person wearing the SN to discover it. We thought that was way too restrictive! (Note that MIT was a hotbed of autobiographical cinema-verite filmmaking back then, so one-person being able to shoot and record sound without a soundperson -- heresy here I realize -- was a big deal. For you kids, this was long long ago, before "camcorders" -- I started out shooting one-person with my crystal-sync Auricon, a 10mm lens, a Nagra 4.2 around my waist, and a Sennheiser 804 in my left hand. I was a lot stronger then....)