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Member LoginJohn Lanser
John Lanser is a graduate in law and economics and earned a post graduate degree with a thesis on Australian bushranging films from 1906 to 1980. He has been a part time lecturer in law for 18 years, spent 21 years in the RAAF Legal Reserve (reaching Squadron Leader rank) and was Chairman of the NSWAFL Disciplinary Tribunal for 9 years. Because of his interest in cinematography he joined the ACS as an Associate Member in 1982. He was then kind enough to devote a great deal of his personal time and professional experience to bring the original 1960 Articles of Association into the 1980s. For his efforts in doing this and his continued legal assistance to the Society over the years John was granted Honorary Membership in 1989.
John Leake ACS Historian
My involvement with film was initially limited to projecting it: when I was about 12 a neighbour was throwing out a hand-cranked 9.5mm Coronet mark 1 projector and threw it in my direction.
A second hand Dekko 8mm camera and Kodascope Eight-46 projector came later but it was not until I got to university that things became serious. Sydney University Film Group (a student society) was keen to establish a production unit to make newsreels about university life (there had been several earlier attempts at this, none of which had come to anything) and as the Group had money to spend some of us were willing to spend it. In those days, of course, there were no film training courses: it was all on-the-job learning, but as undergraduates we were not even "on-the-job" in the full-time sense. The Group took out a subscription to American Cinematographer and also acquired a copy of the first edition of the American Cinematographer Manual, which I read assiduously (when I should have been reading my university texts). If I wanted to know something which I could not distil from this document I simply strolled into one of the production houses or labs and asked. (The late Tom Nurse at Supreme Sound Studios was especially helpful.)
For equipment we originally had only the Group's ageing Keystone A9 16mm camera, but I later acquired a Bolex HI 6T. Sound was recorded on magnetic stripe at first, using a borrowed Siemens 2000 projector, but we eventually graduated to double system recording on a Herofon synchronously linked by flexible cable to a modified Eumig P3 projector.
Over a period of four years we made 11 newsreels and several documentaries (Orientation Week, Commemoration Days) capturing such present day luminaries as John Bell, Michael Kirby , Richard Walsh, Ron Blair and Laurie Oakes as undergraduates and a show reel about research in the Physiology Department, which was screened at a medical conference in the United States. We even established production classes and turned out The Upturned Face, a short, forgettable fiction piece, in which the camera work was shared among the class members: the predictable disparities in exposure drove the graders at Associated Film Printers apoplectic.
I managed to graduate despite the hours allocated to film making (I spent the eve of one exam cutting A and B rolls in Associated's lab at Artarmon with my lecture notes on the editing bench for the occasional "work break"). Three of us then operated as a unit for several years, making a series of shorts which we sold to ABC TV. I was always the cameraman and it was on the basis of these productions that, in 1970, I was granted the Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS) in the quaintly-designated "Kinematography" division. Gradually my day job displaced the diversions of filming, but in 1983 I was keeping my hand in with a documentary about schoolboy rowing, called Four Oarsmen of the Apocalypse, when I found myself in need of some technical advice and wandered into Film Australia. There I made the acquaintance of Bruce Hillyard ... and the rest, (so far as the ACS is concerned), is history.
In this 1962 location shot taken during the making of The Upturned Face I am lying beside the Keystone camera lining up a shot in which Ron Blair (holding shovel) is being directed by Richard Brennan (in white hat) while John Flaus (behind Brennan) looks on. Blair was later to write The Christian Brother and serve as Head of Scriptwriting at the AFTRS. Brennan became a producer (credits include Spotswood, Blood Oath, Star-Struck, Stir, Grievous Bodily Harm and Newsfront) and was recently appointed to the Australian Film Commission. Flaus, who made a career as critic and actor with appearances in Newsfront, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, The Castle, The Dish and Crackerjack, received the ASDA’s Cecil Holmes Award for 2003.
from Australian Cinematographer - Issue 21