A couple of weeks ago I expressed my admiration for an Eclair ad that appeared in the May 1969 issue of American Cinematographer. Judging from the one you’ll see below, the legendary French camera company must’ve been on quite the roll that spring. The next month they followed up with this brilliant example of clarity and brevity, the likes of which we rarely see in today’s over-the-top, often demeaning commercial environment.
No matter what the form, I adore simplicity; this one really hits the spot. The economy of the graphic and the message it sends accomplishes the goal of all good advertising, which is to immediately make the brand memorable. Its cleverness was a requirement of the day and shows why the 1960’s were such an exciting time if you had something to sell. I don’t know why that approach fell out of style in the following years, but the idiocy of most current advertising must be a reflection of our society at large.
At least the television remote offers an escape from the crassness that appears in the gaps between the network and streaming narratives. But imagine if some better minds went to work. It might once again become fun to watch commercials.
Don’t put too much into it, though. At the rate and in the direction we’re going, it’s not likely to happen.
I used the NPR in the mid-60s & I owned an ACL in the late 70’s and it was a great camera. After about a million feet of film, my sound tech would announce, are we projecting a movie or making one!
If memory serves, Aaton had an ad with a cat on a camera operator’s shoulder implying the quiet purr of its product. I eventually went to ARRI 16SR in 1980, bought at the factory in Munich, because I felt German engineering was better than French! I used that SR for over 20 years. So much for memory lane.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s the Eclair NPR and the Eclair ACL were the preferred documentary film cameras. The 1983 portion of my film, Finally A Voice, was shot on these two cameras, using Angénieux zoom lenses. The film cycled through many camera systems in the 32 years it took to finish it. This combination of camera and lens gave a distinctly archival feel to that footage. I don’t know why Eclairs fell out of favor. While living in Paris in the early 2000s, the second hand camera shops on Blvd Richard Lenoir near Bastille had piles of Eclair bit and pieces as well as Angénieux lenses. I wish I’d had the foresight and money to save some of these relics.