"Dancing, Flying Camera Jockeys": Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985

Abstract

This article examines how below-the-line discourse shaped the aesthetics and labor of Steadicam craft style. Through over thirty years of industrial training, Steadicam operators cultivated an invisible style to formally mimic a kind of faster and cheaper dolly shot and to mitigate the apparatus's uniquely embodied quirks. This article reexamines how Steadicam's discursive and industrial history with competing technologies like Panaglide potentially destabilizes a coherent narrative of technological and craft evolution. By highlighting the eccentricities of stabilizer craft in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this article explores how the formation of practitioners' athletic training and metaphoric discourse reimagines how we as film and media scholars might account for histories of style, labor, and technology more broadly.