In the 1973 documentary, The Battle of Chile, Argentine cameraman Leonard Hendrickson records his own death. As his camera films the military invading the streets of Santiago, one military officer takes out his pistol and coolly and deliberately murders Hendrickson.
This, up until the late 1990s, was considered extremely dramatic and one of a kind. Now, with surveillance cameras and cell phones everywhere, this sort of thing can be watched daily and keeps growing, and has become a genre on youtube, and, as common as still pictures in use with texts in newspapers and magazines on line.
On New Year’s Eve, 1994 into 1995, I positioned myself in a kind of bunker, in a small playground within Woodland Hills Park. The pit was made of railroad ties on three sides, as high as my waste with an iron fence, about seven feet tall around the pit. I was here because I was recording with a Nagra and two microphones, the celebratory gunfire that happens every New Year’s, and Cleveland is a leader in this field of endeavor.
I had a shotgun microphone in a zeppelin on a pole that I was holding above me. I was crouching to try to keep below the railroad ties. There was an iron fence surrounding the area I was holed up in. At one point, after midnight, there was quite a ricochet of a bullet hitting the iron fencing above my head. Later on in the night, unbeknownst to me, someone was very close to my hideout. I found this out the hard way, with the first shot of his .357 which is one of the loudest handguns that I know of. I fell to one knee, still holding tyhe mile steady on the pole. (I actually worked quite a few boom jobs in Chicago on films on a freelance basis) He shot that first round, and took his time, aiming at my microphone in the zeppelin on the pole above my head, and shot a total of four rounds, while in no hurry whatsover. I was just glad he didn’t come over to where i wqs hiding and finish me off.
In a few years this sort of thing would be a whole genre on YouTube. Today it’s possible to buy small field recorders. and simply place them in the field, walk away and return 24 hours later, and, then, download the file, and look at any areas of interest that you want to say, the same is true with cameras, where you can set up remote cameras in the world are Ness that are triggered by motion the rarest and the scene animals are now recorded with these remote cameras., and, even the snow leopard has been, now, thoroughly documented.
A sound snip from the 2021/2022 New Year’s Celebratory gunfire event.
