Karl Malkames wrote, directed, narrated and shot this movie about motion picture cameras -- the Malkames family has a tradition of being movie cameramen and take their craft very seriously The result is a survey of movie cameras from about 1900 through 1960.

It's a well made movie, but a movie for a highly specialized audience. If it were an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute, it would be a very good exhibition that would raise as many questions for the museum goer as it answered. The construction of these cameras with their ad hoc kludges -- in the 1960s, the issue of how much extra film to leave on the loop baffled me -- is gone over swiftly as a series of names; and the names, although they may be familiar to fans of old movies, would be known in different contexts.

Although the days of film cameras is passing, the craft of camera-work will remain, and this movie shows us an important stage in the evolution of its tools.