A postwar Swedish film from Ingmar Bergman 
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Very good film ! To be honest, I half expected the Panther to blow a final drive doing some of those trials.
Good film for details (snow in/on tracks)…but Ingmar Bergman was not particularly good with shooting film on a dark object facing the sun or under trees ; SHADOWS all the time. How filmographic simpleton can you be to keep the sun anywhere but in your back, or lacking extra lighting or reflector.
What film school did he go to ?
Keep in mind the era of the cameras being used, odds are they aren’t super fantastic like today’s cameras.
Exactly.
It’s less the cameras, although the lenses then were much slower (less able to capture images in poor light), than the film speed (able to capture images in poor light) on the tank film.
People used to the common ability of today’s electronic cameras and phones to capture images in very poor light, and in worse light with an inbuilt flash, have no idea of how limited the old film cameras, still or movie, were in poor light.
Back in the 1970s when I was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, a fast still film (which generally was much the same stock as movie film) was 400 ASA and wouldn’t have been even remotely capable of taking a photograph in what are now common situations such as an indoor photograph under standard, or even fairly poor, artificial lighting. Try taking a photograph on 400 ASA film in a dim restaurant, if you can find anyone to develop and print it nowadays, and compare it with the endless number of photographs taken nowadays with phone cameras. The film one will be pretty much, or fully, blank. The cheap phone one will be quite clear.
The film available in the tank film was probably considerably slower than the film I used in the 1970s, so it’s hardly surprising that it has difficulty in low light conditions such as forests.
As for shooting objects facing the sun, the limited film speed range (ability to handle poor to bright light in the same image) at the time of the tank film, or even several decades later when I was using more advanced films, meant that it was virtually impossible to get a clear image facing a full sun.
As for Frankly Dude Really’s comment “SHADOWS all the time. How filmographic simpleton can you be to keep the sun anywhere but in your back”, using the sun behind you will always produce a shadow in front of you, whereas shooting into the sun on film will avoid the shadow and produce a glaring blank.
I’m old enough to remember using a separate light meter to measure a photographic object and then setting the camera’s shutter speed and aperture to deal with the light meter’s reading. At the time that was very high tech. About 30 years after Bergman made the tank film.
Very few people nowadays would be capable of using the camera and film available to Bergman to present images with anything like the clarity he did with the equipment available to him. Slagging him for shadows etc just demonstrates how little is understood about that equipment, and relevant photographic history.
I was a bit pseudo ranting, okay.
But we are talking about Ingmar bergman here and not a army depot schmuck who had a camera pushed in his hands.
1951 is a 33 year old Ingmar, so he must have already proven himself to be talented. (wiki check; already done 3 movies…but not sure how much of it was dealing with the camera work directly).
That is the one negative surprise.
The other is that , all matters of extra lighting dark/shadowy spots is already known since at least the 1920’s…(Hitchcock and leni Riefenstahl made their defining filming shots eerrrrr 14 years before…a lot of dark/light contrasts etc).
Besides , all of them know what type of film (sensitivity etc) they have, to know how much intensity is required to see something in the shade. So they don’t even have to do a “test film” (and develop, and wait, and learn).
Maybe Ingmar only did the editing and production of this tank film, and had to rely on the shots given to him by the swedish military ?
Remember that we are viewing a digitized, and very small version of the original film, this will be a degraded, and more contrasty image and further degraded with each additional generation made in the process. As RS* stated, its the optics that work the magic, not the camera body, but even the very best Zeiss optics can do only so much depending on what type, and speed of film is used, and how it is processed. With movie film it’s not possible to expose for the shadows, and print for the highlights (which is a still image trick) normally in cine film work reflectors, and fill lights are used to balance the light, but this is not possible in this type of work, unless the subject is stationary, or nearly so. Although 35mm cine cameras were available, the format didn’t give the best results in all conditions. The quality may be far better were we viewing the film shown through a projector and not a compressed, digi version in a 3.5x5inch box.
Very good points.
I based my comments on my experience with still film, which as I mentioned was generally the same as movie film, but due to no experience with motion picture film I didn’t think ahead to the points you mention about the specifics of filming motion pictures with the same stock where the lighting issues are quite different and more demanding than with stills.
yes. Probably that is the explanation. The one digitising the film did it on “auto” mode, and did not check the results.