Jake Messenger
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photos and words by me!
Here you may find burblings and pictures from me, a gentleman of photography and technology. Enjoy.
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Unruhe - in which the author nerds out over Polaroid and The X Files.
The X Files, Season 4, Episode 4.
The one with the spirit pictures. And Polaroids! Or are they? Allow me to bore you with observational nerdery...
A young girl goes into a pharmacy to get a passport photo taken. She has forgotten her cash, so runs out to the car to get it. She gets abducted. After waiting a while, the pharmacist peels apart the instant passport picture he'd taken, to see a distorted, screaming image of the very same girl, seemingly surrounded by demons or ghosts. Eeek!
So let me get my nerd on:
The pharmacist and his passport camera:
It looks like a Polaroid MiniPortrait 203 camera to me. Except it's, um, called an ETAP. You often see this sort of thing on TV, where they will cover up a prominent branding: how frequently do you see a metallic laptop with a blank circular sticker where there would perhaps be a glowing apple?
But The X Files go a stage further, because the plot revolves around scary spirit pictures imprinted on the film, without the need of a camera.
So what film does an ETAP camera use? In one shot we see him peeling it apart, and it looks like Polaroid 100 type, but it seems the ETAP has its own range of film:
Firstly: Gillian Anderson. *happy sigh*
Secondly, the prop-makers went to a great deal of bother with this! Love the faux Polaroid 'squares' logo. I'm wondering if Polaroid expressly didn't want their brand being shown, or whether the producers felt it would be distracting. Perhaps licensing or payment issues. Either way, I want one of these boxes.
Because I'm a nerd.
But the steamy instant action doesn't stop there.
At the victim's house, Mulder notices some 600 shots on the fridge, and goes looking for the camera.
He covers the lens and fires off a couple of shots, to see if the scary images are there:
I like how these are clearly real Polaroids, and they're really developing, not faked up. TV and film drama always likes to make things more exciting: digital cameras making the motor-dirve sound of film cameras; computers that beep and click at every occasion. But here they've clearly got a spirit photographer to imprint on the unexposed negative inside the Polaroid camera. No trickery. Kudos.
Which makes it a slight shame that the passport camera makes the sound of the motor in an SX70 type camera when fired. Sigh. I guess "click" isn't interesting enough.
Also fun is the part where Mulder gets the computer boffin to unscramble that distorted image. It's like a 20th Century CSI. With indexed colour graphics and dithering.
So there you have it: the X Files was cool, and I'm a massive, obsessed nerd.
No new revelations there.
p.s. Special thanks to Carol for the heads up!
