Watch Kate Winslet Deftly Operate a Rolleiflex Camera
Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet appeared on 60 Minutes this week and brought the Rolleiflex camera she used in Lee along with her.
Lee is a biopic of wartime photographer Lee Miller and Winslet used a replica of the icon’s Rolleiflex camera — taking actual photos while on set.
The Rolleiflex is a series of high-quality, twin-lens reflex (TLR) cameras manufactured by the German company Franke & Heidecke (later Rollei) starting in 1929. Rolleiflex cameras were particularly popular among professional photographers and serious enthusiasts in the mid-20th century.
Speaking to CBS’s Cecilia Vega, Winslet explained why she felt she had to learn the craft of TLR film photography.
“It couldn’t just be a prop,” says Winslet. “It needed to feel like an extension of my arms. I had to be confident and comfortable with it and in order to do that I had to know what I was doing.”
Winslet explains that the photographer’s body “becomes a tripod with the Rolleiflex” because Miller would hold her breath when taking a photo while steadying the camera on her torso.
The British actress really got into the minutiae of analog photography by scolding the editing team after they added breathing in post; explaining that she was deliberately holding her breath to keep the camera still so that the focus doesn’t change.
“Anyone who has worked with a Rolleiflex camera might watch that film and they would know if I was going [makes breathing noises] that’s not a photograph that is ever going to work,” says Winslet.
“It was my job to be authentically like Lee as I could. So there’s just no way I wouldn’t consider doing those things.”
Biopic
Winslet was on 60 Minutes to promote Lee which was released in theaters in September.
The film, set during World War II, also stars Alexander Skarsgård as Miller’s second husband, Roland Penrose, and Josh O’Connor as their son, Antony, who is himself a photographer and the director of the Lee Miller Archive and Penrose Collection.
A serious Andy Samberg plays David E. Scherman while Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers, and Marion Cotillard as Solange D’Ayen.
The movie is based on Antony Penrose’s book, The Lives of Lee Miller, which is part photo essay and part biography of his mother.
Lee Miller: A Brief History
After a chance encounter with publishing mogul Condé Nast, Miller’s modeling career began to flourish, making her a popular subject for top photographers, including Edward Steichen. However, as Winslet notes, Miller had other ambitions famously saying: “I’d rather take a picture than be one.”
In 1929, she moved to Paris and became a student, lover, and muse of the renowned surrealist photographer Man Ray. Together, they developed innovative photographic techniques, including solarization, which became a hallmark of their work. Lee said she invented the technique after a mouse ran over her foot in the darkroom and caused her to reach for the light switch, the light flooded the developing images which “accidentally created this beautiful, ethereal, halo effect.”
At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in London with a man called Roland Penrose. She became a war correspondent for Vogue magazine, documenting the Blitz in London, the liberation of Paris, and the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Her harrowing photographs of war, including scenes from Dachau and Buchenwald, remain some of the most powerful images of the 20th century.
After the war, Miller struggled with PTSD and retreated from photography. She spent her later years in England with her second husband, the aforementioned Penrose.
“After the war, she never spoke of her wartime experiences and deliberately boxed up and put away her photographs in an effort to forget the atrocities she had witnessed,” says Winslet.
Her son Anthony Penrose played a crucial role in getting Miller’s name out there creating the Lee Miller Archives and cooperating with Winslet as she made the eponymous biopic.
