TRAVELS WITH MY NVr-WZ

What the discriminating fictional snapper relies on in the American desert of 1955; Jason Schwartman’s fictional “Muller-Schmid Swiss Mountain Camera” in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”

BY MICHAEL PERKINS

PROP DESIGNERS FOR MOVIES have to walk a bit of a tightrope when creating on-screen objects, dodging copyright laws (unless product placement is truly the goal), redefining the physical properties of things (think planes that could never actually fly) or even crafting plausible gizmos that cannot exist in the real world (think phasers). Combine all these skills with the recent craze for burying hidden in-jokes or “Easter eggs” in movies to reward multiple viewings by the nerdiverse, and you have the special world of fun fakery, a world where, on occasion, the coolest cameras reside, all bearing the NVr-WZ (never was) trademark.

Fictional cameras in film set my inner geek’s heart a-racing, and, judging by a general search of the interweb, I am not alone. A recent entry is the camera that is sported by Jason Schwartzman’s character Augie Steenbeck in the new Wes Anderson hallucination Asteroid City. In the frame above, Augie, said to earn his bread covering various world crises, sports a “Muller-Schmid Swiss Mountain Camera”, which, of course, never existed in any world outside Anderson’s unique 1955 desert-y destination for science dreams and Cold War nightmares. The deliberate fakiness of the device has sent camera lovers into a game of Clue as to its design origins. And, as with everything else debated on-line by camera lovers, well, let’s just say the results are inconclusive.

The labelings on the camera are the biggest part of the fun, with the optic being labeled as a “combat lens” (so…can it not be used to snap, say, family events in peacetime?), and the overall model being referred to as a “Swiss Mountain” camera, as if there may be additional variants for Italian or Greek or Tibetan mountains elsewhere in the product line. And then there is the brand name itself, “Muller-Schmid”, which may or may not be a reference to Joey Schmidt-Muller, a surrealist painter who pioneered a style called New Objectivity in the 1930’s and who invented a term for his work called “traumatic realism”. In fact, Anderson may just have pulled the two names out of thin air, although I doubt it.  

Was the Soviet Kiev 4M the inspiration for Augie Steenbeck’s imaginary kit?

A lot of online detective work, however, has focused on the general layout of features on the camera, with most fans insisting that it must be based on a Contax III rangefinder (introduced in the 1930’s), while another large camp is certain that it’s actually more like the cheap Soviet-era knockoff of the Contax, the Kiev 4M (seen just above).  Does it matter? Welllll, either a great deal or not at all, depending on your perspective. What does seem consistent is Wes Anderson’s talent for sending cues to our collective subconscious, our inherited warehouse of cultural impressions, and tossing all that data like salad to create new worlds that are alien and familiar at the same time, worlds where a vintage NVr-WZ is the perfect camera for the task at hand.