Mario's Bolex walk and Avril on sadness (pp. 754–755)
Part of Mario’s footage for the documentary they’re letting him do on this fall’s E.T.A. consists of Mario just walking around different parts of the Academy with the Bolex H64 camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle, which he holds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other. […] Mario doesn’t bother with the change in film-speed he’d need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt’s room, where he is.
Context
11 November YDAU, 2100h, and the scene announces its own apparatus in the first sentence: everything that follows is Mario's walking-around footage for the sanctioned fall documentary, shot on the head-strapped Bolex H64 with coax cable and chest-held foot-treadle. The rig is the POV — the whole nighttime circuit of E.T.A. (Schtitt's room, the girls' hall, the boys' floor, the lobby, Avril's office) arrives lens-mediated, exactly as the plan's one-liner has it. And Mario is making working cinematography calls from the opening beat: he skips Holt and Criess's marathon challenge because the steamed window would need a film-speed change he judges not worth it — exposure arithmetic as narrative selection.