Erich Kurt Kästner (5 April 1911 – 31 January 2005) was a German

movie camera A movie camera (also known as a film camera and cine-camera) is a type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either on an image sensor or onto film stock, in order to produce a moving image to project onto a movie s ...

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exp ...

. He was born in

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a popu ...

. During his work for

ARRI The Arri Group () is a German manufacturer of motion picture film equipment. Based in Munich, the company was founded in 1917. It produces professional motion picture cameras, lenses, lighting and post-production equipment. Hermann Simon menti ...

, he invented the spinning mirror reflex shutter for film cameras, which was first used in the

Arriflex 35 The Arriflex 35, released by Arri in 1937, was the first reflex 35mm production motion picture camera. Function It was built around the spinning reflex twin-bladed "butterfly" mirror shutter designed by Erich Kästner, chief engineer at Arnold & ...

in 1937. It allows the operator to have a viewfinder image equal to the recorded picture. Kästner received a

Gordon E. Sawyer Award The Gordon E. Sawyer Award is an Honorary Award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." The award is named in ...

in 1992 and an

Oscar Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to: People * Oscar (given name), an Irish- and English-language name also used in other languages; the article includes the names Oskar, Oskari, Oszkár, Óscar, and other forms. * Oscar (Irish mythology), ...

in 1973 (Class II technical award laque and 1982 (Academy Award of Merit tatuette. In 1994 he won the

Bavarian Film Awards The Bavarian Film Awards (german: Bayerischer Filmpreis) have been awarded annually since 1979 by the state government of Bavaria in Germany for “exceptional achievement in German filmmaking.” Along with the German Film Awards, these are th ...

Honorary Award He died in

Penzberg Penzberg (; Central Bavarian: ''Benschberg'') is a city (although some see it as a town) in the Weilheim-Schongau district, in Bavaria, Germany. It is located about 50 km south of Munich, and had a population of around 17,000 in 2020. A histo ...

References

1911 births 2005 deaths Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners Cinema pioneers 20th-century German inventors Scientists from Jena People from Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Recipients of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award Recipients of the Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit {{Germany-engineer-stub