Chronicle of a Camera: The Arriflex 35 in North America, 1945-1972

3. Increasing Usefulness: The Fifties

26 Chapter 3 INCREASING USEFULNESS The Fifties During a European trip he took sometime around 1950, Richard Moore, later an important cinematographer and one of the founders of Panavision, managed to meet August Arnold, co-founder of Arnold & Richter. Describing himself as a Hollywood cameraman (but without explaining that he had worked only in 16mm), Moore said that he wanted to represent Arriflex in America. The upshot was that he served for a brief period as Arriflex’s representative in seven western states, an endeavor into which he brought his USC film-school friend Conrad Hall. As Moore later recalled, I told Conrad about the camera after I got back to Los Angeles and he got excited. Conrad got some money from a relative, and we bought an Arriflex camera at factory cost. We thought that we would sell cameras like crazy to all the studios, but that never happened. We showed our camera to the heads of the studio camera departments, who were very powerful in those days. They all thought it was a silly idea because the camera made too much noise, and “who wants to shoot hand-held?” We didn’t sell one camera. But Conrad used the one we had to shoot short films.1 In the initial postwar period, Arnold & Richter had needed to supply newly manufactured Arriflex cameras directly to individual North American camera dealers and other customers. This means of distribution was somewhat haphazard and not ideally suited either to promoting the Arriflex 35 within North America or to guaranteeing its steady and timely availability to meet North American demand. This began to change in 1951, when The Fifties 27 Arnold & Richter designated Kling Photo Supply Corporation, a New York camera dealer and importer, as their “sole agent” for the United States. Established by Paul Klingenstein, a German Jew who had left Germany for the United States after Hitler’s rise to power, Kling Photo Supply Corporation (later shortened to Kling Photo Corporation ) specialized in high-quality German cameras and optics, including Linhof cameras and Kilar and Rodenstock lenses. According to Klingenstein’s obituary notice in the German-Jewish journal Aufbau, however, Klingenstein took his greatest professional pride in serving as the exclusive U.S. distributor of the Arriflex. Indeed, the Arriflex Corporation of America, set up in the summer of 1959, was a direct offshoot of Kling.2 Kling Photo’s official link with Arriflex in all likelihood came about in connection with the unveiling of the prototype 16mm Arriflex at the Cologne camera fair in the summer of 1951. This was at a time when American television ownership and television broadcasting were growing dramatically, as was the market for educational and industrial films, areas for which 16mm production seemed ideally suited. An August 1951 article in American Cinematographer about the “long anticipated” 16mm Arriflex noted that the camera would be distributed in the United States by the Kling Photo Supply Corporation, which hoped for an initial shipment of the camera that month—a hope that proved wildly optimistic. In fact, the 16mm Arriflex did not reach North American dealers until the end of 1953, and did not receive display advertising in American Cinematographer until February 1954, when it was heralded in a full-page advertisement by Kling as “the new revolutionary Arriflex 16.”3 The designation of Kling Photo Supply Corporation as “sole U.S. agents” for Arriflex by no means excluded other American dealers from handling the Arriflex. Kling emphasized in its own advertising that Arriflex cameras were available through other dealers as well as directly from Kling,4 and on one occasion, Kling used an Arriflex endorsement from a rival New York dealer, Camera Equipment Company, in one of its full-page Arriflex advertisements in American Cinematographer.5 Although Camera Mart appears to have stopped referring to itself as America’s 28 Increasing Usefulness “Arriflex headquarters” in the latter half of 1951, it too continued to be very active in Arriflex sales and products. In its early advertising, Kling Photo described the 35mm Arri- flex II as “the ideal 35mm camera for newsreel, industrial, location , travel, expedition, scientific motion picture photography.”6 It is not difficult to find examples of all of these uses of the Arriflex II throughout the 1950s. Newsreel work...