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 onto film stock or an image sensor, in order to produce a moving image to display on a screen. In c ...

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 exper ...

. He was born in

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany 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 in ...

. During his work for

ARRI Arri Group () (stylized as "ARRI") 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. It ...

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

Arriflex 35 The Arriflex 35 was the first reflex finder, reflex 35mm production motion picture camera, released by German manufacturer Arri in 1937. Function It was built around the spinning reflex twin-bladed "butterfly" mirror shutter designed by Erich Kä ...

in 1937. It allows the operator to have a viewfinder image equal to the recorded picture. Kästner received a Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1992 and an

Oscar Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to: People and fictional and mythical characters * Oscar (given name), including lists of people and fictional characters named Oscar, Óscar or Oskar * Oscar (footballer, born 1954), Brazilian footballer ...

in 1973 (Class II technical award laque and 1982 (Academy Award of Merit tatuette. In 1994 he won the Bavarian Film Awards Honorary Award. He died in Penzberg.

References

1911 births 2005 deaths Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners German 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