Munich's low-profile film companies
The popcorn eater near the exit falls silent, the teen-queen in the second row stops slurping her diet coke and the giant folded up in the aisle seat forgets his cramped limbs. Harry Potter has just launched into his first on-screen Quidditch match and the effect is stunning. Swooping, soaring, diving across the pitch, this is the bowel-loosening, brain-frazzling stuff of cinematic fantasy. “Isn’t it amazing what they can do?” mutters the tall man to a friend later as he steps out into the night. “They” of course in this case refers to men and women working in the cinematography business, whose job it is constantly to push forward the boundaries of film technology for our benefit. While for most of the cinema-going public they are a faceless army of technicians, here in Munich we have on our doorstep at least two award-winning companies that produce lighting and cameras for the crème de la crème of the movie industry. On September 12, 1917, two Munich students and film enthusiasts, August Arnold and Robert Richter, inspired by such moving-picture pioneers as the Lumiére brothers, started their own cinematographic company at 85 Türkenstrasse. Their aim was to improve existing film equipment, but the founders of Arri—the name was composed from the first two letters of Arnold and Richter—soon began developing their own film and lighting equipment. Today, 86 years later, Arri has become one of the world’s leading companies for the production and the rental of motion-picture cameras and lighting. One of the firm’s earliest successes was a film printer that was put on the market in 1920 and cost a staggering DM 100,000. Despite a fire on the premises in 1924, caused by a short-circuit spark, setting the highly flammable strips of celluloid ablaze and destroying many of the workshops, Arri worked on undeterred; Arnold even created the KinArri, a 35mm amateur, portable camera, in the same year. With Richter concentrating on the sales side of the business Arri soon moved into the US market and by the late 1920s the company had 20 full-time employees. Almost ten years later the workshops on Türkenstrasse turned out what is, to date, probably Arri’s most revolutionary and groundbreaking invention: the reflex mirror shutter, which was incorporated into the legendary Arriflex 35. For the first time in the history of motion pictures a camera operator was able to view the exact framing of a subject and could focus through the viewfinder. This feature is now incorporated into every modern motion-picture camera. In recognition of this achievement Arnold and chief engineer, Erich Kästner, received the Academy Award Class I Oscar in 1982—one of eleven Academy Awards for technical development conferred on Arri over the years—and Kästner was honored with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his lifetime achievement. As the technical developments of modern cinematography are highly complex, and, let’s face it, of little interest to the layperson, perhaps a short roll call of recent movies made using Arri equipment would give a better picture of the company’s importance in the film world: Lord of the Rings, A Beautiful Mind, About a Boy, Chicago, Harry Potter, Die Another Day and the list could go on for pages. And lest anyone think that Arri employees spend their working lives holed up in the Schwabing workshops, many are sent on location for months to work with film crews, as was the case with Lord of the Rings, much of which was shot in New Zealand. Another award-winning company in Munich contributing to movie magic is Dedo Weigert Film, which specializes in precision lighting instruments. Like the founders of Arri, Dedo Weigert first worked on film sets as a Director of Photography (DOP), but the rapid expansion of his company, which was originally set up in 1965, meant that he no longer had the time to work on films. Though with the experience he has gleaned through his work, Weigert feels he would probably be a better DOP now than during his active years in film. The Dedolight, created in 1984, was designed to produce a powerful and controllable light source that is both compact and uses a minimum amount of energy. This allows filmmakers a wider range of lighting effects. So revolutionary was this lighting that the company was awarded the 1990 Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. Most recently, in March 2003, the Academy presented the Dedolight design team with the Scientific and Engineering Award for its latest achievement in precision lighting. Now their lights are standard equipment in most lighting rental companies throughout the world, and some films and TV series have even been exclusively lit using their instruments. So for those who manage to sit through the closing credits of a film, there might be two more recognizable names that put Munich on the map.