Bolex ads before it merged with Paillard and after
Toronto. … or so Barnum is supposed to have said. The Bolex was the Leica or Contax of the amateur movie crowd. It was a high end camera made in Switzerland by Paillard. Interestingly, Bolex was originally not a Paillard product, but a design by its inventor and made by others. Both Bolex and Paillard were Swiss companies.
In the late 1920s/early 1930s the company was sold to Paillard and the designer, Jacques Bogopolsky, agreed to be a consultant on movie cameras to Paillard. Apparently Paillard found the original Bolex and its patents flawed necessitating a complete redesign. The designer of the original Bolex was then considered as an unwelcome individual at the Paillard company. In the end, out of the merger, only the name ‘Bolex’ was used by Paillard.
The Paillard-designed Bolex cameras are superficially similar to the original camera in external appearance. Paillard spun off the Bolex division to Eumig in 1980. Bolex moved from one company to another over the years and faded away. Today, the Bolex company no longer manufactures cameras but instead repairs Bolex cameras by special request. Note that the 1938 ad may be politically unacceptable today, touting the Bolex as a ‘man’s camera‘.
My thanks to George Dunbar who discovered the ads shown here for Bolex (c 1927) and Paillard (BJA 1938) which I merged into one image.
