Arthur Gerstle(1906-1993)
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Additional Crew
Arthur Gerstle was a cameraman, First Assistant Cameraman, to be exact. He studied film making in Germany and the UK landing his first job shooting for Gaumont British Films. In 1930, he boarded a ship to New York City in hopes of finding a job working at Universal Pictures. A family relative of Carl Laemmle, founder and owner of Universal, Arthur arrived with a letter addressed to Uncle Carl. When Universal moved out West, Arthur followed, riding a motorcycle across the USA in pursuit of more work, and Estelle Ruben who was at the time the personal secretary to Carl Laemmle. For five decades Arthur worked at Universal Pictures, MGM, Colombia, Warners, Republic, Monogram, and 20th Century- Fox shooting movies on the sound stages and the back lots of California and locations around the world. At his home in North Hollywood, he had a workshop filled with tools that he brought from the "old world", tools with which he built a new life in the world of moving pictures. Since he was a technician, camera parts and accessories were things he often had to fashion in pursuit of the technically perfected image. So early in the history of film making, his was a time of invention and when the patenting of technologies and equipment were still being imagined. His life rode the seismic phenomenological wave between the Technical and the Digital Revolutions. From iceboxes to Frigidaires, horses to automobiles to airplanes, fossil fuel to nuclear power, celluloid to television, analog to digital, Arthur always adapted, working hard in the business mostly uncredited for over 50 years.
By: Morleigh Steinberg