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“Beyond the Bolex” (streaming on Kanopy): The 2018 documentary “Beyond the Bolex” depicts a surprising intersection of personal experience and historical revelation. Its director, Alyssa Bolsey, was in film school when she delved into the archives of her grandfather Emil, who died in 2004, and discovered that his father, Jacques, was an unheralded yet crucial figure in the history of cinema. A Russian Jewish émigré to Switzerland, Jacques Bolsey was a medical student and an artist in Geneva when he became obsessed with creating a small and inexpensive movie camera for serious amateur filmmakers, including himself. His major invention, the Bolex 16-mm. camera, went into mass production in 1935 and soon became standard equipment for independent filmmakers, as affirmed here in interviews with such directors as Wim Wenders, Barbara Hammer, and Jonas Mekas. Alyssa Bolsey’s ardent research explores her polymathic great-grandfather’s utopian industrial schemes as well as his spirit of innovation and situates his life and work amid the vast events of the times—the Depression, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.
Trailer: