Richard Authier, born in Lausanne, trained as a technical draftsman before joining Paillard, where he became one of Switzerland’s first industrial designers, eventually rising to design consultant to management over a 42-year career. He worked on the firm’s products—machine à écrire, radio casings, and the Bolex 150/160 macrozoom camera—remaining, in his own words, “qu’un employé. His account also covers his work as technical adviser for the Bolex pavilion at the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition (Expo 64), where architect Max Bill reportedly declared that only two people present knew how to work, “Authier pis moi.” The Bolex 150/160 was designed to rotate the film magazine without opening the camera, a feature nearly made obsolete mid-development when Kodak introduced a new cassette.

Jean Bettinelli

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Jean Bettinelli, of Bergamasque descent and raised in Noiraigue in the Val-de-Travers, joined Paillard in Sainte-Croix in August 1955 after working at Dubied in Couvet. Over roughly ten years he prepared and repaired cameras on the assembly line, then worked in montage, became a machine régleur, and was eventually promoted to chef d’équipe on the 16mm sound projector; he was twice sent to Paris to support the newly opened Bolex agency on Avenue Hoche. He recalls a customer who bought a B8 to film her daughter’s wedding in Mexico, only to find the footage black on her return — a broken spring had jammed the shutter closed. He left Sainte-Croix around 1965 when his wife no longer wished to stay, and went on to manage a synthetic-gemstone workshop near Lausanne for 25 years.

Edmée Bourgeois, originally from Essertines-sur-Rolle, joined Paillard SA in Yverdon in 1956 as secretary to Monsieur Moreillon in the licensing department, which also oversaw the small-batch production of cinema accessories. When Paillard’s film-rewinder devices for the 1964 Lausanne Expo fell behind schedule, she took charge of coordinating their outsourced manufacture, working 350 hours of overtime in three months and leaving the factory at two in the morning under the watch of the night caretaker. She left in May 1965, after the birth of her daughter and ten years at the firm. The Expo’s projector failures, she recalled, were eventually traced to humidity, which loosened the film so it no longer caught in the sprockets.

Raymond Bourquin

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Raymond Bourquin, born in Bienne in 1927, trained as a precision mechanic and technician there before working at the photo-cinema wholesaler Perrot SA from 1955 to 1962, then joining Bolex SA in Yverdon in March 1962 as technical chief, where he was the second employee hired and stayed until 1982, when declining sales pushed him to leave for the audiovisual department at the CHUV. He served as the link between the Swiss clientele and Paillard’s engineering, handling the technical side of sales, guiding clients through factory tours at Sainte-Croix, and managing the company’s installations at the Expo 64 national exhibition. Asked why Paillard failed, he returns repeatedly to a single diagnosis: the firm had become an administration run by civil servants, too heavy and inert to react when Kodak’s Super 8 arrived; he recalls telling the engineering directors that if Bolex disappeared from the market, no dealer would mourn it.

Michel Brouard, originally from France, trained as a higher technician in micromechanics in Orléans before working at Beaulieu in Romorantin. He joined Paillard in September 1968 as production manager for a Super 8 camera model, recruited during the troubled launch of the format. He recalled the company’s administrative weight: where at Beaulieu he could simply walk down to the workshop to change a washer, at Paillard the same change required nearly half a kilo of paperwork. He remained in Sainte-Croix for nearly five decades, settling there with his wife after intending to stay only a year or two.

Charles Burla

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Charles Burla, born and raised in Yverdon, came from a Paillard family — his father and later his son also worked there, the three overlapping for a time. He began in 1950 working piece-rate, spent two years in Sainte-Croix (1952–54) as a draftsman in the tooling office, then moved to Yverdon in 1955, where he designed packaging — first the expanded-polystyrene cases for the B8 and C8 cameras, later for typewriters and electronic machines — until he was laid off around 1990 during the Olivetti period. Asked early on to introduce time-and-motion study at Sainte-Croix, he refused, unwilling at 21 to take on a role that would isolate his family in a small town. His career ran across both eras of the company’s decline: he recalls that Paillard “missed the turn” to electronics for lack of competent engineers, and that he packed an Olivetti minicomputer in his final month.

Florian Campiche worked in the purchasing department at Paillard’s Sainte-Croix site and came to film from painting, to which he had given some twenty years before turning to cinema for what he called its fourth dimension, movement. His first long film, Le Jura au cours des saisons, sonorised with the help of his colleague Albert Jeanneret, won best colour film at the 1957 Swiss national competition. His major work — a documentary shot in the Baud brothers’ museum at L’Auberson, listed in company bulletins as Voyage au Pays des Merveilles and in later sources as Boîtes à musique et automates — took two years and in 1959 won best documentary at the Cannes amateur festival and a second Grand Prix at the UNICA competition in Helsinki. The company described him filming with a mastery of framing and colour, and his record placed him among the “Paillardistes” whose Bolex cameras dominated the amateur competitions of the period.

Elisabeth Franchinni

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Elisabeth Franchinni came from Brembilla, in the province of Bergamo, and arrived in Sainte-Croix on 18 August 1954, recruited along with five young women from her village by the director of Paillard, who toured the Bergamasque region looking for female labour. She worked in camera assembly (montage), mainly on the small Bolex cameras and later on the Hermès Baby typewriter, then on soldering and mastic-filling work on the larger H16; she was laid off in 1958 after exceeding the three-year limit on her permit, returned to Italy for several months, and came back under a new contract. She earned 1.10 francs an hour, and recalled that once she reached 137% output, the timekeeper would come to re-time her and push the quota higher — “presser comme des citrons,” as her husband Aldo put it. She also remembered her first bonus of 15 francs, with which she bought an umbrella.

René Gilliard, of Orges in the canton of Vaud, joined Paillard SA in 1956 as a maintenance mechanic and electrician before moving into the design office in 1960 and becoming head of the durability laboratory in 1962, eventually running the laboratories as head of service. He came to the firm at twenty-three, during what he calls a period of transition, and worked through the years when Bolex was Europe’s leading camera maker and the largest employer in Vaud. He attributes the company’s decline not to its products but to its commercial blindness: the firm pursued “Swiss made” quality “like a religion,” he says, without ever studying what customers actually wanted.

Jean Guex

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Jean Guex joined Paillard SA in 1956 and, together with M. de Senarclens, built the company’s first structured advertising department—work that had previously been left to a single illustrator producing what he called mere “réclame.” Over sixteen years he traveled widely among the company’s agents, from Canada to Mexico and across Europe, attending the Photokina fair in Cologne every two years. He recounts that Paillard fell behind when it failed to receive the technical specifications for the Super 8 format, and that, well-informed about the company’s technical decline, he arranged to leave around 1972 as Japanese competition took hold. He also describes the lingering marketing problem of the dual name: the French insisted on “Paillard,” while English speakers and Germans preferred “Bolex,” a tension never resolved.

Jean-Claude Hefti, born in 1930 and bilingual French-German, trained as a lawyer in Lausanne before joining Paillard in Yverdon in 1960 as in-house legal counsel; he later became director of personnel and stayed until the company’s sale to Olivetti in 1981. His first assignment was drafting a five-year plan to justify adding a wing to the factory, which he privately called the “plan quinquennal” because it struck him as faintly Soviet, a joke no one noticed. He recalls the rigid caste system that shocked him on arrival — white-collar and blue-collar staff who would not mix, a “racism” he spent years trying to dismantle by putting all workers on monthly salaries — and the 1971 work stoppage over a withheld profit-share that brought the Marxist league and federal arbitration down on the firm.

Wilfred Heiniger

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Wilfred Heiniger, originally from Le Locle, trained as an engineer at the Technicum there before joining Paillard SA in Yverdon as a constructeur (design engineer) on 1 December 1949, where he worked in the cinema department on camera mechanisms including the H16, Double 8, and Super 8, with a stint at Pignons SA in Ballaigues (1957–1959) before returning; he stayed until late 1969, when Paillard sold the Bolex division to Eumig. He was struck throughout by the division between employees and workers at the firm—separate toilets, year-end bonuses that ran up to a full month’s salary for employees versus 50 francs for workers—a disparity he still described as scandalizing decades later. He also recalled that Stefan Kudelski once applied to Paillard as a design engineer and was turned down, after which Kudelski went on to develop the Nagra recorder.

Marc Hoesli, a fourth-generation native of Sainte-Croix, began at Paillard as a lathe operator before becoming a tool-and-die maker, draughtsman, and finally head of factory personnel, a post he took up on 1 May 1968 and held until the company’s closure at the end of 1989. When he learned that the receptionist was turning away long-haired job applicants without interviews, he overruled the practice, insisting on seeing everyone who applied. He recalls that the first rounds of early retirement broke men who had entered the factory at sixteen or seventeen and identified with it completely: the terms cost them nothing financially, but the loss of the work itself left them “completely idle,” and he himself burned out in early 1990 after months spent placing laid-off workers across French-speaking Switzerland.

Elisabeth Hofer

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Elisabeth Hofer, a Swiss German woman, joined Paillard SA in Sainte-Croix in 1952, working first in the radio-gramophone department before moving to Bolex, where she was secretary to Willy Matile and later Walther Stehlé. Over roughly three decades she handled correspondence, took orders, managed travel and lodging for staff and agents at the Photokina trade fair in Cologne, and on occasion demonstrated cameras herself—reading the manual on the train before presenting the Super 8 to an audience in Basel. One recurring duty was procuring unusual items at Stehlé’s request: she once arranged for a St. Bernard dog to be shipped to the company’s agent in South Africa, to prove the cameras were genuinely Swiss. Her account also documents the firm’s relocation from Sainte-Croix to Yverdon, the international network of agents who visited, and small workplace incidents recorded in an office logbook she maintained.

Marianne Hofer, from Sainte-Croix, trained as a commercial apprentice at Paillard SA from 1961 to 1964, working in the purchasing department (Bureau des Achats) under buyers including Florian Campiche and Robert Jaccard. She recalls being paid 100 francs a month as an apprentice, rising to 120, and later, working for Paillard via Thorens, discovering that a German-speaking colleague who barely spoke French earned 100 francs more than she did; when she challenged the personnel office, she was told, “but you are a woman, Mademoiselle Hofer.” She describes the mechanics of office work in that era—carbon copies corrected by hand with a razor blade, shorthand dictation, timed typing exams in Lausanne—and the weekly pay distributed in cash-filled envelopes counted out to the centime and signed for by each worker.

Richard Isliker

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Richard Isliker, born around 1924–25 in the Winterthur region of German-speaking Switzerland, settled in Yverdon after training as a machinist at Sulzer and joined Paillard in 1947, where he spent his entire career, first as a fitter, then on SIP jig-boring machines, and finally in the tooling design office, rising to group leader before leaving around 1980 ahead of the Olivetti takeover. His value to the firm rested partly on his bilingualism: he was the company’s designated guide for German-Swiss visitors, a role he disliked but performed for years. He recalled requesting a raise only once in his life, securing five centimes—from 2.05 to 2.10 francs an hour—from the personnel chief Haguenauer, and remained opposed to child allowances on principle, holding that wages alone should support a family. On the sale of Bolex around 1970, which he considered a catastrophe driven by bankers on the board wanting faster returns, he blamed a two-year delay in the camera’s optics that let competitors take the lead.

Armand Jaccard, born 2 January 1925 in Sainte-Croix, worked in the wage and insurance office at Paillard after starting his career as a manual labourer and then clerk at Thorens, having earned his federal accounting diploma through evening courses; he later left the region for Adia, where he spent roughly twenty years. At Paillard he was among those who handled the cash payroll, collecting between 100,000 and 130,000 francs each Friday morning from the bank and distributing wages in envelopes—a system that, he notes, was never once robbed despite the fantasy that surrounded it. He witnessed the arrival of time-and-motion men in the workshops and the early days of computerised payroll, when there was no on-site computer and punched cards had to be carried to an IBM machine in Bern. Of Paillard’s decline he is blunt: the firm chased perfection in the wrong direction, clung to its 8mm cameras, and let Kodak go elsewhere.

Fernand Jaccard

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Fernand Jaccard worked at Paillard SA in the early 1950s, joining as a timekeeper (chronométreur) in 1953–54 and moving into technical work and service before leaving around 1955–57, after helping introduce electrostatic varnishing to the workshop. He recalled that timekeepers were resented on the floor—one worker warned him that if he came back acting clever, he’d be thrown through the window. He later spoke critically of rationalization methods he encountered elsewhere, calling the piece-rate timing system a form of slavery, a stance that got him transferred out of production management at Dubied.

Jean-Claude Junod, from Sainte-Croix, worked at Paillard SA beginning in the late 1950s, when he joined the assembly line for the H16 camera around 1957, and later moved into manufacturing preparation—estimating machining times and planning production for parts, motors, and wiring harnesses—before the company was bought out and absorbed by Eumig in the early 1980s. He completed evening technical school, finishing in electrical construction in 1966, and worked on accounting-machine studies in Yverdon before relocating to Sainte-Croix in 1969. One telling moment: when his preparation post was to be transferred back to Yverdon, he refused, telling the director Albert Schenk that he still knew how to file metal and to put him back in the machine shop rather than send him “into that wasps’ nest in Yverdon.” He recalled local detail with precision, including a saying about Sainte-Croix’s three 1952 buildings—the hospital to be born in, the school to train you, Paillard to wear you out, and back to the hospital to finish you off.

Christian Leuzinger

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Christian Leuzinger, born in Yverdon, trained first as a cheesemaker before joining Paillard around 1956, hired into the Bolex laboratory after a contact passed his name to Monsieur Millet. He tested camera prototypes—filming the streets, the bandstand flowers, the station—and assisted in the optical work, including the “sound chamber” experiments where he raised and lowered a lamp by hand for two or three hours at a stretch while Madame Ugly recorded the light readings. He recalls Paillard being warned in advance by Kodak that a new cassette film was coming, and missing the shift: with the Super 8 “pistol” camera and the rise of Eumig, he says, the company fell behind. He left for the PTT, where he worked another thirty years, partly on the advice of Millet, who told him he could go to work there in a tie.

Edouard Margot

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Edouard Margot, born in 1932 in L’Auberson above Sainte-Croix, trained at the Sainte-Croix mechanics school and was hired at Paillard in 1950, where he worked first in the machine shop and then in quality control until 1959, totalling fifteen years across two periods. He earned 2.11 francs an hour when he started, and recalls that the atmosphere allowed time to joke and to breathe — “on avait le temps de rigoler, on avait le temps de souffler” — unlike the productivity demands he saw later. In June 1956 he filmed the mechanics’ outing to the Rhine Falls on a borrowed Bolex 8mm camera, travelling by red-arrow railcar to Schaffhausen and back; most of the colleagues he sees in that footage have since died. He kept his first-year apprenticeship test piece, a hand-forged screwdriver, which he says was one of the few that held.

Horst Noedl

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Horst Noedl trained as an optician at Carl Zeiss in Germany before answering a Paillard newspaper advertisement and arriving in Sainte-Croix in 1957, where he worked until 1971 as head of optical manufacturing and deputy to the Orbe plant director, Walther Gugger. He oversaw production of the reflex prism for the H16 — a plane-parallel glass element with a semi-reflecting layer evaporated onto it, fabricated in two pieces and bonded, which he describes learning to make on his arrival because it demanded extreme precision to avoid a doubled image. When Kodak unveiled Super 8 at the Photokina fair in Cologne, he recalls Bolex’s complete surprise and never understood why the company hadn’t seen it coming — for him the beginning of the end. He later spent 31 years near Basel continuing to supply 16mm viewfinder prisms, and notes that around a hundred of the last batch may still be in stock at Yverdon.

Born in 1923 in Chavornay, Serge Oulevay trained as a radio-electrician in Nyon and qualified as a micromechanics technician at the École technique de Neuchâtel. After military service from 1943 and a post in the aviation department at Hasler in Bern, he joined Paillard in 1954 as a builder of cameras and projectors, soon becoming head of the 16 mm group. His work centered on the Paillard-Bolex H-16, the 16 mm camera that had already found a worldwide market in the 1930s; as he put it, “I tuned it the way a racing driver tunes his machine.” A dedicated collector, he amassed more than 500 cameras, along with dozens of still cameras, projectors, and gramophones documenting the history of Bolex.

Roger Paillard

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Roger Paillard, born in Sainte-Croix, joined Paillard SA in 1946 at age fifteen, after a brief stint as a packer of music boxes at Breitler. Over forty-two years he assembled gramophones, then worked on the camera prisms — adjusting the optics of the H16 so the image fell correctly through the viewfinder — controlled large projectors, and spent twelve to thirteen years as a team leader before moving to typewriters and ending as a parts inspector in Yverdon, where the plant, by then owned by Olivetti, laid him off in 1989. He recalls a camera once arriving down the assembly line jammed with melted chocolate, dropped by a distracted worker at the end of a nine-hour shift, and an internal investigation that never found the culprit. He also bought his own Bolex in the early 1960s and filmed local events, including the last jump at Les Chables.

Marc Renaud

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Marc Renaud was engaged by Paillard in 1931 as an engineer and, from 1932, designed an entirely new spring-driven camera. While Jacques Bogopolsky had initiated the Bolex, Renaud was the one who conceived the H16, later produced in 9.5mm and 8mm versions, the latter at the origin of the double-8 format. He went on to develop the G projector, compatible with all three film formats and subsequently issued in a sound version. He worked without prior knowledge of cinema — “voilà, il faudrait construire une caméra… moi, je n’y connaissais pratiquement rien” — and built the camera to keep running from −20°C to over 40°C and to survive a two-metre fall; the H16 was the first camera in the world to offer automatic threading in seconds, and it remained in production for more than forty years. Renaud also wrote a technical account of the work, “Étude, projet caméra H.”

Édouard Reymond, born in 1923 in L’Auberson, trained at the mechanics’ school and was hired by Paillard around 1938–39 along with his entire graduating class of eleven, at one franc per hour. After a period at Thorens, where he returned to mechanical work, he came back to Paillard as a time-and-motion chronometer, having trained in the MTM method in Bienne and Zurich; he retired at 63. He recalled the friction his work created with foremen, who under the old system received a lump sum for a job and pocketed the difference after underpaying their workers—”the foreman’s pay came, you might say, a little off the back of each man.”

Jean-Pierre Reymond

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Églantine Lina Thevenaz, born in 1927, came from Bullet, in the Jura vaudois, and had been working in German-speaking Switzerland before joining Paillard SA in Sainte-Croix on 6 November 1950. She spent nine months on piecework before becoming a magasinière (stock clerk) in the gainerie and across the workshops, a job she held until retirement, with a seven-month posting to the Yverdon plant and a stint at the Thorens factory in between. Working as the only woman among seventeen male stockmen, she walked the building constantly — she claims she climbed 900 stairs a day — and prided herself on talking back to foremen: when one asked how she reacted to being shouted at, she answered that it depended on her mood. She recalled that the goatskins used to cover the cameras came from Africa, sorted for holes by the man who checked the parts, and that watching the emptied factory at the end left her in tears at the bottom of the stairs.

Georges Vaney

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Georges Vaney trained as a hardware salesman in Lausanne before joining Paillard SA in Sainte-Croix in March 1960, where he first worked for about fifteen months on the 221 projector—fitting the magnetic head and adjusting the film path—before moving to advertising-stock and finished-goods inventory management, a post he held through the company’s absorption by Eumig until his retirement. His account is precise about the mechanics of the export trade: cameras shipped to the United States carried lenses priced below the camera body to clear customs duty-free, parcels to Japan were valued at 9,800 or 9,999 francs to stay under the 10,000-franc duty threshold, and on one occasion he doctored a lamp specification on screen (changing “25” to “24”) to satisfy a letter-of-credit clause, with his director Lang agreeing not to ask how it was done. He recalls the firm’s hierarchy and its military character—directors who were army officers, an annual end-of-year aperitif hosted by Marc Renaud—and the disposal of stock dating to 1935–1940 when production wound down. 

Louis Volery, born around 1927, worked at Paillard SA in Sainte-Croix, where he began in the radio repair workshop in 1943, trained without a formal apprenticeship contract by Robert Besuchet. After radio production ended in 1955, he moved to cinema equipment, becoming head of the repair workshop in 1962 (or, by another account, during the 1964 national exhibition), specializing in 16mm and 8mm sound projectors, and stayed until his transfer to Yverdon in 1970. He repeatedly clashed with the design office over their dismissal of his fixes as “trop bricolage” — too makeshift — only for the engineers to eventually adopt his solutions anyway, as with the spring belt that kept slipping off the 221 projector. He locates the decline of Bolex precisely: the 1964 launch of Kodak’s Super 8 cassette, weeks after the national exhibition, forced a costly redesign of the cameras and optics that the company never recovered from.

Oscar Wagner

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Oscar Wagner, worked at Paillard SA in Sainte-Croix, where he began as a facturiste before becoming chef d’expédition and later chef du personnel, a post he held until being let go two years short of retirement when the personnel department he managed was liquidated. He oversaw shipping when the company sent gramophones, radios and later cinema equipment worldwide, from New York to Valparaiso, routing goods around Africa via Bremen because the Suez Canal was closed. He recalls the transition from wooden crates, made at L’Auberson, to cardboard packaging, and how the expédition staff shrank from twenty-one to five or six once film products replaced the bulkier radios. Reviewing his own footage during the interview, he repeatedly fails to recognize what he filmed, noting that his memory had declined sharply in recent months: “C’est moi qui ai filmé ça?”

Born in Kriens, near Lucerne, Adelheid Brunold left Switzerland at 22 — adventurous, she said — and arrived in New York in 1956. She joined Paillard Products Inc. at 100 Sixth Avenue in 1957, working in franchising and dealer relations before becoming secretary to the sales manager Jerry Kovanda. She worked there until 1975. When Paillard closed, she received no compensation. Nothing, she said. Absolutely nothing.

Georges Jaska
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Georges (Jürg) Preising
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