german cinema
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1. Unlike other national cinemas, which developed in the context of relatively continuous and stable political systems, Germany witnessed major changes to its identity during the 20th Century. Those changes determined the periodisation of national cinema into a succession of distinct eras and movements. 2. It all started on November 1, 1895, when Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self-invented film projector the Bioscop at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin. In its earliest days, the cinematograph was perceived as an attraction for upper class audiences, but the novelty of moving pictures did not last long. Early film theorists in Germany began to write about the significance of "visual pleasure" for the audience. Visually striking sets and makeup were key to the style of the expressionist films that were produced shortly after First World War. 3. German cinema got off to a fantastic start straight after the war, as the liberal atmosphere of the Weimar republic caused an explosion across all creative disciplines. Film-makers responded by appropriating the techniques of expressionist painting and theatre, combining them into twisted tales of madness and terror – thereby virtually inventing what would become known as the horror film. With its angled, distorted set designs, tortured eye-rolling, and layers of dreams and visions, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) is generally acknowledged as a landmark of international cinema, not just Germany's own. Two years later came an equally groundbreaking film, Nosferatu – an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula that demonstrate some of the creepiest cinema images ever recorded. At this time German cinema was considered to be the best in the world. 4. They also marked the beginning of the careers of two great silent-movie directors, Robert Wiene and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau – the latter turned in more authentic masterpieces in the shape of The Last Laugh and Faust. 5. But both were outdone by Fritz Lang, whose monumental Metropolis became the most ambitious, most expensive, and most influential silent film ever made. It had a unstable subsequent career, being savaged from its original 210-minute running time: various restorations have been released, with the most complete version running at 149 minutes after being discovered in 2008 in a Buenos Aires archive. And the "new objectivity" was represented by GW Pabst's Pandora's Box, starring a glowing, charismatic Louise Brooks. 6. In the beginning of 30s the uncertain economic and political situation in Weimar Germany had already led to a number of film-makers and performers leaving the country, primarily for the United States. Some 1,500 directors, producers, actors and other film professionals emigrated in the years after the Nazis came to power, including Marlene Dietrich, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Curtiz, Douglas Sirk and also Fritz Lang.TRANSCRIPT
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German cinemaEarly years. Expressionism
From the invention of horror under the Weimar republic to recent re-examinations of the second world war, German cinema has an amazingly creative history…
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Eugen (left) and Max Skladanowsky (right) with their Bioscop (1934).
The history of cinema in Germany can be traced back to the years shortly after the medium's birth.
Geneva Drive allows the film to be advanced intermittently one frame at a time. First time used in a projector in 1896 by German film pioneers Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe.
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Metropolis – a scale and metaphorical sci-fi dystopia, which has become the highest point and the completion of the development of German expressionism.
Daring and stylish, Pandora’s Box is
one of silent cinema’s great
masterworks and a testament to Louise
Brooks’s dazzling individuality.
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Some of film-makers and performers who left Germany in the 1930s:
Ernst Lubitsch, director of “The Shop Around the Corner”. Received a Honorable Academy Award (Oscar) in 1947.
Billy Wilder, director of “Some Like It Hot” starring Marilyn Monroe, and “Sunset Blvd”. Received 7 Oscars.
Michael Curtiz.Shot more than
160 pictures, including
“Casablanca” and “Mildred
Pearce”.
Marlene Dietrich, famous actress.
In 1999, the American Film Institute named
Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of
all time.
New German Cinema
1960s-1980s
"The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema“. Oberhausen Manifesto
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Werner Herzog Wim Wenders
The new movement provided a plenty of excellent films
Wolfgang Petersen
German cinema
Modern era
Tom Tykwer
Fatih Akin
