German film history

The film industry in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema made major technical and artistic contributions to early film, broadcasting and television technology. Babelsberg became a household synonym for the early 20th century film industry in Europe, similar to Hollywood later.

Germany witnessed major changes to its identity during the 20th and 21st century. Those changes determined the periodisation of national cinema into a succession of distinct eras and movements.

History

1895–1918 German Empire

The history of cinema in Germany can be traced back to the years shortly after the medium's birth. On 1 November 1895, Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self-invented film projector, the Bioscop, at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin. A 15-minute series of eight short films were shown – the first screening of films to a paying audience. This performance pre-dated the first paying public display of the Lumière brothers' Cinematographe in Paris on 28 December of the same year, a performance that Max Skladanowsky attended and at which he was able to ascertain that the Cinematographe was technically superior to his Bioscop. Other German film pioneers included the Berliners Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe, two of several individuals who independently in 1896 first used a Geneva drive (which allows the film to be advanced intermittently one frame at a time) in a projector, and the cinematographer Guido Seeber.

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. Soon, trivial short films were being shown as fairground attractions aimed at the working class and lower-middle class. The booths in which these films were shown were known in Germany somewhat disparagingly as ''Kintopps''. Film-makers with an artistic bent attempted to counter this view of cinema with longer films based on literary models, and the first German "artistic" films began to be produced from around 1910, an example being the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ''The Student of Prague'' (1913) which was co-directed by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye, photographed by Guido Seeber and starring actors from Max Reinhardt's company.

Early film theorists in Germany began to write about the significance of ''Schaulust'', or "visual pleasure", for the audience, including the Dada movement writer Walter Serner: "If one looks to where cinema receives its ultimate power, into these strangely flickering eyes that point far back into human history, suddenly it stands there in all its massiveness: visual pleasure." Visually striking sets and makeup were key to the style of the expressionist films that were produced shortly after the First World War.

Cinemas themselves began to be established landmarks in the years immediately before World War I. Before this, German filmmakers would tour with their works, travelling from fairground to fairground. The earliest ongoing cinemas were set up in cafes and pubs by owners who saw a way of attracting more customers. The storefront cinema was called a ''Kientopp'', and this is where films were viewed for the most part before the First World War broke out. The first standalone, dedicated cinema in Germany was opened in Mannheim in 1906, and by 1910, there were over 1000 cinemas operating in Germany. Henny Porten and Asta Nielsen (the latter originally from Denmark) were the first major film stars in Germany.

Prior to 1914, however, many foreign films were imported. In the era of the silent film there were no language boundaries and Danish and Italian films were particularly popular in Germany. The public's desire to see more films with particular actors led to the development in Germany, as elsewhere, of the phenomenon of the film star; the actress Henny Porten was one of the earliest German stars. Public desire to see popular film stories being continued encouraged the production of film serials, especially in the genre of mystery films, which is where the director Fritz Lang began his illustrious career.

The outbreak of World War I and the subsequent boycott of, for example, French films left a noticeable gap in the market. By 1916, there already existed some 2000 fixed venues for movie performances and initially film screenings were supplemented or even replaced by variety turns. In 1917 a process of concentration and partial nationalisation of the German film industry began with the founding of Universum Film AG (UFA), which was partly a reaction to the very effective use that the Allied Powers had found for the new medium for the purpose of propaganda. Under the aegis of the military, so-called ''Vaterland'' films were produced, which equalled the Allies' films in the matter of propaganda and disparagement of the enemy. Audiences however did not care to swallow the patriotic medicine without the accompanying sugar of the light-entertainment films which, consequently, Ufa also promoted. The German film industry soon became the largest in Europe.

1918–1933 Weimar Republic

The German film industry, which was protected during the war by the ban on foreign films import, became exposed at the end of the war to the international film industry while having to face an embargo, this time on its own films. Many countries banned the import of German films and audiences themselves were resisting anything that was "German". But the ban imposed on German films involved commercial considerations as well – as an American president of one of the film companies was quoted, "an influx of such films in the United States would throw thousands of our own... out of work, because it would be absolutely impossible for the American producers to compete with the German producers". At home, the German film industry confronted an unstable economic situation and the devaluation of the currency made it difficult for the smaller production companies to function. Film industry financing was a fragile business and expensive productions occasionally led to bankruptcy. In 1925 UFA itself was forced to go into a disadvantageous partnership called Parufamet with the American studios Paramount and MGM, before being taken over by the nationalist industrialist and newspaper owner Alfred Hugenberg in 1927.

Nevertheless, the German film industry enjoyed an unprecedented development – during the 14 years which comprise the Weimar period, an average of 250 film were being produced each year, a total of 3,500 full-feature films. Apart from UFA, about 230 film companies were active in Berlin alone. This industry was attracting producers and directors from all over Europe. The fact that the films were silent and language was not a factor, enabled even foreign actors, like the Danish film star Asta Nielsen or the American Louise Brooks, to be hired even for leading roles. This period can also be noted for new technological developments in film making and experimentation in set design and lighting, led by UFA. Babelsberg Studio, which was incorporated into UFA, expanded massively and gave the German film industry a highly developed infrastructure. Babelsberg remained the centre of German filmmaking for many years, became the largest film studio in Europe and produced most of the films in this "golden era" of German cinema. In essence it was "the German equivalent to Hollywood".

Due to the unstable economic condition and in an attempt to deal with modest production budgets, filmmakers were trying to reach the largest audience possible and in that, to maximize their revenues. This led to films being made in a vast array of genres and styles.

One of the main film genres associated with the Weimar Republic cinema is German Expressionism which was inspired by the expressionist movement in art. Expressionist movies relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than stark realism to tell their stories. Given the grim mood in post-WWI, it was not surprising that these films focused heavily on crime and horror. The film usually credited with sparking the popularity of expressionism is Robert Wiene's '' The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'' (1920), produced by Erich Pommer. The film tells the story of a demented hypnotist who is using a sleepwalker to perform a series of murders. The film featured a dark and twisted visual style – the set was unrealistic with geometric images painted on the floor and shapes in light and shadow cast on walls, the acting was exaggerated and the costumes bizarre. These stylistic elements became trademarks of this cinematic movement. Other notable works of Expressionism are Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's ''Nosferatu'' (1922), a classic period-piece horror film that remains the first feature-length film adaptation of '' Bram Stoker's Dracula'', Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's '' The Golem: How He Came Into the World'' (1920), a Gothic retelling of the Jewish folktale, and ''Metropolis'' (1927), a legendary science-fiction epic directed by Fritz Lang. The Expressionist movement began to wane during the mid-1920s, but perhaps the fact that its main creators moved to Hollywood, California, allowed this style to remain influential in world cinema for years to come, particularly in American horror films and film noir and in the works of European directors such as Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman.

Despite its significance, expressionist cinema was not the dominant genre of this era. Many other genres such as period dramas, melodramas, romantic comedies, and films of social and political nature, were much more prevalent and definitely more popular.

The "master" of period-dramas was undoubtedly Ernst Lubitsch. His most notable films of this genre were ''Madame DuBarry'' (1919) which portrayed the French Revolution through the eyes of the King of France's mistress, and the film ''Anna Boleyn'' (1920) on the tragic end of King Henry VIII's second wife. In these films, Lubitsch presented prominent historic personalities who are caught up by their weaknesses and petty urges and thus, ironically, become responsible for huge historical events. Despite modest budgets, his films included extravagant scenes which were meant to appeal to a wide audience and insure a wide international distribution.

As the genre of expressionism began to diminish, the genre of the New Objectivity (die neue Sachlichkeit) began to take its place. It was influenced by new issues which occupied the public in those years, as the rampant inflation caused deterioration in the economic status of the middle class. These films, often called "street films" or "asphalt films", tried to reflect reality in all its complexity and ugliness. They focused on objects surrounding the characters and cynically symbolized the despair felt by the German people, whose lives were shattered after the war. The most prominent film maker who is associated with this genre is Georg Wilhelm Pabst in his films such as: '' Joyless Street'' (1925), ''Pandora's Box'' (1929), and '' The Loves of Jeanne Ney'' (1927). Pabst is also credited with innovations in film editing, such as reversing the angle of the camera or cutting between two camera angles, which enhanced film continuity and later became standards of the industry.

Pabst is also identified with another genre which branched from the New Objectivity – that of social and political films. These filmmakers dared to confront sensitive and controversial social issues which engaged the public in those days; such as anti-Semitism, prostitution and homosexuality. To a large extent, Weimar cinema was playing a vibrant and important role by leading public debate on those issues. Pabst, in his film ''Diary of a Lost Girl'' (1929), tells the story of a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, is thrown out into the street by her family and has to resort to prostitution to survive. As early as 1919, Richard Oswald's film ''Different from the Others'' portrayed a man torn between his homosexual tendencies and the moral and social conventions. It is considered to be the first German film to deal with homosexuality and some researchers even believe it to be the first in the world to examine this issue explicitly. That same year, the film ''Ritual Murder'' (1919) by Jewish film producer Max Nivelli came to the screen. This film was the first to make the German public aware of the consequences of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. It portrayed a "pogrom" which is carried out against the Jewish inhabitants of a village in Tsarist Russia. In the background, a love story also evolves between a young Russian student and the daughter of the leader of the Jewish community, something that was considered a taboo at the time. Later on, in an attempt to reflect the rapidly growing anti-Semitic atmosphere, Oswald confronted the same issue with his film ''Dreyfus'' (1930), which portrayed the 1894 political scandal of the "Dreyfus affair", which until today remains one of the most striking examples of miscarriage of justice and blatant anti-Semitism.

The polarised politics of the Weimar period were also reflected in some of its films. A series of patriotic films about Prussian history, starring Otto Gebühr as Frederick the Great were produced throughout the 1920s and were popular with the nationalist right-wing, who strongly criticised the "asphalt" films' decadence. Another dark chapter of the Weimar period was reflected in Joseph Delmont's film '' Humanity Unleashed'' (1920). The film was an adaptation of a novel by the same name, written by Max Glass and published in 1919. The novel described a dark world consumed by disease and war. The filmmakers decided to take the story to a more contemporary context by reflecting the growing fear among the German public of political radicalization. They produced what was to become the first fictional account of the events of January 1919 in Berlin, the so-called "Spartacist Uprising". This film is also considered one of the anti-Bolshevik films of that era.

Another important film genre of the Weimar years was the Kammerspiel or "chamber drama", which was borrowed from the theater and developed by stage director, who would later become a film producer and director himself, Max Reinhardt. This style was in many ways a reaction against the spectacle of expressionism and thus tended to revolve around ordinary people from the lower-middle-class. Films of this genre were often called "instinct" films because they emphasized the impulses and intimate psychology of the characters. The sets were kept to a minimum and there was abundant use of camera movements to add complexity to the rather intimate and simple spaces. Associated with this particular style is also screenwriter Carl Mayer and films such as Murnau's '' Last Laugh (1924).''

Nature films, a genre referred to as '' Bergfilm,'' also became popular. Most known in this category are the films by director Arnold Fanck, in which individuals were shown battling against nature in the mountains. Animators and directors of experimental films such as; Lotte Reiniger, Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttmann, were also very active in Germany in the 1920s. Ruttman's experimental documentary '' Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis'' (1927) epitomised the energy of 1920s Berlin.

The arrival of sound at the very end of the 1920s, produced a final artistic flourish of German film before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. As early as 1918, three inventors came up with the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system and tried to introduce it to the industry between 1922 and 1926. UFA showed an interest, but possibly due to financial difficulties, never made a sound film. But in the late 1920s, sound production and distribution were starting to be adopted by the German film industry and by 1932 Germany had 3,800 cinemas equipped to play sound films. The first filmmakers who experimented with the new technology often shot the film in several versions, using several soundtracks in different languages. The film ''The Blue Angel'' (1930), directed by the Austrian Josef von Sternberg and produced by Erich Pommer, was also shot in two versions – German and English, with a different supporting cast in each version. It is considered to be Germany's first "talkie" and will always be remembered as the film that made an international superstar of its lead actress Marlene Dietrich. Other notable early sound films, all from 1931, include Jutzi's adaptation to Alfred Döblin's novel '' Berlin Alexanderplatz'', Pabst's Bertolt Brecht adaptation ''The Threepenny Opera'' and Lang's '' M,'' as well as Hochbaum's ''Raid in St. Pauli'' (1932). Brecht was also one of the creators of the explicitly communist film ''Kuhle Wampe'' (1932), which was banned soon after its release.

In addition to developments in the industry itself, the Weimar period saw the birth of film criticism as a serious discipline whose practitioners included Rudolf Arnheim in ''Die Weltbühne'' and in ''Film als Kunst'' (1932), Béla Balázs in ''Der Sichtbare Mensch'' (1924), Siegfried Kracauer in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Lotte H. Eisner in the ''Filmkurier''.

1933–1945 Nazi Germany

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; Ernst Lubitsch moved to Hollywood as early as 1923, the Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz in 1926. Some 1,500 directors, producers, actors and other film professionals emigrated in the years after the Nazis came to power. Among them were such key figures as the producer Erich Pommer, the studio head of Ufa, stars Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, and director Fritz Lang. Lang's exodus to America is legendary; it is said that ''Metropolis'' so greatly impressed Joseph Goebbels that he asked Lang to become the head of his propaganda film unit. Lang fled to America instead, where he had a long and prosperous career. Many up-and-coming German directors also fled to the U.S., having a major influence on American film as a result. A number of the Universal Horror films of the 1930s were directed by German emigrees, including Karl Freund, Joe May and Robert Siodmak. Directors Edgar Ulmer and Douglas Sirk and the Austrian-born screenwriter (and later director) Billy Wilder also emigrated from Nazi Germany to Hollywood success. Not all those in the film industry threatened by the Nazi regime were able to escape; the actor and director Kurt Gerron, for example, perished in a concentration camp.

Within weeks of the '' Machtergreifung'', Alfred Hugenberg had effectively turned over Ufa to the ends of the Nazis, excluding Jews from employment in the company in March 1933, several months before the foundation in June of the ''Reichsfilmkammer'' (Reich Chamber of Film), the body of the Nazi state charged with control of the film industry, which marked the official exclusion of Jews and foreigners from employment in the German film industry. As part of the process of '' Gleichschaltung'' all film production in Germany was subordinate to the ''Reichsfilmkammer'', which was directly responsible to Goebbel's Propaganda ministry, and all those employed in the industry had to be members of the ''Reichsfachschaft Film''. "Non-Aryan" film professionals and those whose politics or personal life were unacceptable to the Nazis were excluded from the ''Reichsfachschaft'' and thus denied employment in the industry. Some 3,000 individuals were affected by this employment ban. In addition, as journalists were also organised as a division of the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels was able to abolish film criticism in 1936 and replace it with ''Filmbeobachtung'' (film observation); journalists could only report on the content of a film, not offer judgement on its artistic or other worth.

With the German film industry now effectively an arm of the totalitarian state, no films could be made that were not ostensibly in accord with the views of the ruling regime. However, despite the existence of anti-semitic propaganda works such as '' The Eternal Jew'' (1940)—which was a box-office flop—and the more sophisticated but equally anti-semitic ''Jud Süß'' (1940), which achieved commercial success at home and elsewhere in Europe, the majority of German films from the National Socialist period were intended principally as works of entertainment. The import of foreign films was legally restricted after 1936 and the German industry, which was effectively nationalised in 1937, had to make up for the missing foreign films (above all American productions). Entertainment also became increasingly important in the later years of World War II when the cinema provided a distraction from Allied bombing and a string of German defeats. In both 1943 and 1944 cinema admissions in Germany exceeded a billion,Kinobesuche in Deutschland 1925 bis 2004
Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e. V and the biggest box office hits of the war years were ''Die große Liebe'' (1942) and ''Wunschkonzert'' (1941), which both combine elements of the musical, wartime romance and patriotic propaganda, ''Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten'' (1941), a comic musical which was one of the earliest German films in colour, and '' Vienna Blood'' (1942), the adaptation of a Johann Strauß comic operetta. ''Titanic'' (1943) was another big-budget epic that arguably inspired other films about the ill-fated ocean liner. The importance of the cinema as a tool of the state, both for its propaganda value and its ability to keep the populace entertained, can be seen in the filming history of Veit Harlan's '' Kolberg'' (1945), the most expensive film of the Nazi era, for the shooting of which tens of thousands of soldiers were diverted from their military positions to appear as extras.

Despite the emigration of many film-makers and the political restrictions, the period was not without technical and aesthetic innovations, the introduction of Agfacolor film production being a notable example. Technical and aesthetic achievement could also be turned to the specific ends of the Nazi state, most spectacularly in the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's ''Triumph of the Will'' (1935), documenting the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, and '' Olympia'' (1938), documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, pioneered techniques of camera movement and editing that have influenced many later films. Both films, particularly ''Triumph of the Will'', remain highly controversial, as their aesthetic merit is inseparable from their propagandising of Nazi ideals.

1945–1989 East Germany

East German cinema initially profited from the fact that much of the country's film infrastructure, notably the former UFA studios, lay in the Soviet occupation zone which enabled film production to get off the ground more quickly than in the Western sectors. The authorities in the Soviet Zone were keen to re-establish the film industry in their sector and an order was issued to re-open cinemas in Berlin in May 1945 within three weeks of German capitulation. The film production company DEFA was founded on 17 May 1946, and took control of the film production facilities in the Soviet Zone which had been confiscated by order of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany in October 1945. A joint-stock company on paper, the majority interest in DEFA was actually held by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) which became the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after 1949, formally placing DEFA as the state-owned monopoly for film production in East Germany. A sister "company", Progress Film, had also been established as a similar monopoly for domestic film distribution, its principal "competition" being Sovexportfilm, which handled distribution of Soviet films.

In total, DEFA produced some 900 feature films during its existence as well as around 800 animated films and over 3000 documentaries and short films. In its early years, production was limited due to strict controls imposed by the authorities which restricted the subject-matter of films to topics that directly contributed to the Communist project of the state. Excluding newsreels and educational films, only 50 films were produced between 1948 and 1953. However, in later years numerous films were produced on a variety of themes. DEFA had particular strengths in children's films, notably fairy tale adaptations such as '' Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella)'' (1973), but it also attempted other genre works: science-fiction, for example '' Der schweigende Stern (The Silent Star)'' (1960), an adaptation of a Stanisław Lem novel, or " red westerns" such as '' The Sons of the Great Mother Bear'' (1966) in which, in contrast to the typical American western, the heroes tended to be Native Americans. Many of these genre films were co-productions with other Warsaw Pact countries.

Notable non-genre films produced by DEFA include Wolfgang Staudte's adaptation of Heinrich Mann's ''Der Untertan'' (1951); Konrad Wolf's ''Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven)'' (1964), an adaptation of Christa Wolf's novel; Frank Beyer's adaptation of Jurek Becker's '' Jacob the Liar'' (1975), the only East German film to be nominated for an Oscar; '' The Legend of Paul and Paula'' (1973), directed by Heiner Carow from Ulrich Plenzdorf's novel; and '' Solo Sunny'' (1980), again the work of Konrad Wolf.

However, film-making in the GDR was always constrained and oriented by the political situation in the country at any given time. Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader in the Weimar period, was the subject of several hagiographical films in the 1950s (''Ernst Thälmann'', 1954), and although East German filmmaking moved away from this overtly Stalinist approach in the 1960s, filmmakers were still subject to the changing political positions, and indeed the whims, of the SED leadership. For example, DEFA's full slate of contemporary films from 1966 were denied distribution, among them Frank Beyer's '' Traces of Stones'' (1966) which was pulled from distribution after three days, not because it was antipathetic to communist principles, but because it showed that such principles, which it fostered, were not put into practice at all times in East Germany. The huge box-office hit ''The Legend of Paul and Paula'' was initially threatened with a distribution ban because of its satirical elements and supposedly only allowed a release on the say-so of Party General Secretary Erich Honecker.

In the late 1970s, numerous film-makers left the GDR for the West as a result of restrictions on their work, among them director Egon Günther

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