The Johannisthal Studios were

film studios A film studio (also known as movie studio or simply studio) is a major entertainment company that makes films. Today, studios are mostly financing and distribution entities. In addition, they may have their own studio facility or facilities; howev ...

located in the

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

area of Johannisthal. Founded in 1920 on the site of a former

airfield An aerodrome, airfield, or airstrip is a location from which aircraft flight operations take place, regardless of whether they involve air cargo, passengers, or neither, and regardless of whether it is for public or private use. Aerodromes in ...

, they were a centre of production during the

Weimar Weimar is a city in the state (Germany), German state of Thuringia, in Central Germany (cultural area), Central Germany between Erfurt to the west and Jena to the east, southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together w ...

and

Nazi era Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictat ...

s. Nearly four hundred films were made at Johannistal during the silent period. The first production was the 1920 silent '' Verkommen'' starring

Maria Zelenka Maria Zelenka (1894–1975) was an Austrian film actress.Grange p.148 Selected filmography * ''Alkohol'' (1919) * ''Lola Montez'' (1919) * ''The Grand Babylon Hotel'' (1920) * '' The Blood of the Ancestors'' (1920) * '' Alfred von Ingelheim's Dra ...

. Sometimes known as the Jofa Studios, in 1929 they became the base of the newly established German

major studio Major film studios are production and distribution companies that release a substantial number of films annually and consistently command a significant share of box office revenue in a given market. In the American and international markets, t ...

Tobis Film Tobis Film was a German film production and film distribution company. Founded in the late 1920s as a merger of several companies involved in the switch from silent film, silent to sound films, the organisation emerged as a leading German sound s ...

at the beginning of the

sound era A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed befo ...

. After 1945 the studios fell into the Soviet Zone of Germany, and later into the

Communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

state of

East Germany East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...

.Bergfelder p.24 The studios were used by the new monopoly film company

DEFA DEFA (''Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft'') was the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) throughout the country's existence. Since 2019, DEFA's film heritage has been made accessible and licensable on the PR ...

. Although the first postwar German film ''

The Murderers Are Among Us ''Die Mörder sind unter uns'', a German film known in English as ''Murderers Among Us'' in the United States or ''The Murderers Are Among Us'' in the United Kingdom was one of the first post-World War II German films and the first ''Trümmerfil ...

'' was shot at Johannisthal, they were used less than the

Babelsberg Studios Babelsberg Film Studio () (also known as Studio Babelsberg), located in Potsdam-Babelsberg outside Berlin, Germany, is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, producing films since 1912. With a total area of about and a studio area of a ...

Potsdam Potsdam () is the capital and largest city of the Germany, German States of Germany, state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the Havel, River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of B ...

. It was often used for

dubbing Dubbing (also known as re-recording and mixing) is a post-production process used in filmmaking and the video production process where supplementary recordings (known as doubles) are lip-synced and "mixed" with original production audio to cr ...

foreign films into

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

for their release. From the 1960s East German television increasingly used the site. Following the fall of the

Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (, ) was a guarded concrete Separation barrier, barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and the East Germany, German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany). Construction of the B ...

the studios were acquired by the

Kirch Group KirchGruppe (KirchGroup) was a German media group founded by Leo Kirch in the 1950s. It was the dominant buyer and seller of TV programming rights in Germany. By 2000, it controlled a 52.5 percent stake in what became the country's biggest broa ...

, but were largely demolished by 1995.

References

Bibliography

* Bergfelder, Tim. ''International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s''. Berghahn Books, 2005. * Kreimeier, Klaus. ''The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945''.University of California Press, 1999. German film studios {{film-studio-stub