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German National Cinema (1895 - 1933)Germany boasts one of the oldest national cinemas in the world, and is as old as the medium itself. In November of 1895, two German brothers, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, unveiled the film projector that they developed themselves, a month before the French Lumiere brothers premiered their cinematograph in Paris. Two German film pioneers, Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe, were the first to use the Geneva drive, a mechanism that transfers continuous circular motion into intermittent motion, to build film projectors that could advance film one frame at a time. By the time that the cinema became more than just a simple amusement, Germany was one of the forerunners of the nascent art form. These advances represented the formation of the German national cinema. Once the novelty of the moving image wore off for the upper classes, Cinema became a plaything of the masses. German audiences flocked to fairgrounds and small booths known as Kintopps to see the newest curiosity. By this point, films were considered to be cultural clutter, and the German national cinema was hardly regarded as high culture. However, some German filmmakers believed that the medium had more potential, and began producing longer works based on literary sources. The Student of Prague, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, was adapted successfully into a film around 1910. As the 1910s progressed, films from other national cinemas began to out-compete domestic works. However, when World War II broke out in Europe late in 1914, Germany boycotted the films that its enemies produced, leading to a surge of domestically-produced films. This became the first true boom of the German national cinema. The first German film studio was founded in 1917, and was known as the Universum Film AG, or Ufa, for short. One of the many reasons that the Germans founded this very influential studio was to combat the propaganda films that the Allies were turning out as the First World War drew to a close. Ufa began making its own propaganda films, known as Vaterland pictures, to promote the German cause. However, German audiences demanded more lighthearted entertainments, and the studio obliged. During the interwar period, the German national cinema became one of Europe’s largest film production businesses. During the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s film business ballooned into a powerhouse, due in large part to the hyperinflation of the Papiermark. This period also saw the development of German Expressionism, a movement that featured heavily symbolic and artistic images instead of stark realism. Many of these were genre films, with crime and horror films being the favorites of the day. Many great directors worked on landmark films at this time, such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Fritz Lang’s M and Metropolis. After the fall of the Weimar Republic, when the Nazis seized power in the German government, many of these influential German directors, who were mostly of Jewish descent, moved to Hollywood to begin new careers in America. Since then, the German national cinema has struggled to live up to the reputation it established during this golden era. |