Weimar’s cinema, named after the German Republic between 1919 and 1933, wasn’t just expressionist films. At the instigation of U.F.A, it developed an innovative cinema, increasingly popular that it attired productors from Hollywood who searched to recruit German actors and actress.
This was the case, for example, with the director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who directed Nosferatu, and with Emil Jannings, the first actor to win an Oscar in 1927. He returned to Germany a few years later, following the advent of talking films, as he didn’t speak English very well. He starred in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), the film that launched Marlene Dietrich’s career – another actress who moved to Hollywood immediately after the film’s Berlin premiere.
In the early 1930s, German cinema was at its peak. Thanks to their renowned technical and artistic expertise, the U.F.A studios, based in Babelsberg near Berlin, became one of the major centres of European film production. Films were then produced in multiple versions – for Germany, France and Italy – meaning they were shot “almost simultaneously” in all three languages based on the same scripts, using the same sets and, sometimes, the same actors. This period of creativity was soon disrupted by political changes.
The rise of the political nationalism in Germany led to voluntary exile among artistic circles, even before the Nazis came to power. This was the case for most artists of Jewish origin, but also for those perceived as communist sympathisers. This exodus was exacerbated by Hitler coming to power in January 1933. Yet, German cinema of the 1930s isn’t lacking in talent: the majority of artists and film technicians from the Weimar era continued to work in an industry now under the regime’s control.
Photo 4 : Archives cinématographiques de l’est – Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, photo from the book Vom werden deutscher filmkunst : Der Tonfilm by Oskar Kalbus (1935).
Photo 5 : Archives cinématographiques de l’est – Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, photo from the book Vom werden deutscher filmkunst : Der Tonfilm by Oskar Kalbus (1935).
Photo 6 : Archives cinématographiques de l’est – Aerial view of U.F.A’s movie studios in Babelsberg (Potsdam), photo from the book Vom werden deutscher filmkunst : Der Tonfilm by Oskar Kalbus (1935).