Adalbert Baltes

Franz Emil Adalbert Baltes (born July 27, 1916 in Wiesbaden ; † April 5, 1992 in Uetersen ) was a German director of cultural and advertising films and inventor .

Life and work as a film director

Adalbert Baltes was the son of the farmer Emil Baltes from Bitburg , who was married to Wilhelmine, nee Scheuer. Baltes first attended a secondary school and then studied at the Folkwang School in Essen and at the Berlin Reimann School . During the Second World War he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 and discharged in 1941 due to a serious injury that required the amputation of a leg. Baltes then worked as a dramaturge in the business and advertising film department at UFA . In the same year he married Charlotte Koch in Münster , who gave birth to their daughter Barbara a year later.

In 1947, Baltes applied to several film productions and registered with the authorities in January 1949 with the address Johnsallee in Hamburg-Rotherbaum . On behalf of the Alster Film Studios, he wrote and directed his first cultural film "Between Stream and the Sea". The film was first shown in Cuxhaven in 1950 . A short time later, on behalf of Roto-Film, Baltes wrote the screenplay for a short film entitled “This is my world”, which was shown for the first time at the end of 1951. In addition, he wrote essays in which he dealt with the suggestive powers of the medium of film and thought about ways of using them as advertising media.

With his own production company founded in 1952, he made numerous advertising films in the following years. The customers of the company based on St. Benedictstrasse included Esso , Steinway & Sons , Hamburger Kreditbank and Café Keese . In 1953 and 1955 Baltes made two films that dealt with Hamburg's cultural life. In 1955 he was the first Hamburg director who had a CinemaScope camera and with which he shot several Hamburg-related films. Due to a lack of demand for such films, Baltes concentrated from 1957 back on the production of advertising and industrial films.

After the end of his professional activity, Baltes moved with his wife from Eppendorf to Uetersen at the end of 1990 .

Adalbert and Charlotte Baltes had two daughters: Barbara (born in 1942 in Berlin ) and Sylvia Monica (born on December 31, 1953).

Working as an inventor

In addition to working as a director, Baltes was also an inventor. First he tried to create a 360 ° cinema. With this design, which was also followed by other developers, a special projection technique was used to create the impression that he was in the middle of the action. Baltes chose the term "Cinetarium" for this, which should be reminiscent of a planetarium due to its design and projection technology . He presented the "spherical film theater Cinetarium" in 1958 at the Photokina trade fair in Cologne . The image was to be projected onto a spherical screen hanging in the cinema using mirror technology. In order to realize the idea, Baltes and two partners founded Cinetarium Film Baltes KG in March 1959 . However, the company developed nothing more than a provisionally set up experimental cinema. The technology chosen did have a visual effect, but it was essentially limited to a few places in the middle of the hall. In addition, there were imaging errors and distortions that could not be solved technically. Even when Baltes tried to fix the problems, he sold the technology to Japan in 1963 .

In the 1970s, Baltes dealt with acoustic and kinetic processes. For the 1973 International Garden Show , which took place in Hamburg that year, he planned the installation of a “floating cinema”. The viewer was supposed to fly through a large room fixed on rubber rings and the feeling of floating or flying should be suggested by clouds projected onto the wall. Baltes also had the idea of ​​building a "giant crystal" on Domplatz in Hamburg-St. Georg , which should provide space for a media center. Both ideas were not implemented.

Baltes also had plans to develop a scented television called "SASO". However , the project presented at the radio exhibition in 1979 was never realized. Baltes bequeathed his extensive collection of cinematographic equipment to the Düsseldorf Film Museum in 1979 .

literature

• Volker Reissmann: Baltes, Adalbert . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 32-33 .

Web links

• Portrait on Fernsehmuseum-hamburg.de