Decla bioscope

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The Decla Bioskop AG was a German production company that - starting with a predecessor company - since 1915 under the direction of Erich Pommer produced a wealth of high-profile part silent films, including several important early works by Fritz Lang , FW Murnau and Ludwig Berger and Robert Vienna's legendary production Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari .

Company history

The early years

As a predecessor company , Fritz Holz and Erich Pommer founded the production company Decla-Film-Gesellschaft-Holz & Co. in Berlin on February 16, 1915 with the capital of Deutsche Eclair ( Kofferwort Decla , the daughter of a French parent company) . In just under a decade, this initially quite small company brought out entertainment productions in a wide variety of genres, above all adventure and detective films, but also dramas and melodramas. In the production range can be found at the beginning of several serial with performers such as Harry Lamberts-Paulsen and Alwin Neuss . With the company's own Decla film distribution, foreign films were also released in the German Empire.

Fusion and absorption

After the First World War, when UFA , which had meanwhile been founded (December 1917), largely controlled production on the German film market, Pommer was forced to merge his company with the Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft Rudolf Meinerts in 1919 in order to continue to face the competition to be able to pass. Pommers new films were now given all sorts of superlatives and under signa like "Decla-Abenteuerklasse" (e.g. Fritz Lang's Die Spinnen ) or "Decla-Weltklasse" (e.g. Vienna's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari , who by far most famous Decla film) marketed and distributed.

In 1920 Decla merged with Deutsche Bioskop AG to form Decla-Bioskop AG and thus became the second largest German film company after UFA. The company owned the studio complex in Neubabelsberg and its own cinema chain. With Uco-Film GmbH, Decla-Bioskop was also involved in a subsidiary in association with Ullstein-Verlag . The Uco-Film focused on the implementation of serial novels by the Berliner Illustrirten , including Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Schloss Vogelöd and Lang's legendary two-part drama. Mabuse, the player . During the production phase of this first of all Mabuse films, the competing UFA absorbed Decla-Bioskop in November 1921, which temporarily owned another subsidiary, the Russo-Films Commandite.

The last few years under the UFA umbrella

Even under the umbrella of the UFA company, Decla-Bioskop continued to produce films as an independent department for a few years and brought such ambitious works as Murnau's Phantom and The Expulsion , Berger's A Glass of Water and The Lost Shoe as well as Lang's two-part large-scale production The Nibelungen to the screen . It was not until the end of 1924 that the Decla-Bioskop stopped making films.

Decla and Decla Bioskop films (selection)

Individual proof

  1. ^ Friedrich von Zglinicki : Der Weg des Films , Berlin 1956, p. 403

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