Enno Patalas

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Enno Patalas (born October 15, 1929 in Quakenbrück ; † August 7, 2018 in Munich ) was a German film historian and critic . From 1973 to 1994 he was director of the Munich Film Museum . He was considered one of the most important film historians in Germany.

Life

Enno Patalas was the son of a drawing teacher and professional officer and graduated from high school in Quakenbrück in 1949. He studied journalism and German studies in Münster from 1949 to 1954 and originally wanted to become a political journalist. After being at a meeting of film clubs in Schluchsee the Italian neorealism had met, he and Benno folding and Theodor Kotulla a soon thriving film club at the University of Münster and wrote film reviews for newspapers such as the lunch in Dusseldorf as well as for the magazine film forum in Emsdetten. In 1951 he published a film history in keywords under the pseudonym Benjamin S. Eichsfelder.

From 1957 to 1970 he was an editor at the magazine Filmkritik , which he also co-founded.

Patalas determined the line of the magazine very decisively. Shaped by his student years, he initially pursued a line critical of ideology , while later turning to the so-called aesthetic left .

From 1973 to 1994 he was director of the Munich Film Museum. This is where Patalas did pioneering work. On the one hand, there were large retrospectives on directors, countries or genres (in original versions), on the other hand, he set standards in the restoration and reconstruction of German silent films in particular. The reconstructions of the films Metropolis , M and Die Nibelungen (all by Fritz Lang ) attracted particular attention .

In addition, Patalas built a film archive with a few thousand titles. The focus of the collection is on international film classics, new German films, German silent films and Munich film history, such as films by Karl Valentin .

Another concern of Patalas was the accompaniment of silent films by competent musicians. Before that, silent films were often shown with no or only mediocre musical accompaniment, which sometimes came to the fore. Patalas regularly engaged the pianist Aljoscha Zimmermann for piano accompaniment. Zimmermann soon developed into a specialist in silent film music. He looked for old scores and also composed his own accompanying music.

In addition to many reviews in film criticism , the time and a. Patalas also published (together with Ulrich Gregor ) in 1963 a history of the film for the period up to 1960. Later, Gregor's work was continued solely in a volume that covers the years 1960 to 1977. Patalas also contributed to monographs on Fritz Lang , Ernst Lubitsch and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau .

He created film essays for WDR television on Jean Vigo , Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , Jean Renoir , Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg .

Even after his retirement, Patalas carried out several film restoration projects on behalf of various institutions. In addition, he wrote a concise book on Alfred Hitchcock (1999) and a reading version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2000). In 2005 a book was published with the title “Südseebilder” with materials and documents related to the film Tabu by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Patalas was married to the film critic and essayist Frieda Grafe from 1962 until her death in 2002 . From 2002 onwards, Patalas was responsible for a twelve-volume edition of works with collected writings by Frieda Grafe. He died in Munich in August 2018 at the age of 88.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DER SPIEGEL: Enno Patalas is dead: Munich film historian has died - DER SPIEGEL - culture. Retrieved June 30, 2020 .
  2. ^ Munzinger archive
personal data
SURNAME Patalas, Enno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film historian and critic
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Quakenbrück
DATE OF DEATH 7th August 2018
Place of death Munich