Erich Zander (film architect)

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Erich Zander (born June 17, 1889 in Berlin , † September 15, 1965 in Regenstauf , Bavaria ) was a German film architect .

Life

Erich Zander had attended an art school in his native Berlin and in 1906 came to work as a painter and to the opera house there, to which he would remain loyal until the end of the First World War. He then switched to film, initially as a worker for the architect Paul Leni , and later, from 1923, as a freelance production designer. In this capacity, Zander did his best work for the historical material Prince Louis Ferdinand and Napoleon on St. Helena as well as with the adaptation of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin , You shall not commit adultery! . Nevertheless, his work - he actually served all common entertainment film genres - was rather insignificant until 1939.

The beginning of a five-year collaboration with his colleague Karl Machus introduced Zander to cost-intensive prestige productions of the “Third Reich” since the beginning of the Second World War . The duo Machus / Zander mainly designed the decorations for Veit Harlans with various National Socialist honorary titles, pathetic historical dramas (especially the monumental films The Great King and Kolberg ) as well as the buildings for Wolfgang Liebeneiner's large-scale Bismarck portrait from 1940. With the surprising death of Machus' This collaboration ended in 1944.

After 1945, Zander made the transition to German post-war cinema, this time as a permanent employee of DEFA . For them, Zander designed the sets for sometimes high-quality, time-critical pieces such as Falk Harnack's Das Beil von Wandsbek and Wolfgang Staudte's Der Untertan .

With the construction of the Wall in 1961 , Zander , who lived in West Berlin ( Schöneberg , Kufsteiner Strasse), lost his job and retired to private life after briefly working for western television.

Filmography

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 8: T - Z. David Tomlinson - Theo Zwierski. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 511.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zander, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film architect
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1965
Place of death Regenstauf , Bavaria, Federal Republic of Germany