Ernst Kunstmann

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Ernst Kunstmann (* 25. January 1898 in Potsdam-Babelsberg , Germany ; † 30th May 1995 ) was a German animated film - and special effects - cameraman .

Life

Kunstmann, one of ten children, completed an apprenticeship as a lathe operator after graduating from school . After serving as a weapon in World War I , he returned to Potsdam-Babelsberg in 1918, where the Decla-Bioscop film company employed him as a stage worker. The technically gifted artist quickly showed interest in all things camera technology and thus caught the attention of Eugen Schüfftan , who made him his assistant. With Schüfftan, Kunstmann developed a reflection process around 1923, the so-called Schüfftan process . Kunstmann was able to use his skills for certain sequences of famous films, including classics like Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod , where he had to ensure that Bernhard Goetzke appears as death and then disappears again, and Metropolis . For Lang's colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , he made the models that were used in The Last Man . They were mounted right in front of the camera lens and allowed the model and the real scenes arranged behind it to merge with one another. In EA Dupont's most famous production of Varieté and, above all, Lang's “ Metropolis ”, Schüfftan and Kunstmann were able to perfectly integrate the recorded, tiny models into the real scene and thus create the illusion of a (with “ Metropolis ”) futuristic world of gigantic buildings, workshops and streets create. In 1925, Kunstmann and his mentor Schüfftan traveled to the USA for a year and a half to pass on their knowledge of mirroring technology to the cameramen there.

With the dawn of the sound film era, Ernst Kunstmann was employed as a freelance trick specialist in the Babelsberg studio and occasionally also photographed films on his own. He worked, for example, with Luis Trenker , for whom he created the violent thunderstorm in mountains in flames with trick technology. The following year, Ernst Kunstmann animated the flight scenes for Karl Hartls F.P. 1 does not answer , cooperated on The Testament of Dr. Mabuse last worked with Lang, developed the effects of the science fiction classic Gold in 1933, again for Hartl, and in 1934 obtained the special photography for Leni Riefenstahl's NSDAP party conference film Triumph des Willens . After working on Reinhold Schünzel's satirical comedy of the gods Amphitryon - Happiness Comes from the Clouds (1935), Riefenstahl brought him to their Olympia film as one of numerous (unnamed) cameramen . Shortly before, in 1935, Tobis had commissioned Kunstmann to set up a trick department in their studio in Berlin-Johannisthal . Until 1945, Kunstmann's visual effects were only an outstanding design element in two films from 1942/43: Herbert Selpin's Titanic film, where he and the film architect Fritz Maurischat recreated a Titanic ship model, and Josef von Báky's Münchhausen film, where he worked with colleague Theo Nischwitz and u. a. Hans Albers designed the now famous ride on the cannonball in the powder tower of the Ottomans.

After the end of the war in 1945, the artist, who was temporarily unemployed, was busy producing the titles of the German dubbed versions of Soviet films in the Althoff studio in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 1947 he was brought in by DEFA , for which, after the founding of the GDR , he was mainly responsible for their ambitious fairy tale films The Cold Heart and The Story of Little Muck . In 1959 he went temporarily to the West and worked on the Federal Republican productions A man goes through the wall and mistress of the world . Almost at the same time, Kunstmann created the extensive trick shots for the ambitious DEFA science fiction flick The Silent Star by Kurt Maetzig . In 1963, when he reached retirement age, Ernst Kunstmann left the GDR state company. His daughter Vera Kunstmann, who did an apprenticeship with her father and worked for him in the 1950s, followed in his footsteps and also worked in the DEFA's trick department.

Filmography

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kunstmann, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German animation and special effects cameraman
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam-Babelsberg , Germany
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1995
Place of death Potsdam-Babelsberg , Germany