Georg Furkel

Georg Furkel (born June 13, 1863 in St. Dié , France , † August 21, 1945 in Radebeul ) was a German cameraman and pioneer of European cinematography .

Life

Furkel, who comes from the Vosges , also worked in this profession after completing his training as a photographer. On November 30, 1896, Furkel began decades of work for cinematography, which at that time was just a fairground amusement. On this day he met the French cinema pioneer Bressier in Cologne, who traveled like a traveling juggler through the German provinces in order to enrich variety events with the presentation of short film scenes. Furkel joined Bressier and worked for him as a demonstrator.

Georg Furkel founded his own film production company in the Netherlands in 1897, one of the first in Europe, with which he recorded current affairs and images of everyday life that he presented at variety shows. He also photographed and staged short documentary recordings for the Dutch producer and film pioneer Franz Anton Nöggerath senior. The German film pioneer Jules Greenbaum met Furkel in Amsterdam in 1899 and persuaded him to follow him to Germany.

Now based in Berlin , Georg Furkel worked as a cameraman and technical director for Greenbaum's company Bioscope until 1910 , after which he worked for Vitascope . In those early years in Berlin, Furkel mainly photographed hundreds of current events, in 1907 he filmed as far as the German African colonies of Togo , Cameroon and German South West Africa .

Orders for feature films did not follow until the beginning of the 1910s. From 1913 to 1915 Furkel returned to Greenbaum again, but also shot in Cologne and for Colonia Film in Berlin . Then he gradually restricted his cinematic activity. After finishing some of the films he had shot in Munich in the early 1920s, Georg Furkel returned to Berlin in 1922 and ran his own cinema there.

In order to improve his meager income, the old cinema veteran, suffering from asthma and cardiac insufficiency with the distinctive, snow-white goatee, was given one or the other minor activity (tiny film role in 1934 in How a love ended ). Otherwise he kept afloat with small gratuities from the NS-Fund Künstlerdank .

Filmography (selection)

until 1911 short documentaries

• 1897: The annoying smoker
• 1897: fun in the barracks
• 1897: Africans bathing
• 1899: Carneval in Paris
• 1904: The Kaiser fleet parade off Heligoland
• 1905: Celebrations at the unveiling of the Kaiser Friedrich monument
• 1907: From war life in South West Africa
• 1909: Zeppelin III in Berlin on August 29, 1909
• 1909: Colorful pictures of the German fleet
• 1911: Launch of the first turbine liner 'Kaiser' on March 22, 1911 in Kiel
• 1912: The Bajadere
• 1912: The sea and the waves of love
• 1913: From difficult times
• 1913: fairy tales of happiness
• 1913: Winter flirt
• 1913: Death in the mountains
• 1913: witch magic
• 1922: The sister's blood
• 1922: Severin Hoyer's descent

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 3: F - H. Barry Fitzgerald - Ernst Hofbauer. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 147 f.

Web links

• Georg Furkel in the Internet Movie Database (English)