Guido Seeber

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Guido Seeber with a film drying drum, 1898

Friedrich Konrad Guido Seeber (born June 22, 1879 in Chemnitz , Germany , † July 2, 1940 in Berlin ) was a German film pioneer, photographer and cameraman .

Life

Guido Seeber was the third child of the married couple Clemens Seeber (1851–1905) and Juliane Laura Seeber (1846–1913), née Schubert, born in Chemnitz . In 1885 Guido Seeber started school and left middle school in 1893, whereupon he began his training as a photographer in his father's studio. Clemens Seeber acquired this in May 1873 after the death of the photographer August Adolf Hunger in Neugasse No. 5 in Chemnitz. In 1879 the studio moved to Theaterstrasse 22 in downtown Chemnitz, where Guido Seeber mainly worked in the years to come.

In the summer of 1896, Clemens Seeber saw the first films by the Lumière brothers at the Saxon Crafts and Applied Arts exhibition in Dresden . Fascinated by the new technology, the Seebers bought their first projection apparatus and some films from the leading German manufacturer of cinematographic equipment, Oskar Messter, in 1897 . On September 5, 1897, they gave their first presentation of “living photographs” in the Chemnitz Varieté Mosella Hall .

With the purchase of a recording device from Ed. Messter in May 1898, Clemens and Guido Seeber began making their first films, which included the rifle train of the private rifle company in Chemnitz on May 31, 1898 and the transport of locomotives by the Saxon machine factory through the streets of Chemnitz on June 28, 1898 . On September 16, 1898, this was performed in Chemnitz, along with other original recordings. The Seebers established the screenings of “living photographs” as an integral part of the Varieté program, from which a kind of traveling cinema developed in the years to come, with which they contributed to the spread of cinematography throughout Saxony .

Seebers animated film The Mysterious Matchbox (1910)

For this purpose, Clemens and Guido Seeber developed a handy travel cinematograph together with Oskar Messter, which they registered with the Imperial Patent Office in 1903 as a registered trademark under the name Seeberograph . To produce sound images , they combined this device with a gramophone , with which they performed under the name Seeberophon .

After Clemens Seeber's death on July 17, 1905, the photographic studio at Theaterstraße 22 was sold in 1907. Guido Seeber left his hometown of Chemnitz and moved to Valencia via Paris with a traveling cinema.

Back in Germany, he worked as a film examiner for the Deutsche Rollfilm Gesellschaft Frankfurt and Schleusser AG Cologne . From 1908/09 onwards he was the technical manager of Deutsche Bioskop and made his first films in 1909, including the animated film The Mysterious Matchstick Box . From then on, he did pioneering work as a cameraman and laid the foundations on which the other famous cameramen of the German silent film era - e. B. Karl Freund , Fritz Arno Wagner , Carl Hoffmann - could build.

In 1910, the feature film Guilt and Atonement with Henny Porten and Paul Bildt was made for Deutsche Bioscop GmbH , which Guido Seeber engaged for further films. In the years that followed, Guido Seeber shot a series of Asta Nielsen films with Danish director Urban Gad and his wife Asta Nielsen, such as Hot Blood , Night Butterfly , The Stranger Bird and In the Big Moment .

Erich Zeiske , director of Deutsche Bioscop GmbH, commissioned Guido Seeber to look for a suitable plot of land in the Berlin area to enlarge his studio. In the winter of 1911/12, construction work on a glass house on Stahnsdorfer Strasse in Novawes began under the technical guidance of Guido Seeber . With this, Bioscop GmbH laid the foundation stone for the Babelsberg film landscape . On February 12, 1912, the studio with the recordings for the film The Dance of Death was inaugurated.

In addition to his technical talent in handling the camera (he developed several trick techniques), the use of the perspective of the room and the skillful use of light-dark contrasts were remarkable . He worked with directors such as Urban Gad , Lupu Pick , Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Paul Wegener . His most important achievements include the doppelganger recordings in the film Der Student von Prag (1913) and the drive recordings in the films by Lupu Pick - especially in the film Sylvester (1923) - as an anticipation of the unleashed camera as a stylistic device of the chamber play in film The last man (1924) can apply.

In the sound film era, he only got average tasks. Disabled by a stroke he suffered in 1932, he withdrew more and more from active camera work, but without turning his back entirely on the film business. In 1935 he took over the management of the UFA's film tricks department and wrote several books for amateur filmmakers.

In 1937 Seeber became an honorary member of the Deutsche Kinotechnische Gesellschaft (DKG), a forerunner of today's television and cinema technology society .

Gravestone of Guido Seeber in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Guido Seeber died just ten days after his 61st birthday on July 2, 1940 in Berlin. He was buried in the Heerstraße cemetery in today's Berlin-Westend district (grave location: 8-C-53). The grave has since been closed, but the tombstone has been preserved as a memorial stone next to the grave site.

A building in the media city of Babelsberg that was inaugurated in 2009 bears his name today.

Filmography (selection)

Fonts

  • Guido Seeber: “From the film of my life”. in: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (Hrsg.): The wandering picture. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. Berlin 1979a, p. 30.
  • Guido Seeber: The Seeberograph and the Seeberophon. in: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (Hrsg.): The wandering picture. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. Berlin 1979b, pp. 35-44.
  • Guido Seeber: The practical cameraman: Theory and practice of cinematographic recording technology with special consideration of scientific amateur filmmaking , Volume 1, Verlag der "Lichtbildbühne", 1927 / Facsimile edition: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1979
  • Guido Seeber: The practical cameraman: A practical and theoretical presentation of the photographic film tricks , Volume 2, Verlag der "Lichtbildbühne", 1927 / Facsimile edition: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1979
  • Guido Seeber: The practical cameraman : The cameraman's work equipment and workplaces: History of recording technology and the recording apparatus, the cameraman's modern equipment, lamps and studios then and now , Volume 3, Verlag der "Lichtbildbühne", 1927 / facsimile- Edition: German Filmmuseum, 1980

literature

  • Helmut Herbst: Three picture descriptions and a list. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. in: C. Müller, H. Segeberg (Hrsg.): The modeling of the cinema. Munich 1998, pp. 15-41.
  • Helmut Herbst: Watching the light at work: Helmut Herbst photographs friends and colleagues from 1964–1990. Book for the exhibition of the same name at the Filmmuseum Berlin 2004.
  • Babette Stach: 100 years of cinema: '... we had to do that too'? the film pioneer and cameraman Guido Seeber (1879–1940). in: Sächsische Heimatblätter. No. 6, 41st year 1995, pp. 366-369.
  • Walter Steinhauer: Chemnitz as the original cell of the film. in: The tower keeper of Chemnitz. 3rd year 1937, pp. 292-305.
  • Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation (ed.): The wandering image. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. Berlin 1979.
  • Joachim Castan: Max Skladanowsky or the beginning of German film history. Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-9803451-3-0 . (Includes passages on how Seeber worked with Skladanowsky in the 1920s).
  • Sergej Eisenstein: Foreword to the Russian translation by Guido Seeber in 1927 of the book Der Trickfilm (Moscow 1929) published by the Berlin publishing house “Lichtbildbühne” . (Translated by Hans-Joachim Schlegel). in: Eisenstein: writings. Volume 3. Hanser, Munich 1975, pp. 244ff ISBN 3-446-12004-1 .
  • Andreas Hansert: Asta Nielsen and the film city Babelsberg. Carl Schleussner's involvement in the German film industry. Michael Imhof Verlag, 2007.
  • Stephan Weingart:  Seeber, Friedrich Konrad Guido. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 134 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Guido Seeber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Honorary members of the FKTG
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin tombs . Haude & Spener, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-7759-0476-6 . P. 199.
  3. ↑ District Office Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf of Berlin: Prominent graves in the state-owned cemetery Heerstrasse . Notice in the cemetery. As of November 2012. Read on December 3, 2019.
  4. ^ Potsdamer TGZ: Potsdam technology and start-up centers: Guido-Seeber-Haus Babelsberg. Retrieved June 21, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Seeber, Guido
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seeber, Friedrich Konrad Guido (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film pioneer, photographer and cameraman
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz , Germany
DATE OF DEATH 2nd July 1940
Place of death Berlin