Johann Alexander Hübler-Kahla

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Johann Alexander Hübler-Kahla (born June 23, 1902 in Vienna , † April 6, 1965 in Berlin ) was a German - Austrian film director , screenwriter and film producer .

Live and act

Living in Berlin since 1909, he finished his school career at the age of 16 to gain a foothold in the film industry. He was trained on the camera and directed several short films for Erwin Piscator from the mid-1920s . He gradually worked as a camera assistant, cameraman , editor and documentarist. After directing several documentaries , he made his feature film debut in 1933 with the smuggler crime thriller Shooting at the Border . Feature films from a wide variety of genres followed. In addition to musical comedies with Viennese echoes such as Buchhalter Schnabel , dance music and a waltz around the Stephansturm , he created crime comedies based on the British model such as The mysterious Mr. X , romances such as Blood Brothers and even an early Karl May adaptation: Through the desert .

However, Hübler-Kahla celebrated his greatest success with a story from the Berlin milieu: the folk play Das Veilchen vom Potsdamer Platz (1936), with Berlin's Rotraut Richter as the celebrated leading actress. After this popular success, however, his career broke off abruptly. He was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment on September 3, 1937 because of a falsified Aryan certificate (his mother was Jewish). Then he was "put in the cold", so he could no longer make films.

Only a decade later, in 1946, was he able to return to the film business. He went back to Vienna for this purpose, where he founded his own film company, JA Hübler-Kahla & Co. Filmproduktion , which, however, only made three films. Including his first film since his cold position, The world is turning upside down with Hans Moser as the main actor. However, he only worked as a producer for the most important of the three films: GW Pabst's drama The Trial , which, in addition to international recognition, also won two prizes at the Venice Biennale .

In the 1950s, Hübler-Kahla returned to West Germany, where he worked alternately as a director, screenwriter and producer. However, he was unable to follow up on earlier successes. The films were mostly on a low artistic level and mostly dealt with simple stories from life, some with restorative tendencies. One of the better-known of these is Die Wirtin an der Lahn (1955) with the leading actress Hella Christ .

In 2014, his short film Geld with Heinz Erhardt was immediately discovered in an estate ; the novel “A Little Story from a Big City” was written by Gabriel D'Hervilliez . The film may not have been made until the early 1960s.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Johann Alexander Hübler-Kahla retired into private life. He died of a heart attack in Berlin in early April 1965 .

Filmography

The following is a selection of films directed by JA Hübler-Kahla, unless otherwise stated:

  • 1927: Rasputin (DEU, short film, also camera)
  • 1928: The adventures of the good soldier Schwejk (DEU, short film, also camera)
  • 1928: Singing Gallows Birds (DEU, short film, also screenplay)
  • 1929: Up from everyday life (DEU, documentary, also production and camera)
  • 1929: Girls in Danger (DEU, only camera)

Sound films:

literature

  • Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 183.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Unknown film by Heinz Erhardt discovered Süddeutsche.de from December 16, 2014