Josef Stein

This article is about the film director and producer Josef Stein. For the musical author, see Joseph Stein .

Josef Stein (born February 2, 1876 in Vienna , † June 16, 1937 in Prague ) was an Austrian theater actor and director, film director and producer in Germany , and a film pioneer from the very beginning.

Live and act

Stein, who grew up in Prossnitz in the Austro- Hungarian province of Moravia , gained his first theater experience as a teenager as a member of a four-person drama troupe with which he made guest appearances in Bohemia . In 1889 he came to the Hamburg Carl-Schultze-Theater as part of this tour .

As early as 1896, Stein came across the film through his friend and later director colleague Gustav Schönwald and initially took care of film distribution. In this role he was entrusted with the distribution of the first films by the Lumière brothers in Germany. Stein then temporarily returned to the theater and in 1907 became stage manager and stage inspector at the New Theater in Berlin . On July 22, 1911, he set off on a trip to New York to work in the same position at the German Theater there, also known as the Irving Place Theater . Guest performances have taken him to Cuba ( Havana ) and Mexico . Back in Europe, Josef Stein worked on stages in Cologne , Düsseldorf , Aachen and Magdeburg . Before the First World War he went to St. Petersburg to the Opéra Comique. There, as in Moscow , he directed guest performances.

When war broke out in 1914, Stein returned to Germany. There, together with Robert Reinert , he was involved in an unknown function in 1916 in the production of the successful, six-part Homunculus sensation film Otto Rippert with Olaf Fönss . In the last two years of the war, 1917/18, Stein was employed as a director by the production company Deutsche Bioscop GmbH. In the years that followed, up to 1925, Josef Stein concentrated on directing a considerable number of film-historically insignificant entertainment films , including the first Karl May films On the Rubble of Paradise and The Caravan of Death . During the period of upheaval in 1918/19, Stein also directed Hungarian films. In 1921/22 he was also responsible for several films in the Nobody series, including Nobody makes everything, The Lord of the Underworld, Lucifer and The Lady in Gray . In 1925, Stein ended his uncomfortable directing career.

Since then he has only appeared as a producer or production manager for a wide variety of companies. In 1933, the Jew Stein fled from the Nazis in Berlin in Czechoslovakia . There he continued his activity as a producer at AB-Film Prag and made the last two films by the actor Ferdinand Hart, who also fled Berlin in 1933 . His remake of the old Golem fabric made by Julien Duvivier in 1936 attracted particular attention . Stein remained active as a producer until immediately before his death; He gave his last major interview on the occasion of his 60th birthday to the German-language exile newspaper Pariser Tageblatt .

Filmography

as director:

• 1917: Escaped from Knute
• 1917: The outlaws
• 1917: Extinguished eyes
• 1917: Avenging love
• 1917: Princess Wolkowska's lace shawl
• 1918: cash register revision
• 1918: The light of life
• 1918: The great sacrifice
• 1918: The wrong ways of love
• 1918: The way of salvation
• 1918: A gög
• 1918: A csitri
• 1919: Úri banditák
• 1919: A Csöppség
• 1920: Highness on the reel
• 1920: The Prince of Montecuculi
• 1920: old letters
• 1920: On the ruins of paradise
• 1920: The death caravan
• 1921: Nobody (25 episodes)
• 1922: The Lord of the Underworld
• 1922: Lucifer
• 1922: The Lady in Gray
• 1922: Street jugglers
• 1924: The tempting danger
• 1923–25: The Horror of the West Coast (direction with Carl-Heinz Boese )
• 1925: The little one from America

as producer or production manager:

• 1927: primary love
• 1927: The awakening of the woman
• 1928: Polish economy
• 1928: Serenissimus and the Last Virgin
• 1928: Spelunke
• 1929: Furnished rooms
• 1929: stud. chem. Helene Willfuer
• 1930: A girl from the Reeperbahn
• 1930: The fall of the General Staff Colonel Redl
• 1931: The dancing hussar
• 1931: He and his servant
• 1933: The double groom
• 1934: Za ranních cervánku
• 1935: Barbora rádí
• 1936: Le golem
• 1936: Jizdni hlidka
• 1937: Advokátka Vera
• 1937: Devce za výkladem

literature

• Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 483.

Web links

• Josef Stein in the Internet Movie Database (English) - the year of birth 1886 published here is incorrect
• Josef Stein at filmportal.de - the year of birth 1886 published here is wrong