Karel Reisz

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Karel Reisz (center) in Karlovy Vary in 1964

Karel Reisz (born July 21, 1926 in Ostrava , † November 25, 2002 in London , England ) was a Czech - British director .

Life

Born in Czechoslovakia , Karel Reisz of Jewish descent was able to flee to Great Britain before the Wehrmacht invaded . However, his parents stayed behind and were murdered in Auschwitz . During the last years of World War II he served in the Czech Royal Air Force unit . Reisz studied chemistry at Cambridge and worked as a teacher. In 1947 Reisz founded the film magazine Sequence together with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert , where he worked as an author until 1952 and later also with Anderson as editor . Reisz also worked as a film journalist for Sight & Sound and gained experience as a film editor , which culminated in the 1953 study The Technique of Editing , which was published in 30 editions. In 1952 he worked as a curator at the newly founded National Film Theater in London.

In 1956, Karel Reisz founded the British Free Cinema movement together with Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger as a counterpoint to American commercial Hollywood cinema. First he shot two highly acclaimed naturalistic documentaries from the everyday life of young men from the working class (Momma Don't Allow and We Are the Lambeth Boys), before he became internationally known for his realistic documentary film Saturday Night to Sunday Morning , based on a novella by Alan Sillitoe is based. The film, a sensitively observed everyday protocol, is one of the key works of the British New Wave that emerged from free cinema.

Griff aus dem Dunkel ( Night Must Fall , 1964) is the shocking portrait of a vain young man who commits murders out of a desire for recognition. The melodramatic plot takes place in front of a reality background observed in a documentary. Unfortunately, it was with this film, his second with Albert Finney , that Reisz began to fail at the box office. Most of his work was financially unsuccessful. The dominant theme of Reisz 'films were portraits of eccentric loners (for example in his film biography of Isadora Duncan and his film adaptation of Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski's The Gambler ).

From 1974 he worked temporarily in the USA, where his best-known and most successful film was made in collaboration with Harold Pinter : The French lieutenant's mistress with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in the lead roles, a complex, sophisticated film adaptation that is entertaining and emotionally appealing was. In the 1990s Karel Reisz worked primarily as a theater director for stages in London, Dublin and Paris. He created the staging of the works of Samuel Beckett , Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, setting standards .

Karel Reisz 'oeuvre only includes ten feature films, but today he is considered one of the most influential directors in English film history.

Awards

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Commons : Karel Reisz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Reisz, Karel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-British director
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Ostrava
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 2002
Place of death London