Kiba (cinema operator)

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The Kinobetriebsanstalt Ges. Mb H. ( Kiba ) was a company of the City of Vienna . It was founded in " Red Vienna " in 1926 in order to be able to use the new mass medium of film politically.

In 1938 the Kiba cinemas were taken over by the National Socialist Ostmärkische Filmtheater Betriebs GmbH . In 1945 the Kiba was re-established and got it back, as well as another 30, once “Aryanized” cinemas. In 1999, Kiba was privatized and all cinemas were sold.

history

Foundation and development until 1945

The Kiba was founded in 1926 by the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAPÖ) in " Red Vienna " as a community-owned company. There are movie theaters founded and bought, with the aim of being able to collect this political. They represented a great competition to the private cinema operators and should enable the workers to go to the cinema cheaply.

By 1931, the Kiba had a size of over 30 cinemas with 16,000 seats. Kiba also commissioned the production of two advertising films for the Social Democrats: “The Notebook of Mr. Pim” , in the course of which a conservative American was convinced of “Red Vienna” and “Die vom 17er Haus” by Artur Berger - a socially utopian one Film produced for the 1932 state elections. This was also the last SPÖ film before it was banned in the Austrofascist corporate state .

In 1938 the seven cinemas of Kiba in Vienna (“ Apollo ”, “Busch”, “Mariahilf”, “Opern”, “Scala”, “Sweden” and “Weltspiegel”) and those in Linz and Steyr were owned by Ostmärkische Filmtheater Betriebs GmbH Taken over in the sense of synchronization and continued to operate as a subsidiary.

Re-establishment in 1945 and takeover of "Aryanized" cinemas

After the Second World War, the four victorious Allied powers established the Information Service Branch in Austria . This should carry out the denazification in the theater and cinema . A corresponding law was passed on May 10, 1945. In the implementation of the denazification measures, however, numerous irregularities occurred in Vienna. The cinemas themselves were returned to their previous owners or legal successors , but the City of Vienna provided different, separate criteria for the return of the concessions that entitle them to operate the cinema. Accordingly, only the former licensees or their direct descendants were entitled to benefits, but no other relatives, beneficiaries or legal successors.

So if there were no owners or direct descendants, as was the case after the expulsion and murder of many Jews in around half of Vienna's cinemas, the City of Vienna transferred the concession to the municipality's Kiba. The legal successors of the cinema owners - mostly living abroad - either had to lease the license or sold their cinema to Kiba. 30 more cinemas, around a third of the once “Aryanized” Viennese cinemas, came into the possession of Kiba.

In 1949 there were lawsuits against this procedure, but not from legal successors to the Jewish owners before 1938, but from some of the people who had been favored by the National Socialists for “services to the party” and had operated “Aryanised” cinemas between 1938 and 1945. The Constitutional Court approved them in 1949, so that the Kiba had to return some of the “Aryanized” cinemas to the Nazi sympathizers appointed by the National Socialists in 1938.

Development up to the sale of the cinemas in 1999

The venerable metro cinema , owned by Kiba after the Second World War until 1999.

At the end of 1947, the Pabst-Kiba production company was founded by Kiba and the director GW Pabst . For ten million schillings, three films were to be made in the coming years. However, there were four: “ Duel with death ”, “Mysterious depth”, “1 - 2 - 3 - off!” And “Call from the ether”. While “Duel mit dem Tod” was still considered worth seeing by the critics, “Mysterious Depth”, the script of which was written by GW Pabst's wife Trude, failed both critically and at the box office. After heated discussions in the Vienna City Council, this company was dissolved again in 1949.

In 1949 the “ Austrian newsreel ” was temporarily brought back to life. The owners were 52 percent of the federal government and 24 percent each of Kiba and Sascha-Film .

Until the 1990s, Kiba was the largest cinema operator in Austria, ahead of Constantin Holding. With this, however, Kiba founded the joint cinema construction and operation company Cineinvest in 1992. New multiplex cinemas have now been built and operated together. For a long time there was speculation in the media about a merger between Kiba and Constantin Holding. Ultimately, Kiba was privatized in 1999 - but the remaining nine cinemas (Cine, de France, Elite, Flotten, Gartenbau , Gloria, Colosseum , Metro , Top) ultimately went to an association of Austrian film producers, distributors and investors called City Cinemas . These included film production companies such as Allegro and Dor Film , Filmladen -Filmverleih, Filmarchiv Austria as well as gastronomy and real estate companies. However, the shares in Cineinvest, which also included the first multiplex cinema in Vienna, the 12-screen Apollo cinema and the Cineplexx chain, were transferred in full to Constantin Holding, which has since ceased to be the largest distributor is also the largest cinema operator in Austria. City Cinemas filed for bankruptcy in January 2002, not least because they were in need of renovation and in some cases their competitor Constantin Film-Holding did not supply them with films with large numbers of visitors.

The nine cinemas have now been partially closed and partially resold. The Metro-Kino was taken over by the Filmarchiv Austria and now serves as its screening facility for retrospectives and historical films. The Gartenbaukino, in turn, was bought by the Viennale with the support of the City of Vienna and extensively renovated.

The Kiba continued to exist in association with the Wiener Stadthalle operating company.

literature

  • W. Fritz, cinema in Austria. The sound film 1929-45 , 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Georg Tillner: Austria, a long way. Film culture between Austrofascism and reconstruction. In: Ruth Beckermann, Christa Blüminger: Without subtitles. Fragments of a History of Austrian Cinema. Sonderzahl Verlag, Vienna 1996, p. 180
  2. ↑ a b The Curse of Manitu. In: Falter, No. 6/02, February 6, 2002 ( Memento of April 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Andreas Ungerböck ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Österreichisches Filminstitut , 1999, pp. 8–9 (accessed on November 21, 2012)