Cinema explainer

A cinema explainer was a person who, before the advent of talkies, presented the publicly shown silent films to the audience as dramatically as possible as a coherent representation. It was a job , or at least a job in Berlin . The actress Henny Porten gave an example of a scene from 1910 in which she “waited in vain for her lover in the Tiergarten as a faithlessly abandoned bride”: “When the film was being played in a cinema in north Berlin, the explainer accompanied the scene In the words: In pouring rain she waited for hours and hours for him. But who didn't come, he was [...] and she was Neese . "

The following report from the Berliner Tageblatt of August 1932 shows how closely the institution of cinema explanations is associated with the past : “[...] in Joachimsthaler Strasse, a side street off Kurfürstendamm , a show of abnormalities was shown under the title Kino von 1905 , which, to the amusement of the audience, once again presented a cinema instructor. ”The last cinema instructor had just been fired because of the switch to sound film.

Individual evidence

↑ The job was often taken over by unemployed actors, reciters and emcees, cf. Georg Herzberg: Der Kinoerklärer , in: Neue Filmwelt 1949 No. 1, p. 30; Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors . Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag 1956, p. 311. Charlie Roellinghoff (1897–1935) passed on to posterity a late testimony to the work of this class in his humorous lecture The Last Cinema Explanator in 1929 ; it is preserved on the gramophone record Homocord 4-3256 (Matr. TC 1397/98) on August 17, 1929.
↑ Continuation series That was and is Berlin from Neue Berliner Illustrierte (NBI) around 1971, Part 2. The newspaper clipping that has been handed down has no date.
↑ Joachim-Felix Leonhard: Medienwissenschaft: a handbook for the development of media and forms of communication , part 2. ISBN 9783110163261- Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2001, p. 1114.

[1] The job was often taken over by unemployed actors, reciters and emcees, cf. Georg Herzberg: Der Kinoerklärer , in: Neue Filmwelt 1949 No. 1, p. 30; Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors . Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag 1956, p. 311. Charlie Roellinghoff (1897–1935) passed on to posterity a late testimony to the work of this class in his humorous lecture The Last Cinema Explanator in 1929 ; it is preserved on the gramophone record Homocord 4-3256 (Matr. TC 1397/98) on August 17, 1929.

[2] Continuation series That was and is Berlin from Neue Berliner Illustrierte (NBI) around 1971, Part 2. The newspaper clipping that has been handed down has no date.

[3] Joachim-Felix Leonhard: Medienwissenschaft: a handbook for the development of media and forms of communication , part 2. ISBN 9783110163261- Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2001, p. 1114.