Klaus Wildenhahn
Klaus Wildenhahn (born June 19, 1930 in Bonn ; † August 9, 2018 in Hamburg ) was a German documentary filmmaker and, with his work and teaching, is one of the most influential German documentary film directors of the 20th century.
biography
Wildenhahn was the late and only child of the carpenter , upholsterer and later commercial director of a furniture factory Max Wildenhahn and his wife Nora, nee. von Sochatzki, a trained nurse. After studying sociology, journalism and political science at the Free University of Berlin , he received an exchange scholarship for Colgate University in Hamilton, USA . He broke off the study after a year and worked from 1954 to 1958 as a nurse in the mental hospital Banstead Hospital in Sutton , Surrey near London . He married a Japanese woman and they had two children. An encounter with the British documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock inspired him to work as a documentary filmmaker with the method of direct cinema . The handheld camera with 16mm film enabled Klaus Wildenhahn to capture people and events directly. Without an obstructive distance and based on "pure observation".
In 1959 he started with the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR). As a director's assistant at NWDR he learned the film trade in the production of commercials for the ARD television lottery .
From 1960 to 1964 he worked as an implementer in which by Ruediger Proske developed political TV magazine Panorama . There he produced the following articles, among others:
- 1961: The strange death of Mr Hammarskjöld , 45 min.
- 1962: Death came as ordered, 45 min.
- 1964: CDU party congress, 5 min.
- 1964: CSU state assembly, 5 min.
- 1964: SPD party congress, 5 min.
- 1964: party congress 64, 18 min. (Was withdrawn by NDR and only broadcast in abbreviated form 17 years later)
- 1964: Between three and seven in the morning, 9 min.
After a change in personnel within the Panorama editorial team in 1964 (Proske left), Wildenhahn moved to the television drama department of the NDR, for which he only made documentaries. In addition, he worked from 1968 to 1972 as a directing lecturer at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). In 1972 his book On Synthetic and Documentary Film was published , an “influential theoretical reflection on the method and technology of documentary film”. The second part of a 1970/71 documentary about the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel was not broadcast and was destroyed at the publisher's objection. A four-part documentary film about the closure of a VW plant in Emden ( Emden goes to USA , 1975/76), which he expanded with landscape shots of northern Germany and portraits of its residents, met with negative reactions from the regional press. The first part was awarded gold with the Adolf Grimme Prize in 1978 .
From 1981 until his retirement he was an editor in the education program of what was then N3 (today: NDR television) and was a member of the program commission of the Duisburg Film Week on several occasions . In 1993 he initiated the NDR series "The Documentary View". In 1998 he became a founding member of the film workshop "Documentary Work" eV
2010 appeared in the DVD series The great documentarists the box Documentarist on television with 14 of his films on 5 DVDs. Wildenhahn made the selection himself, the edition was overseen by Hans-Michael Bock ( CineGraph ) as well as Christa Donner and Peter Paul Kubitz ( Deutsche Kinemathek ).
In 2015, on his 85th birthday, he published his last book Abendbier im flat area , which, edited by Eva Orbanz, brought together selected lyrical texts.
Wildenhahn last lived in Hamburg, where he died in August 2018 at the age of 88. For many years he also lived in Ostend , where his mother had worked as a nurse during the First World War and had become a pacifist .
Filmography
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Retrospectives
- 1989: Academy of the Arts (Berlin) / West
- 1989: TV station 3sat
- 1990: International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film
- 1990: TV station Eins Plus
- 2011: DOK.fest Munich
Awards
- 1978: Adolf Grimme Prize with gold for the first part of the documentary Emden goes to the USA (together with Gisela Tuchtenhagen )
- 1993: Member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts
- 2011: Prize for the complete work at the Mille Occhi Filmfest 2011 Trieste
Fonts
- Klaus Wildenhahn: About synthetic and documentary film. 12 reading hours was published in 1973 by the DFFB, Berlin as typescript. Edited by Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Municipal cinema , Frankfurt am Main 1975, 231 pp.
- A journey into legend and back. (Journey to a legend and back. The British realistic film.) Ed. By Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek . Essays by Klaus Wildenhahn. Spiess, Berlin 1977, 213 pp., Ill., Filmography and bibliography pp. 165–210, ISBN 3-920889-51-7 .
- Parts - About my documentary work in a public service broadcaster in 'TV Documentarism' 1992, Volume 1 of the series GLOSE UP, House of Documentary Film
- Mimesis and the effect of the Schnulze - film theory No. 2. Poems 1997 Kellner Verlag Hamburg
- Klaus Wildenhahn: The author's body. Film theory No. 3. Ed. By René Schöttler. Materialverlag, Hamburg 2005, 176 pp., Ill., ISBN 3-938158-21-2 .
- Evening beer in a flat area - film theory No. 4. Edited and introduced by Eva Orbanz. Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95732-076-6 .
literature
- Christian Hißnauer: Hamburg School - Klaus Wildenhahn - Eberhard Fechner. Second generation television documentarism. In: Becker, Andreas R. et al. (Ed.): Media - Discourses - Interpretations. Documentation of the 20th Film and Television Studies Colloquium. Marburg: Schüren-Verlag 2007, pp. 118–126.
- Christian Hißnauer, Bernd Schmidt: milestones of television documentarism: the Hamburg schools . UVK, Konstanz 2013, ISBN 978-3-86764-387-0 .
- Nicolaus Schröder (editor): Klaus Wildenhahn, documentarist. Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin 2001, 157 pp., Ill., Issue 92.
- Egon Netenjakob : The love of television and a portrait of the permanent film director Klaus Wildenhahn . 1st edition. Volker Spiess, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88435-089-7 (Publication by the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation, Red .: Hans Helmut Prinzler. Detailed filmography, pp. 194–234).
Quote
“According to Wildenhahn, the criterion for the truth and dignity of the documentary is that the end of the film is particularly close to what is filmed. It is not primarily defined aesthetically, but morally and politically. The virtue of the documentary filmmaker is shown in the careful, tense and patient observation of social processes and people who are usually not represented in the political and cultural public.
The virtues of the documentary craft are therefore: long-term observation, films that are as inconspicuous as possible, adapting to the 'narrative' of the protagonist, long camera positions, selfless montage (as is) produced by the raw material itself, elimination or minimization of the comment level, not synthetic, between viewer and 'Narrator' pushing 'synthetic' film elements.
The consistently altruistic documentary wildenhahn's character is the opposite of formalism: the documentary content seeks out and determines its form. "
documentary
- Klaus Wildenhahn. Direct! Public and Private , documentary with and about Klaus Wildenhahn, Germany, 2010, 84 min., Script and direction: Quinka F. Stoehr, camera: Volker Tittel, Stefan Grandinetti, Quinka Stoehr, editing: Margot Neubert Maric; Dramaturgical advice: Rainer Komers; Editors: Katya Mader (ZDF / 3sat), Bernd Michael Fincke (NDR); Production: StoehrMedien and NDR, ZDF / 3sat.
- Ostend, 3 p.m. - The documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn. TV documentary, Germany, 2010, 59 min., Script and director: Quinka F. Stoehr, production: NDR , 3sat , first broadcast: June 15, 2010, summary by 3sat
Web links
- Klaus Wildenhahn in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Retrospective by and with Wildenhahn. (pdf, 716 kB) (No longer available online.) Filmclub Münster , 2004 formerly in the original ( html ). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- Dossier on Klaus Wildenhahn at filmportal.de
- Raimund Hoghe : Observer, not voyeur. In: The time . March 12, 1993 .
- The author's body - cinema lectures by and with Klaus Wildenhahn. In: filmsite.de. Archived from the original on October 21, 2007 (film biography, awards, festival participations and retrospectives, films, literature).
- Christian Iseli: Filmwerkstatt Members: Klaus Wildenhahn. In: ifilm.ch. March 30, 2006 .
- Literature by and about Klaus Wildenhahn in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.taz.de/!5527251/
- ↑ https://www.presseportal.de/pm/6561/4032317
- ↑ Members introduce. Klaus Wildenhahn: "The author's body" , Academy of the Arts , 2008
- ↑ The documentary filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn is interested in everyday life, "the state after the sensation": observer, not voyeur . In: The time . No. 11/1993 ( online ).
- ↑ a b The documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn , 3sat, June 15, 2010
- ↑ Flyer, Klaus Wildenhain - Documentations 1964 - 1991, Das mobile Kino, Hamburg 2013
- ↑ a b c Klaus Wildenhahn , filmportal.de
- ↑ taz Feb. 24, 2011
- ↑ grimme-institut.de ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Klaus Wildenhahn turns 85. A birthday greeting | epd film. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .
- ↑ Prize Winner 1978. (No longer available online.) Grimme-institut.de, archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; accessed on May 29, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ imilleocchi 2011 (Italian)
- ↑ (Ed. Hans-Michael Bock ) filmmakersweb.de, 2007 ( Memento from October 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wildenhahn, Klaus |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German documentary filmmaker, film producer, director and author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bonn |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 9, 2018 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |