Leonid Sacharowitsch Trauberg

Leonid Trauberg ( Russian Леонид Захарович Трауберг ; born January 4 ^{. Jul} / 17th January  1902 ^greg. In Odessa , Russian Empire ; † 14. November 1990 in Moscow ) was a Russian-Jewish director and screenwriter. Together with Grigori Kosinzew , he created a number of great masterpieces of Soviet cinema in the late 1920s, significantly influenced by the Russian avant-garde.

life and work

Leonid Trauberg was born as the son of a journalist in Odessa, but moved to Saint Petersburg with his family when he was eight . As a Jew , he was not allowed to attend a high school (and thus a possible degree), so he returned to Odessa. As a young man, it was here that he discovered his passion for the theater as well as for literature. After the October Revolution , he traveled again to Saint Petersburg, which had been called Petrograd since 1914, in order to be able to work artistically here without restriction. At that time there was a multitude of avant-garde theater styles that broke away from the tsarist Stanislawski theater and formed new, revolutionary currents. Konstantin Miklaschewski , who was then working in the theater of the Komische Oper, led Trauberg to his superior, who introduced him to the then 15-year-old Grigori Kosinzew and finally hired him as an actor.

As a duo, however, the two soon began to go their own way and take their own direction in art, eccentrism . In 1921 the two founded the “Factory of the Eccentric Actor” (FEKS) and experimented with their theater productions within the boundaries of the changing theater, which at the time led to a scandal. The group then switched to film and made their debut in December 1924 with the film Abenteuer der Oktjabrina , followed by Ijschki gegen Judenitsch (1925), Teufels Rad (1926), the expressionist film Der Mantel (1926) and Das neue Babylon (1929). In the further course of their film work, the film duo also became internationally known and advanced to the figurehead of Soviet cinema in the 1930s, mainly because of their Maxim trilogy .

Trauberg's collaboration with Kosinzew ended in the mid-1940s. He lost his post as director of Lenfilm at the end of the 1940s when he was denigrated as a “friend of capitalism” and from then on made a name for himself as an author and translator. As a film director he later directed three of his own films, which, however, received little attention.

His younger brother Ilja Sacharowitsch Trauberg was also a film director and died of a heart attack in Berlin in 1948.

literature

• Oksana Bulgakowa in Filmspiegel No. 3, 1987, p. 10 f.

Web links

Commons : Leonid Trauberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Leonid Trauberg in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Biography on peoples.ru (in Russian)
• Article at arte-tv.com (with photo)