Lotte Eisner

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Lotte Henriette Regina Eisner (born March 5, 1896 in Berlin ; died November 25, 1983 in Paris ) was a German - French film historian and film critic .

Life

The daughter of a Jewish businessman from Berlin studied art history, ancient history and archeology in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich and Rostock, where she received her doctorate on July 26, 1924 for a thesis on “The development of composition on Greek vase pictures”. Since 1927 she has been writing reviews and reports for Film-Kurier , the most renowned German film magazine at the time. She was one of the first film critics.

In 1933 she emigrated to France. In Paris she wrote for the German-language monthly magazine Die Critique von Hans Feld and the anti-fascist International Film Show . Together with Henri Langlois and Georges Franju , who wanted to found a Cinematheque Francaise, she collected documents on the history of film. After the German troops occupied France in 1940, she had to go into hiding, but she was tracked down and interned in the Gurs concentration camp in southern France.

From 1945 to 1975 she was chief curator of the Cinémathèque Française . Here she made a special contribution to building up the film museum, for which she gathered costumes, photos, scripts, equipment, cameras and much more from all over the world. The museum opened in June 1972 in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

In addition, she occasionally wrote articles in film magazines such as the Cahiers du cinéma and La Revue du Cinéma .

Works

Eisner is best known for her book "The Demonical Canvas", about the expressionist German silent film , especially Max Reinhardt . The book was published in 1952 - in a mutilated version - first in French, then in German in 1955.

Together with Heinz Friedrich , Lotte Eisner published the Fischer lexicon "Film Rundfunk Fernsehen" (Vol. 9) in 1958 and wrote the articles "Filmdialog und subtitles", "Filmkamera", "Filmmontage", "Filmschauspieler", "Musik im Film "as well as" Styles and genres of film ".

Your monograph on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , published in French in 1964 , took 15 years to produce a complete German edition (the 1967 edition by Velber Verlag has been greatly abridged).

Your book about Fritz Lang first appeared in 1976 in a poor and abbreviated English translation, in 1984 in an excellent French edition and has still not made it into a German edition, although the original version - also out of consideration for Fritz Lang - on Was written in German (Eisenschitz, in: Eisner 1988: 7).

Her autobiography , written with the help of Martje Grohmann , was published posthumously in 1984 by Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg, under the title “I once had a beautiful fatherland” (with a foreword by Werner Herzog), borrowed from Heinrich Heine .

A complete edition is planned for the future at the Belleville Verlag in Munich, which will also include film reviews and smaller publications.

Lotte Eisner and the German film critic

In addition to Siegfried Kracauer's work, Lotte Eisner's writings became an important starting point for a new beginning in high-quality film criticism in the 1950s, which led to the founding of the magazine Filmkritik . Eisner also stayed in personal contact with the younger film critics and traveled to the film club meetings in the French occupation zone and to Münster, where the first permanent film seminar was held at a German university. She brought film copies with her.

Lotte Eisner and the young German film

Eisner has been very committed to the directors of the new German film since the 1960s and was revered by them as a kind of spiritual mother.

Werner Herzog (1984): “ The Eisnerin, who was that for the new German film? We are a generation of orphans, there are no fathers, at best grandfathers, to whom we could refer, i.e. Murnau, Lang, Pabst , the generation of the 1920s . It is strange that the continuity in German film was so radically demolished by the barbarism of the Nazi era and the catastrophe of World War II that followed. The thread was over, actually before. The path led nowhere. There was a gap of a whole quarter of a century. In literature and other areas this was by no means so dramatically noticeable. That is why Lotte Eisner's concern for our fate, that is, that of the boys, built a bridge in a historical, a cultural-historical context. “(From: I once had a beautiful fatherland. Memoirs . Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1984)

Wim Wenders paid tribute to Lotte Eisner by dedicating his film Paris, Texas, which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival .

In 1979, Sohrab Shahid Saless made the documentary " Lotte H. Eisner's Long Vacation ", in which she reported in detail about her life.

Awards

  • In 1974 she was honored with the film band in gold for many years of outstanding work in German film
  • In 1982 she received the Helmut Käutner Prize
  • 1983 Award of the Legion of Honor by the French Minister of Education, Jack Lang.

bibliography

  • L'Écran démoniaque . Paris: Bonno, 1952, German The Demonic Canvas . Wiesbaden: THE new FILM, 1955, various new editions
  • Film, radio, television . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1958
  • Murnau: the classic of German film . Velber / Hanover: Friedrich-Verlag, 1967
  • Fritz Lang . Traduction de Bernard Eisenschitz. Paris: Flammarion, 1988
  • I once had a beautiful fatherland: memoirs , (written by Martje Grohmann, with a foreword by Werner Herzog). Heidelberg: Verlag Das Wunderhorn, 1984

literature

  • Louise Brooks : Letters to Lotte Eisner . In: Günter Krenn, Karin Moser (eds.): Louise Brooks. Rebel, icon, legend . Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria , 2006, pp. 237-252.
  • Jutta Dick, Marina Sassenberg (ed.): Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries . Lexicon to life and work, Reinbek 1993 ISBN 3-499-16344-6
  • Enno Patalas : The Holy Madonna of the Sleeping Car. Eisner, Kracauer and the Weimar Cinema , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 6, 2005, p. 35
  • Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 136-138
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 253
  • Eisner, Lotte. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 222-231.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the entry of Lotte Eisner's matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
  2. ↑ a b Hella Ehlers: Lotte H. Eisner (1896-1984): Pioneer of filmography. In: Gisela Boeck and Hans-Uwe Lammel: Women in Science , University of Rostock 2011, pp. 81–97 PDF online
personal data
SURNAME Eisner, Lotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eisner, Lotte Henriette; Eisner, Lotte H .; Escoffier (cover name during the German occupation)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-German film historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1983
Place of death Paris