Ludwig Czerny

Ludwig Czerny (born June 24, 1887 in Belgrade , † September 10, 1941 in Berlin ) was a German actor , film director and film producer and is considered the inventor of the silent film operetta (produced using his own method).

Life

Czerny grew up in Vienna , where he attended elementary school, community school and secondary school. Shortly after the turn of the century, he took acting lessons from court actor Hermann Romany at the Vienna Theater School. Czerny began his artistic career at the Theater an der Wien , his first permanent engagement took him to the Innsbruck City Theater in 1906 . In the following year he moved to Hamburg's Carl-Schulze-Theater as a choir singer . In 1910 Czerny went on an opera and operetta tour to South America with an ensemble, where he also directed. In the following year he was appointed director (under the direction of Felix Basch ) to the Vienna Operetta Ensemble. Czerny already felt connected to music theater - an interest that years later would determine his cinematic work.

Arrived in Berlin, Ludwig Czerny made contact with the film industry at the beginning of the First World War . He founded his first own production company, Rahame Film , which made detective films in 1915/16 (among others for the Anheim council). In the late phase of the war, Czerny concentrated more and more on working as a film director. In 1919 he founded the production company Noto-Film , with which he produced several silent film operettas in the years to come - including The Minuet , The Kiss Ban , Miss Venus (screen debut of the future star Willy Fritsch ), The blonde Geisha and The Girl of Pontecuculi - under his own direction .

According to a mode he helped to develop (the so-called Czerny-Springefeld method ), a sheet of music was copied into the film negative, which was to serve as a template for the Kapellmeister and his orchestra in the cinema. During the filmic music passages, the conductor was able to conduct the melody from the music tape running at the bottom of the picture; Singers in the hall tried to perform their arias on the screen in sync with the movements of the lips of the actors. Despite the considerable effort, these films turned out to be technically not fully developed and, moreover, to be quite unsuccessful. After the audience and critics flop Das Mädel von Pontecuculi - at the beginning of 1925, film critic Robert Volz described the work, which premiered in November 1924, as a "freak of this film operetta" - the pioneer of this film genre withdrew completely from the directing business. After the singing film Gretchen Schubert, shot in 1925, failed in every respect, Noto-Film completely stopped its production.

With the beginning of the sound film era, Czerny returned to film and tried, again without any real fortune, with Czerny-Produktion GmbH as a film producer. He concentrated on documentaries about (northern German) country and people. After he had not succeeded in producing two feature films, the harmless boy story Die Bande vom Hoheneck and Peter, Paul and Nanette , he stopped production.

Ludwig Czerny died in an air raid while trying to help a woman carry her stroller down to the air raid shelter.

Czerny was married to actress Ada Svedin , who starred in many Noto productions.

Films (as a director)

• 1915: The confession of a convict (production only)
• 1915: kidnapped (production only)
• 1916: The Golden Match (production only)
• 1916: Sondi's little one
• 1916: Lilli's first love
• 1916: Lotte's first love
• 1917: The golden bridge
• 1919: Alfred's Techtelmechtel
• 1919: The luck smith
• 1919: The minuet (also production)
• 1920: The ban on kissing (also script collaboration and production)
• 1921: Miss Venus (also screenwriting and production)
• 1922: Beyond the stream (also production)
• 1922: The blonde geisha (also script collaboration and co-production)
• 1924: The girl from Pontecuculi (also production)
• 1925: Gretchen Schubert (only production)
• 1931: Buch und Mensch (short film documentation, production only)
• 1932: Im Teufelsmoor (short film documentation, production only)
• 1932: Heidehochzeit (short film documentation, production only)
• 1933: A city calls the world (short film documentary, production only)
• 1933: A Happy Morning (short film documentary, production only)
• 1934: Die Gang vom Hoheneck (production only)
• 1935: Peter, Paul and Nanette (production only)

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 83.

Web links

• Ludwig Czerny in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Ludwig Czerny in the catalog of the German National Library