Ralf Schenk

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Ralf Schenk (born March 27, 1956 in Arnstadt ) is a German journalist , film critic , film historian and author .

Live and act

Ralf Schenk grew up in Gehlberg, Thuringia, as the son of master hairdresser Claus Schenk (1933–2007) and his wife Jutta (born 1930). As a schoolboy he published his first film reviews in 1974 in the Suhl daily newspaper Freies Wort . From 1975 to 1979 he studied journalism at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig and was director of the youth film club in the Capitol cinema in Leipzig . In addition, he worked on the editorial staff of the ZAG-Mitteilungen magazine of the Central Working Group for Film Clubs and wrote mainly about Hungarian cinema and DEFA. From 1979 Ralf Schenk worked as an editor for the magazines Film und Fernsehen , Die Weltbühne and Wochenpost in Berlin and also wrote for Filmspiegel and Das Magazin . He also wrote film reviews for the popular film and theater program Atelier und Bühne of Berliner Rundfunk . After 1990 he was u. a. Employee of the Filmmuseum Potsdam and editor and publisher of books on the history of film, especially on the history of DEFA . He was co-editor of six DEFA Foundation yearbooks (2000–2005). He has also produced around a dozen TV documentaries on German and international film history for ORB and MDR .

As part of his work for the archive of the Filmmuseum Potsdam , he interviewed numerous former DEFA filmmakers about their lives and professional experiences. The interviews, including with the directors Heiner Carow , Joachim Hasler , Günter Reisch , Otto Meyer , Franz Barrenstein , Siegfried Hartmann and Frank Vogel , the actors Helga Göring , Wilhelm Koch-Hooge and Käthe Braun as well as the dramaturge and studio director Walter Janka , are located as audio files in the archive of the film museum.

Ralf Schenk reconstructed the forbidden DEFA films Die Schönste (1957/59) and Fräulein Schmetterling (1966) for the DEFA Foundation and was involved in the reconstruction of the forbidden films Sommerwege (1960) and Hands up or I shoot (1966). For the archive of the DEFA Foundation he filmed several hours of eyewitness talks with former DEFA directors, actors, screenwriters and dramaturges, including the two co-founders of DEFA Kurt Maetzig and Karl Hans Bergmann , Egon Günther , Karl Gass , Walter Heynowski , Wolfgang Kohlhaase , Günther Rücker , Helmut Dziuba , Siegfried Kühn , Klaus Wischnewski , Joachim Mückenberger , Angelica Domröse , Gojko Mitić , Ernst-Georg Schwill , Herbert Ballmann , Peter Kahane , Karlheinz Mund , Eduard Schreiber , Gerd Gericke , Konrad Weiß , Otto Sacher, Kurt Weiler, Lutz Dammbeck and Thomas Heise , the film critic Fred Gehler and the last film minister of the GDR Horst Pehnert .

Ralf Schenk is a permanent freelance writer for the Berliner Zeitung , in which he published the weekly cinema column Das fgende Auge between September 1999 and January 2015 . He regularly works on the film-dienst website and on the CineGraph - lexicon for German-language films . He contributed numerous texts on DEFA history to the International Lexicon of Children and Youth Films . From 2012–2015 he wrote the monthly film column for the magazine “Theater der Zeit”. From 2014 to 2020 he was a member of the film advisory board at the Goethe-Institut.

From 2004 to 2019 he was a member of the selection committee for the feature film competition of the Berlin International Film Festival . From 2004 to 2006 he was also a member of the selection committee of the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival. In addition to the DEFA history, his special focus is on Eastern European cinema in the past and present. He reports regularly from the Eastern European film festivals in Cottbus and Wiesbaden as well as from national festivals in Poland and Austria. He was a jury member at film festivals a. a. in Leipzig, Schwerin, Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main, Istanbul, Bratislava and Graz and held lectures and seminars on German film history in Austria, Switzerland, the USA, Canada, Argentina, Japan, Taiwan and other countries. At the Cinema ritrovata festival in Bologna in 2019 he presented the restored and digitized DEFA film Königskinder (1962, D: Frank Beyer) and in 2020 several films by director Konrad Wolf .

On November 4, 2011, Schenk was awarded an honorary doctorate. On March 6, 2020, he received the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts to promote German film heritage.

From June 1, 2012 to June 30, 2020 Ralf Schenk was a member of the DEFA Foundation in Berlin. Even in retirement he works as a freelance film journalist and historian.

For his book publication Die Trick-Fabrik. DEFA animation films 1955–1990 he and his co-editor Sabine Scholze received the Norman McLaren / Evelyn Lambard Prize of the National Film Board of Canada. The Studio H&S DVD box published by him . Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann were honored with the Willy Haas Prize for the most important historical film DVD of 2014 at the Hamburg CineFest festival . The DVD Volker Koepp: Wittstock Films and the Book You. DEFA directors and their films were nominated for the Willy Haas Prize in 2015 and 2019 respectively.

Works

  • Fascination with film. Conversations with Richard Groschopp . DEFA company academy, 1987.
  • with Helga Hartmann (Ed.): Mitten ins Herz. 66 love films. Henschel Verlag Berlin 1992.
  • (Red.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992. With contributions by Christiane Mückenberger u. a. Ed .: Filmmuseum Potsdam. Henschelverlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-89487-175-X .
  • Director: Frank Beyer . edition hentrich, Berlin 1995.
  • In front of the camera. 50 actors from Babelsberg . Henschelverlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89487-235-7 .
  • with Günter Jordan (Red.): black and white and color. DEFA documentaries 1946–1992. Jovis Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-931321-51-7 .
  • Manfred Krug: The big movies . Parthas Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-932529-01-4 .
  • Images of women in GDR media . Federal Agency for Civic Education, 1997.
  • with Erika Richter, Claus Löser (Red.): by the way: film. The DEFA Foundation yearbook. 2000–2005 (six volumes). Verlag Das Neue Berlin (2000, 2001), Bertz + Fischer Verlag, Berlin (2002–2005)
  • with Sabine Scholze (Ed.): Die Trick-Fabrik. DEFA animation films 1955–1990. Bertz and Fischer Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-929470-27-6 .
  • with Ingeborg Pietzsch (Ed.): Beat him to death, the dog ... Theater and film critics remember. Parthas Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936324-07-7 .
  • A little history of DEFA. Data, documents, memories. Compiled and commented by Ralf Schenk. Ed .: DEFA Foundation Berlin. DEFA Foundation, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-00-018775-8 .
  • Images of a divided world. 50 years of the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival . Bertz + Fischer Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86505-181-3 .
  • as editor: Volker Baer : Words - Against Words. Texts on the film 1959–2007. Schüren, Marburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89472-667-6 .
  • as editor: Cui bono, Fred Gehler? Texts and reviews from five decades . DEFA Foundation, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-037266-7 .
  • as ed. (with Andreas Kötzing): Verbotene Utopie. The SED, the DEFA and the 11th plenary session . Bertz + Fischer Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86505-406-7 .
  • as editor (with Cornelia Klauß): You. DEFA directors and their films . Bertz + Fischer Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-86505-415-9 .

TV documentaries

  • DEFA - between utopia and reality. Part 2: Sun Seeker (1994, screenplay)
  • DEFA - between utopia and reality. Part 3: Troublemakers (1994, screenplay)
  • Slatan Dudow. The Man Who Loved Women (1994, TV, screenplay)
  • Falk Harnack. From the Upright Walk (1994, screenplay)
  • Martin Hellberg. The Game - His Life (1995, screenplay)
  • Artur Pohl - an unknown classic. (1994, TV, screenplay)
  • There'll be a few films left. (1996, screenplay)
  • Trace of the times - the director Frank Beyer. (1997, TV, screenplay & co-director)
  • Film fates. DEFA films: Destroyed, but not forgotten (1997, TV, screenplay & co-director)
  • The short dream of freedom. Cinema in Eastern Europe 1945–1949 (1997, TV, screenplay)
  • Kurt Maetzig, director (1999, TV, screenplay and director)

Film history booklets

  • Casino affair (DEFA film jewels 1957 edition 2016)
  • Semmelweis - Savior of Mothers (DEFA 1950, edition filmjuwelen 2017)
  • Robert Mayer, the doctor from Heilbronn (DEFA 1955, edition filmjuwelen 2017)
  • The girl Christine (DEFA 1949, edition filmjuwelen 2018)
  • The boat of happy people (DEFA 1950, edition filmjuwelen 2018)
  • Who loves his wife ... (DEFA 1954, edition filmjuwelen 2018)
  • The adventures of Till Ulenspiegel (DEFA / France 1957, edition filmjuwelen 2018)
  • Cloudy water (DEFA / France 1960, edition filmjuwelen 2018)
  • Career in Paris (DEFA 1952, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • Star with strange feathers (DEFA 1955, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • Old boat and young love (DEFA 1957, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • My wife makes music (DEFA 1958, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • The wretched (DEFA / France / Italy 1958, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • Wiesenstrasse No. 10 (France / Italy 1959, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • The Naked Island (Japan 1960, edition film jewels 2019)
  • The best years (DEFA 1965, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • The process is postponed (DEFA 1958, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • The green stone variant (WDR / DEFA 1983, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • Zanzibar or the last reason (WDR / DEFA 1987, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • In love and with a criminal record (DEFA 1963, edition filmjuwelen 2019)
  • Janosik, the hero of the mountains (CSSR 1962, edition filmjuwelen 2020)
  • Dr. med. Summer II (DEFA 1969, edition filmjuwelen 2020)
  • The fifteen-year-old captain (USSR 1945, edition filmjuwelen 2020)
  • Ships in a storm / sails storm bastions (USSR 1953, edition filmjuwelen 2020)
  • Witches (DEFA 1954, edition filmjuwelen 2020)
  • Maibowle / New Year's Eve punch (DEFA 1959/60, edition filmjuwelen 2020)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DEFA Sternstunden forum. December 6, 2013, archived from the original on February 27, 2015 ; accessed on February 27, 2015 . , according to information provided there, quoted from "The great lexicon of DEFA feature films", "The second life of the film city Babelsberg"
  2. ↑ cf. [The prize was awarded by Dieter Wiedemann, President of the HFF “Konrad Wolf” at the DEFA conference: “Borders and border crossing. DEFA's transnational film relations before and after the Wall "]
  3. ↑ Ralf Schenk has the title of Dr. hc, (see https://www.defa-stiftung.de/stiftung/ueber-die-defa-stiftung/stiftungsteam/ )
  4. ↑ DEFA Foundation press release: Ralf Schenk to be the new board member of the DEFA Foundation , accessed on May 29, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Schenk, Ralf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, film critic, film historian and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Arnstadt