Rudolf Walter (actor)

Rudolf Walter (born April 16, 1885 in Leitmeritz , Austria-Hungary , † February 1, 1950 near Florence ) was an Austrian actor and film producer .

Live and act

Walter initially studied painting at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, where from 1907 he also regularly took part in the exhibitions of the Association of German Visual Artists in Bohemia . After his celebrated debut as a grotesque comedian at the association's carnival party in March 1907, which was organized together with the Concordia Writers ' Union, Walter applied to the local First International Artists' Cabaret Schöbel that same month and performed every evening in Prague with his own numbers in April. Cocl's Varieté , as he called his program, was a highlight of the Prague artist festivals in the two following years.

In the autumn of 1909 Walter moved with his wife to Reichenberg in Bohemia and in the summer of 1912 he stood in front of the camera for the first time for two short Cocl films during a short stay in Vienna. The production of these films was then continued in Reichenberg, where Walter had his own studio and was able to win actors from the city theater, but also lay people such as the then employee of the local Chamber of Commerce, Josef Holub, to work on his films. After February 1913, the Viennese cameraman Josef Zeitlinger by Sascha film had come as another employee to the rotary team was in the autumn of the same year with the peasant terror of the first film in which Walter and Holub together as a duo Cocl & Seff to see on the big screen were.

In order to be able to market their films themselves, Walter and Zeitlinger founded the Reichenberger Filmwerkstätte in March 1914 - but the outbreak of the First World War and the drafting of a large part of the workforce for military service put an end to the Walters film production for the time being. In 1915 he volunteered for the military and was a front cameraman and war correspondent in Italy and Eastern Galicia until the spring of 1917. After some of the films made by Walter were shown with great praise in Austrian cinemas, he began to develop his own scripts for war films parallel to his work at the front.

At the end of the war in Vienna, Walter turned back to fiction. After two comedies shot by the state film headquarters with him as director and leading actor were subsequently sold to a Reichenberg company - as artistically worthless - in April 1919, Walter founded his own film production company, Cocl's Film Compagnie , which was liquidated again at the end of 1920 GmbH .

At the same time, however, both he and Holub retained managerial positions in the Austrian film headquarters until mid-1920 , where they participated in a large number of educational and documentary films, as well as “propagandistic comedies” during this time. From 1921/22 onwards, Walter's newly founded film production company Cocl-Comedy regularly supplied the Viennese Sascha-Film with short Cocl & Seff comedies until 1924/25 , which they used as supplementary programs in their own feature film repertoire.

Currency turmoil led to a rapid decline in Austrian film production in the following years, and so Walter withdrew completely from the film industry after the end of the Cocl & Seff films, in order to work as a car dealer from 1925. In 1932 he finally moved to Florence, where he turned back to painting and died in 1950.

Filmography

1912: Cocl as an infant 1912: Uncle Cocl at the Gänsehäufel 1913: The peasant fright 1913: Cocl as host 1913: Cocl goes to the masked ball 1913: Cocl's honeymoon 1913: The aftermath of a great night 1913: love of fools 1913: How Cocl Asta became Pilsen 1914: Kokl as matchmaker 1914: Uncle Cocl and the classless 1917: In the golden pheasant 1917: The lover in need 1919: Cocl goes to a rendezvous 1919: Seff in need of love 1920: The brave little tailor

1920: Cocl and Seff as villa owners 1920: Cocl, Seff and the black hand 1920: Seff as a boy 1920: Cocl as a bridegroom 1920: Seff costs $ 24.50 1921: Seff as a detective 1921: Cocl and Seff in the Tingl-Tangl 1921: Seff in the beautification salon 1921: Cocl and Seff at the beach picnic 1922: The water sanatorium 1922: Cocl and Seff as vagabonds 1922: Seff as a reporter 1922: Cocl and Seff doing water sports 1923: Seff boxes his way into the marriage 1923: Seff as an athlete 1923: Seff under arrest

Unless otherwise stated, these are short films.

literature

• Walter Fritz : Cinema in Austria 1896–1930. The silent film. Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-215-04429-3 .
• Günter Krenn / Nikolaus Wostry (eds.): Cocl & Seff. The Austrian series comedians of the silent film era (incl. 2 DVDs). Verlag filmarchiv austria, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-902531-52-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anton Thaller: Rudolf Walter and the Cocl film ; In: Günter Krenn / Nikolaus Wostry (eds.): Cocl & Seff. The Austrian series comedians of the silent film era . Verlag filmarchiv austria, Vienna 2010, p. 63 ff
2. ^ Anton Thaller, Günter Krenn: Filmography Cocl & Seff ; In: Günter Krenn / Nikolaus Wostry (eds.): Cocl & Seff. The Austrian series comedians of the silent film era . Verlag filmarchiv austria, Vienna 2010, p. 177 ff

Web links

• Rudolf Walter in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  Attention: The data set "Rudolf Walter" of the Internet Movie Database contains not only the data of the Austrian actor described here but also that of a Czech actor of the same name!