Rudolph S. Joseph

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Rudolph S. Joseph (born April 17, 1904 in Frankfurt am Main ; † May 11, 1998 in Santa Barbara , California ) was a German-American film historian and film producer . From 1962 to 1973 he was the first director of the Munich Film Museum .

Life

Joseph was the second son of a Jewish lawyer from the affluent educated middle class was born. His older brother is Albrecht Joseph .

Rudolph S. Joseph left grammar school prematurely around 1919 and completed an apprenticeship at the Hugo Helbing art dealer . From 1925 he was employed in Berlin as a dramaturge and member of the board of the Heinz Saltenburg theater company. There, in 1925, Joseph organized the first performance of Carl Zuckmayer's play The Merry Vineyard in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm . From autumn 1927 to February 1930 Joseph was deputy director at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin. From the autumn of 1931 Joseph worked as head of stage and film sales at Drei Masken Verlag . On March 31, 1933 , after the so-called seizure of power by the National Socialists , he emigrated to Paris , where he had already prepared a film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst based on a script by Ilja Ehrenburg in 1932. Joseph worked for Pabst and Henry Koster in Paris until the summer and then went to London. There he became a dramaturge at Globe Films . After changing stays in Salzburg , Rome , London and Paris, he is said to have been temporarily back in Berlin at the beginning of 1936. In the same year he worked with his brother Albrecht on the film Ballerina by Gustav Machatý , which was shot in Italy. He was also involved in the film Castelli in aria by Augusto Genina . At the end of 1938 Joseph was employed as an assistant to Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Globe Films . In 1939 he moved to the USA , where he became Erwin O. Brettauer's assistant . Together with Brettauer and Seymour Nebenzahl , Joseph founded Angelus Pictures in 1942 to produce Hitler's Madman under the direction of Douglas Sirk . Summerstorm was created in 1943 , also directed by Douglas Sirk, with Joseph also serving as an associate producer . After failed projects, Joseph co-produced the film The First Legion by Douglas Sirk with Brettauer in 1950 .

From 1952 Joseph worked at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, where he built up a film department and made films. As a director, he made five films for television, four educational films on health issues and one film about the Navajo people . His film A Visit with Darius Milhaud , which premiered on July 21, 1955 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , received several awards.

In 1957 Joseph visited Europe again for the first time after moving to the USA and met old friends such as Günther Stapenhorst and GW Pabst. After further film productions, Joseph became film commissioner for the state capital of Munich in 1962 in order to prepare the establishment of a film museum . The Munich Film Museum opened on November 30, 1963 in the presence of Enrico Fulchignoni , head of the UNESCO film department, Henri Langlois , founder of the Cinémathèque française , and Lotte Eisner . The Film Museum began with a series of nine films by Douglas Sirk and the permanent exhibition How Walt Disney Drawings Are Made . Further highlights of his work in Munich were a Georg Wilhelm Pabst exhibition and the Sophia Loren exhibition, which was opened by the actress herself in 1965. Booklets were published for the exhibitions and retrospective films were shown. There were programs with films by Jean Renoir , Josef von Sternberg , King Vidor etc. All films were shown in the original version, which became a tradition at the Munich Film Museum. Joseph also began to build up a film archive in 1965, since then as now there was no central film archive in the Federal Republic of Germany . On April 1st, Rudolph S. Joseph retired. His successor as director of the Munich Film Museum was Enno Patalas .

In the mid-1980s, Joseph settled permanently in Santa Barbara, where he died in 1998. Before that, in 1994 he saw the publication of his memoirs under the title From great theater times. Memories of the theater of the twenties .

plant

  • From the great days of theater: memories of the theater of the twenties. Alano, Aachen 1994, ISBN 3-89399-206-5 .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Joseph, Rudolph S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American film historian and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1998
Place of death Santa Barbara , California , USA