Siegfried Kühn (director)

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Siegfried Kühn (born March 14, 1935 in Breslau ) is a German director and screenwriter .

Life

Kühn was born in Breslau. He spent his childhood with his grandmother Anna Seipold, to whom he later erected a monument in his film Childhood , on a farm in Ölschen in Silesia . From 1947 Kühn lived with his mother and stepfather in the western sector of Berlin, but then moved to Eisleben in the GDR in 1950 . Here he started working in the mining industry after leaving school.

In 1955 and 1956, Kühn first worked as a mining engineer. In preparation for a mission in North Korea , he switched to mining foreign trade in Berlin . This plan ultimately failed because of the western kinship. When he had made up his mind to apply for admission to the film school, he bridged the waiting time as an editor at the Berlin publishing house Technik for the trade journal Neue Hütte .

From 1958 he began studying film directing. He first studied for a year at the German Academy for Film Art in Potsdam- Babelsberg and then went to the Moscow Institute for Cinematography , where he learned from Sergei Gerasimow . During his time in Moscow, Kühn directed Bertolt Brecht's The Stopping Rise of Arturo Ui at the Theater of Film Actors. A planned filming of the drama in the Lenfilm studio was prevented by the intervention of the Brecht widow Helene Weigel . In Moscow he shot his first feature film Oni ne proidut (You will not come back). From 1965 to 1966 Kühn worked as a director at the Satire Theater in Moscow, where he staged Rolf Schneider's The Trial of Richard Waverly .

When he returned to the GDR, he initially devoted himself to theater work and worked for a while as an assistant to Benno Besson at the Deutsches Theater. With the documentary The Red Poster , he again drew attention to himself as a film director in 1967. The controversial film did not come into distribution at the instigation of the Akademie der Künste.

He then worked as a feature film director at DEFA . He was also the author or co-writer of the script for most of his films. As the first DEFA feature film, Kühn staged Im Spannfeld in 1969 , a contemporary and commissioned film that deals with the scientific and technical revolution. In 1970, his film Zeit der Störche followed , which, based on a story by Herbert Otto, describes the love affair between a teacher and an oil drilling worker. Winfried Glatzeder had his first leading role in this film .

The 1973 film The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow is considered one of Kühn's most important works . It is about a gatekeeper portrayed by Fritz Marquardt , whose post is no longer needed after the modernization of the route and who smuggles himself into a course instead of his son. The film was rejected by the GDR leadership. It was instructed that the film may only be shown in small cinemas without an official premiere and that it be removed from the program after four days. At the time, however, Kühn's film Elective Affinities , an adaptation of the novel Die Wahlverwandationen von Goethe , received critical praise . In addition to the psychological and scientific model situation of the original, the film also emphasizes the social relationship of the double partner relationship.

Based on his own script, the contemporary film Don Juan, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 78 1980 the psychogram of an uncomfortable opera director. In 1981, the film black and white and color was supposed to be made, which dealt with the conflict between a photographer and the need for embellished reporting during the construction of the Greifswald nuclear power plant . After shooting started, work on the film had to be stopped for political reasons.

In 1984 he filmed the novel Romeo and Juliet in the village of Gottfried Keller . His next film The Dream of the Elk is based on a novel by Herbert Otto. Kühn dealt with his experiences in his grandmother's house during the war in 1986 in the comedy Childhood , where Platow actor Fritz Marquardt played a pig tamer in a traveling circus.

The actress , a film about an Aryan woman who gave up her career during the National Socialist era and switched to the Jewish theater out of love , became an international success . The leading actress Corinna Harfouch received the Grand Prix for best actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival . After this second high point in his career, Kühn got into the turmoil of the turnaround with his long-term project of filming Karl Mickel's anti-Stalinist material Volk Decision : The shooting was stopped in 1989.

Kühn then made the film Today Only The Others Die (1991) about a woman suffering from cancer with Katrin Sass in the leading role. His last film was Die Lügnerin (1992), the screenplay of which was written by Regine Kühn , with Katharina Thalbach in the lead role . Kühn then wrote scripts and literary texts.

From 1963 to 1980 Kühn was married to the screenwriter Regine Kühn and from 1991 to 2004 with the actress Katrin Sass. Since 2010 he has lived with his third wife Irma Grefte in the Groß Jehser manor near Calau . His written archive is in the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Filmography

As a director:

As a performer:

Book publications

Awards

literature

  • Siegfried Kühn . In: Ingrid Poss (Ed.): Trace of Films . CH Links, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-86153-401-0 , p. 263.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Siegfried Kühn Archive Inventory overview on the website of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.
personal data
SURNAME Bold, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw