Svend Noldan

Svend Noldan (born April 25, 1893 in Bad Nauheim as Heinrich August Noldan , † May 1, 1978 in Darmstadt ) was a German painter and documentary film director.

Life

Noldan grew up in Marburg , where he met Erwin Piscator and with whom he had a lifelong friendship. In 1911 he followed Piscator to Munich and began studying at the Royal Bavarian Academy of the Arts and was accepted into the painting class of Carl Johann Becker-Gundahl / Carl von Marr . He financed his studies by painting churches. In January 1915 he was called up for military service in the First World War. He served as an observer and draftsman in an infantry regiment in Flanders .

After the war ended, he moved to Berlin with two friends in January 1919 . Piscator, who in the meantime had risen to become a theater legend, commissioned him to design the stage. He came into contact with the Berlin Dada around George Grosz , John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde . Heartfield, who together Grosz had built up an animation department at Ufa , got him a job there. When Heartfield left the reactionary Ufa to protest against the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , Noldan worked on documentaries ( STDs and their consequences: the white plague and the Rhine in the past and present ) and increasingly specialized in animated maps. He created cartoon characters and worked as a specialist in special effects for Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, among others . In 1922 he founded his own studio. In the spring of 1925 he began work on the two-part compilation film The World War , in which he led the trick camera for Leo Lasko . He was the first German filmmaker to use animated maps (worldwide this was the French animation filmmaker Émile Cohl ), especially for war films. Noldan repeatedly works for Piscator's stage productions. For example, he created film projections for the performances Konjektiven and Des Kaisers Kuli . One of his most important works was his documentation What is the world? (together with the director Fritz Brunsch ). The ambitious project lasted five years and was premiered in 1934 under the patronage of the Reichsverband Deutsche Bühne . By 1937, Svend Noldan's studio had produced fourteen industrial and cultural films .

The documentary film The Big Ice was made in 1936 . Alfred Wegener's last trip (1936). In 1935 he worked as an animator for Leni Riefenstahl's party conference film Triumph des Willens and in 1939/40 for Fritz Hippler's propaganda films Campaign in Poland and The Eternal Jew . In this work he compared (and illustrated) the "spread of Jews" with the spread of rats. In 1940/41 he made the propaganda war documentary Sieg im Westen , which was shown for the first time on January 20, 1941 before Hitler.

After the end of World War II , Noldan returned to industrial film. His West Berlin-based company Atelier Noldan produced advertising films for BASF (a successor to IG Farben, for which he had already worked before World War II) about pest and weed control until 1968 .

A grandson of Svend Noldan is the filmmaker Oliver Lammert , who made two documentaries about his grandfather.

Filmography

1920: Cripple distress and cripple assistance
1922: The Rhine in the past and present
1923: A look into the depths of the soul
1923: Film is rhythm
1925: rhythm 21
1925: rhythm 23
1926: Maya the bee and her adventures
1926: Kolko, the story of a beet protest
1926: Scourge of Humanity
1926: false shame
1927: The World War. 2. The people's distress
1927: The World War. 1st chapter. The people's heroic walk
1928: Hein Priembacke's journeys and adventures
1928: Radio in the country
1928: the economy
1928: Priembacke and the sawfish
1929: The wonderful transformation of the Kubinke family
1929: The rainy Kirmeß
1929: On German country roads
1930: Land of milk and honey
1930: The emperor's coolies
1930: The city of tomorrow. A film about urban development
1931: The discovery of America anno domini 1492 - The Discovery of America
1932: Gas protection at the Auergesellschaft
1932: Under the sign of lions and pretzels
1933: The World War. A historical film
1933: blood and soil. New Kingdom basics
1933: Flanders after 15 years
1933: False thrift
1933: Through the Reichsschau der Deutschen Landwirtschaft for the exhibition of the Nitrogen Syndicate Berlin in 1933
1933: what is the world?
1934: beauty of work
1934: Captain Seemann's settlement house
1934: With the camera through German nitrogen works
1934: From hormone research
1934: Pictures from the Dutch fruit and vegetable growing
1934: Clivia
1935: Different towns - different rolls
1936: Clear ship to battle. A film from the German fleet
1936: Need, a source of strength
1936: The big ice cream. Alfred Wegener's last trip
1936: German handicrafts all over the world
1937: Germany
1937: From the bespoke tailor's workshop
1938: Pictures from Germany
1938: light
1939: Autogenous welding and soldering of light metals
1940: Autogenous welding of zinc
1940: German workplaces
1940: Campaign in Poland
1941: The victory in the west
1952: Lord of the weeds
1954: Small louse - really big
1956: Living agriculture
1956: wood and glue
1956: The Limburgerhof
1958: Fertilizing brings safe harvests
1958: Potato worries - potato blessings
1959: At the sources of life
1960: Grassland - land of the future
1960: Hard work - sweet wages
1960: Minerals - the source of life for plants
1962: Strong stalks - heavy ears
1963: Healthy vines - fruity wine
1963: Weed grasses - flagellation of agriculture
1965: A thousand miracles - a thousand plagues
1967: ten thousand to one
1967: Vegetable growing continues
1967: Potatoes - weed-free and healthy
1967: Beet growing without manual labor
1967: Steadfast until the harvest
1968: A look at agriculture
1969: Fruit and wine - weed-free

Documentaries about Svend Noldan

The legacy of images. Svend Noldan - A Search for Traces (1995; 48 min .; directors: Oliver Lammert, Madeleine Dewald)
From stag beetle to swastika (2001; director: Oliver Lammert)

Individual evidence

↑ cf. Giesen, Rolf / Storm, JP: Animation under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany 1933-1945, Jefferson (NC) / London: McFarland & Company, 2012, p. 144. ISBN 978-0-7864-4640- 7 .
↑ cf. Giesen, Rolf: Nazi Propaganda Films: A History and Filmography, Jefferson (NC) / London: McFarland & Company, 2003, p. 70. ISBN 978-0-7864-3870-9 .

literature

Hans-Jürgen Brandt: Investigations into the documentary film of the Third Reich using the example of three directors . Hippler, Noldan and Junghans. Frankfurt 1985 (dissertation).
Hans-Jürgen Brandt: Noldan, Svend. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 327 f. ( Digitized version ).
CineGraph. Lexicon for German-language films . Munich 1984ff.
Ralf Forster, Animated Maps. Re-enacted wars and symbolic land seizures in German documentaries 1921-1945, in: Peter Haslinger / Vadim Oswalt (eds.), Kampf der Karten. Propaganda and history cards as political instruments and identity texts. Marburg 2012. pp. 171-181.

Web links

Svend Noldan at filmportal.de
Svend Noldan in the Internet Movie Database (English)

personal data
SURNAME	Noldan, Svend
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Noldan, Heinrich August (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German painter and documentary film director
DATE OF BIRTH	April 25, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bad Nauheim
DATE OF DEATH	May 1, 1978
Place of death	Darmstadt

[1] . Giesen, Rolf / Storm, JP: Animation under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany 1933-1945, Jefferson (NC) / London: McFarland & Company, 2012, p. 144. ISBN 978-0-7864-4640- 7 .

[2] . Giesen, Rolf: Nazi Propaganda Films: A History and Filmography, Jefferson (NC) / London: McFarland & Company, 2003, p. 70. ISBN 978-0-7864-3870-9 .