Cinefest: Hamburg, November 13-21, 2004 (review)

Figure 1.

Hamburg, Germany, in November: A low, grey sky, bone-chilling cold, strong winds sweeping in from the North Sea—a perfect time to convene at the Metropolis Theater, a bright and welcoming spot on the Gänsemarkt. Metropolis, Hamburg's venerable art-house cinema/Cinémathèque, was built in the 1950s. It became one of the first "municipal cinemas," joining a movement to make film and film education of the public part of the cultural budgets of cities and other municipalities, on par with the opera (which is next door), theaters, and concert halls. Over the years, its director, Heiner Ross, and his team have made the cinema into one of Hamburg's leading cultural institutions.

In 1988, a dozen film historians, film archivists, and cineastes from Eastern and Western Europe met at the Metropolis to commemorate the hundredth birthday of Hamburg's actor and director Reinhold Schünzel and to take part in the First International History Conference on German Language Films, organized by CineGraph, publisher of a definitive lexicon on German film. In the ensuing annual conferences, lost and forgotten films, directors, actors, and actresses from the 1920s and 1930s were rediscovered. Subjects, which revealed new aspects of German film history, included directors Joe May and Richard Oswald, producer Seymour Nebenzahl, Russian émigrés in Berlin, and German-British coproductions in the early sound period, all revealing new aspects of German film history. The conferences have been documented in many excellent publications. In 1991, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, the German Federal Film Archive, became co-organizer of the event.

To make the public more aware of Germany's rich heritage in film, to give film archivists a public forum for showing their extensive holdings, and to highlight the work of film historians, the team at CineGraph and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv came up with the idea to launch the first Cinefest: the International Film Festival of German Film Heritage, which ran from November 13–21, 2004, complementing this year's seventeenth Film History Conference in Hamburg. Cinefest then moved to Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich. Two prizes will be given annually at the festival: the Reinhold Schünzel Prize for life achievement in preserving, furthering, and disseminating German film; and the Willi Haas Prize, named after the film critic and scriptwriter (of G. W. Pabst's Joyless Street), for an outstanding international publication on German-language films.

Hans-Michael Bock, editor-in-chief of CineGraph, invited me as a guest of honor to Cinefest. The program of the festival and its accompanying Film History Conference looked promising: "Jewish Humor in Early German Film and What Happened to Humor in the years 1933 to 1945." According to Mr. Bock, this year's films focused on a different side of the Weimar period: comedies. "This genre is often neglected by film historians as not 'serious' enough," he said.

The scope of the films reaches from the well-known Victor and Victoria (1933) to unknown gems like Famlientag im Hause Prellstein (Family Reunion at the Prellsteins', 1927). A parade of German film stars came to life: Ernst Lubitsch (in front and behind the camera), Curt Bois, Sig Arno, Anny Ondra, Renate Müller, Lilian Harvey, Ossi Oswalda, Karl Valentin, Willy Fritsch, Adele Sandrock, and many others. At the center of the festival was the work of Reinhold Schünzel, both as an actor and director.

A personal note: I was pleasantly surprised at opening night to find that I was to be awarded the first Reinhold Schünzel Prize. Dr. Rainer Rother, curator of the German History Museum in Berlin, gave the presentation speech and handed me a beautiful framed document with an original animation cel by Hamburg filmmaker Franz Wintzensen. I then had to give an acceptance speech (which I did, totally off the cuff!).

The Willy Haas Prize 2004 went posthumously to William Moritz for Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger. A Special Mentioning went to Icestorm Entertainment for their efforts to bring out on DVD rare films from...