Lotte H. Eisner

Lotte Henriette Eisner ( born March 5, 1896 in Berlin, † November 25, 1983 in Paris) was a German - French film historian and film critic.

Life

The daughter of a Jewish Berlin merchant, studied art history, Ancient History and Archaeology in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich and Rostock. Since 1927, she wrote reviews and features for the Film-Kurier, the then most renowned German film magazine. It was thus one of the first film critics.

In 1933 she emigrated to France. After German troops occupied France in 1940, she had to hide, but was tracked down and interned in a concentration camp in southern France Gur.

From 1945 to 1975 she was chief curator of the Cinémathèque Française. Here she made her particularly to the structure of the film museum deserves for which they costumes, photos, screenplays items of equipment, cameras and more amassed throughout the world. The museum was opened in June 1972 in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot.

She also occasionally wrote articles in film magazines like Cahiers du cinéma and La Revue du Cinéma.

Works

Eisner is best known for her book " The Haunted Screen " on the German Expressionist silent film, especially Max Reinhardt. The book was published in 1952 - in a mutilated version - first in French, then in German in 1955.

Your published in 1964 in French monograph on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau needed at least 15 years to a complete German edition ( the edition of 1967 Velber publisher is heavily cut ).

Her book on Fritz Lang first appeared in 1976 in a paltry and abbreviated English translation in 1984 in an exquisite French edition and still has not been brought there to a German edition, even though the original version - also out of consideration for Fritz Lang - on was written German ( Eisenschitz, in: Eisner 1988: 7).

Posthumously published in 1984 by Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg, its written with the help of Martje Grohmann autobiography under the title borrowed at Heinrich Heine "I was once a beautiful fatherland " (with a foreword by Werner Herzog).

For the future, a complete edition is planned in Belleville Verlag in Munich, which will also include movie reviews and smaller fonts.

Lotte Eisner and the German Film Critics

Siegfried Kracauer addition to the work of Lotte Eisner's writings became an important point of reference for a new start demanding film criticism in the 50s, which led to the founding of the magazine film critics were. Eisner also held personal contact with the younger film critics and traveled to the film club meeting in the French occupation zone and to Münster, where there was the first permanent film seminar at a German university. They brought with film prints.

Lotte Eisner and the young German film

Eisner sat down since the 60s very much for the directors of the New German Cinema, and was worshiped by these spiritual as a kind mother.

Werner Herzog ( 1984): " The Eisnerin, who was that for the new German film? We are a generation of orphans, there are no fathers, grandfathers, at best, to which we were able to move us, so Murnau, Lang, Pabst, the generation of the '20s. It is indeed strange that the continuity in the German film so radical demolition by the barbarity of the Nazi era and the subsequent catastrophe of the Second World War. The thread was over, actually before that. The road led to nowhere. Since there lay a gulf of a whole quarter of a century. In literature and in other areas it was not as dramatically noticeable. That is why we have Lotte Eisner's participation in our fate, so struck the boy, a bridge in a historical, a cultural and historical context at that. " (From: " I was once a beautiful fatherland memoir " Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1984.. )

Wim Wenders tribute to Lotte Eisner through the dedication of his winning at the International Film Festival of Cannes 1984 Palme d'Or film Paris, Texas.

Sohrab Shahid Saless turned the 1979 documentary " The long vacation of Lotte H. Eisner ," in which she tells in detail about their lives.

Awards

Bibliography

Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. Traduction de Bernard Eisenschitz. Paris: Flammarion, 1988.