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Visiting the Berlin Film Museum
Dec. 14th, 2003 11:14 amYesterday the working part of the Berlin trip was finished with lunch, and then I headed off to visit the film museum. I've been meaning to since each time I'm in Berlin, but somehow I never made it. It's truly gorgeous. The two main collections which provide the rarer exhibition pieces, Marlene Dietrich's legacy and Paul Kohner's, truly deserved such a flash light. (Paul Kohner is an important behind-the-scenes guy: as a young man, he made friends with Carl Laemmle, the founder and then-owner of Universal Pictures, when the later was visiting "the old country". Got to Hollywood, rose in the ranks to producer and de facto second in command, was in charge of the overseas business. When sound arrived, people tried for a while produce three versions of the same film at once (in three different languages) to get around the language barrier; thus, Kohner produced some of the last German-American coproductions before Universal pulled out. Returning to the states, Kohner had a fall-out with Carl Laemmle Junior, left Universal and ended up as an agent, fairly soon the agent whom most of the emigrés turned to. Hence, letters from everyone from Conrad Veidt (if you've watched Casablanca, he played Major Strasser) to Billy Wilder (no explanation necessary) in the exhibition. Getting an affidavit from an American citizen that included the promise of employment was vital for the refugees hoping to get out of Europe, and Kohner persuaded several of the major Hollywood bosses, like Harry Cohn (Columbia) or Louis B. Mayer (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) to hire dozens of people they didn't even know.
(Hollywood triva sidenote: Kohner's younger brother Frederick, a writer, had a daughter with a passion for surving. He wrote a novel about her, "Gidget", and several sequels. Which became a movie, which became a TV show.)
Anyway, back to the museum. Also on the subject of "It's a small world": One of the oddest exhibition pieces is a photo from 1928, showing three glamorous young women, up and rising in the film industry, at the Berlin Press Ball, with an arm around each other. The three were: Marlene Dietrich (pre-Sternberg, and hence more chubby), Anna May Wong ...and Leni Riefenstahl. Actually, Leni R. is presented in several stages throughout the exhibition: as a young woman in Arnold Fanck's mountain movies (mountain movies were a rage in the 20s), showing, in several outtakes, that physical fearlessness she kept throughout her life (no stunt woman for any of that climbing and skiing), the above mentioned photo, Leni Riefenstahl the director, shown in several outtakes shooting the Olympia movies (as with "Triumph of the Will", what she's shown doing is stretching the definition of "documentary" since she is seen ordering the athletes to repeat several movements for her if she couldn't get the right angle the first time - in "Triumph", the sound quality of several speeches was rather bad, so she had several of the speakers report their performance in the studio) - and then of course Leni R. looking adoring at Hitler when he hands out awards. A Time Magazine title story calling her "Hitler's Leni". Somewhere there's a quote from Billy Wilder observing that if had been better to stomach her if she weren't so talented but that even Cecil B. DeMille did not have the number of extras Hitler provided for her.
A counterpoint is the wall provided for the actors who were either Jewish or politically opposed and who didn't make it out of Germany in time, nor did find someone to protect them. Several of them ended up in concentration camps; you see their publicity stills from the 20s and early 30s, looking like your avarage period glamour shot, and then you read "...was transported to...", "dissappeared in Berlin when..." "died in...". One of the saddest and most well-known fates is the one of actor Joachim Gottschalk whose wife was Jewish. He refused to divorce her, Goebbels systematically destroyed his career in retaliation, and then came the day where his wife Meta was ordered to "evacuate" to the East anyway. They both committed suicide then, together with their little son. The most stomach-turning exhibition piece are sketches from a propaganda film that Kurt Geron (who later was killed in the concentration camp he was interned at the time) was ordered to do, about Theresienstadt, which was supposed to show how wonderful life in a concentration camp was. The film itself does not exist anymore, but the sketches show theatre, rooms with flowers, people resting on banks. I think we all have seen photos of the real thing. Decades past, and you still feel the horror, the rage, and the urge to do something, anything.
(Hollywood triva sidenote: Kohner's younger brother Frederick, a writer, had a daughter with a passion for surving. He wrote a novel about her, "Gidget", and several sequels. Which became a movie, which became a TV show.)
Anyway, back to the museum. Also on the subject of "It's a small world": One of the oddest exhibition pieces is a photo from 1928, showing three glamorous young women, up and rising in the film industry, at the Berlin Press Ball, with an arm around each other. The three were: Marlene Dietrich (pre-Sternberg, and hence more chubby), Anna May Wong ...and Leni Riefenstahl. Actually, Leni R. is presented in several stages throughout the exhibition: as a young woman in Arnold Fanck's mountain movies (mountain movies were a rage in the 20s), showing, in several outtakes, that physical fearlessness she kept throughout her life (no stunt woman for any of that climbing and skiing), the above mentioned photo, Leni Riefenstahl the director, shown in several outtakes shooting the Olympia movies (as with "Triumph of the Will", what she's shown doing is stretching the definition of "documentary" since she is seen ordering the athletes to repeat several movements for her if she couldn't get the right angle the first time - in "Triumph", the sound quality of several speeches was rather bad, so she had several of the speakers report their performance in the studio) - and then of course Leni R. looking adoring at Hitler when he hands out awards. A Time Magazine title story calling her "Hitler's Leni". Somewhere there's a quote from Billy Wilder observing that if had been better to stomach her if she weren't so talented but that even Cecil B. DeMille did not have the number of extras Hitler provided for her.
A counterpoint is the wall provided for the actors who were either Jewish or politically opposed and who didn't make it out of Germany in time, nor did find someone to protect them. Several of them ended up in concentration camps; you see their publicity stills from the 20s and early 30s, looking like your avarage period glamour shot, and then you read "...was transported to...", "dissappeared in Berlin when..." "died in...". One of the saddest and most well-known fates is the one of actor Joachim Gottschalk whose wife was Jewish. He refused to divorce her, Goebbels systematically destroyed his career in retaliation, and then came the day where his wife Meta was ordered to "evacuate" to the East anyway. They both committed suicide then, together with their little son. The most stomach-turning exhibition piece are sketches from a propaganda film that Kurt Geron (who later was killed in the concentration camp he was interned at the time) was ordered to do, about Theresienstadt, which was supposed to show how wonderful life in a concentration camp was. The film itself does not exist anymore, but the sketches show theatre, rooms with flowers, people resting on banks. I think we all have seen photos of the real thing. Decades past, and you still feel the horror, the rage, and the urge to do something, anything.
