28 November – 1 June 2009
Film art – the “most important of all art forms” – has been around for more than a century now.
Millions of works have been produced within a short period of time – but how many of them are remembered? In many cases, there is just one photo left that attests to an actor’s glamorous performance, yet sometimes entire stories can be reconstructed with the help of series of film stills.
The acquisition of an important photo collection in January 2008 – which was made possible with the financial support of the Ministry for Science, Research, and Culture – enabled Filmmuseum Potsdam to do this.
The 6,000 black-and-white photos represent approx. 900 films, most of which were made before 1945. The collection contains advertising photos for cinemas and a large number of valuable vintage prints that were used by the press as artworks.
Among the most spectacular works are 49 film stills from Friedrich Murnau’s “Four Devils” (1928), a film that is thought to be lost. Moreover, the collection comprises photos by Richard Oswald, Karl Grune, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Mauritz Stiller, René Clair, or Edward Sedgwick as well as pictures taken during the Neubabelsberg studio period. With these photos, the exhibition presented some rarities and highlights of the silent and sound film era that display an astonishing diversity of topics:
Both the story of the African “Samba” (1928) and the first “Tarzan” film (1932, starring Johnny Weissmuller) intrigued audiences with their exotic images. Paula Wessely’s suffering as archduchess Marie Louise (“So endet eine Liebe”, 1934) was in no way inferior to Greta Garbo’s almost transcendental beauty in “The Temptress” (1926). The first film adaptation of Leroux’s gothic novel “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925) as well as Pabst’s vision of the “Mistress of Atlantis” (“Herrin von Atlantis”, 1932) fired spectators’ imagination.