1910-1930
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The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the fact that his films often deal with religious themes) Dreyer did not receive a strict Lutheran upbringing, but was raised in a household that embraced modern ideas: in his spare time the adoptive father was an avid photographer, and the Dreyers voted for The Danish Social Democrates. When he was baptized the reasoning was culturally, not religiously motivated. Dreyer's childhood was an unhappy one. He did not feel his adoptive parents' love (especially the mother), and longed for his biological mother, whom he never knew.
After working as a journalist, he entered the film industry, and advanced from reading scripts to directing films himself. In the silent era his output was large, but it quickly diminished with the arrival of the talkie. In his lifetime he was recognized as being a fanatical perfectionist amongst producers, and thus difficult to work with. His career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises. He is now regarded as the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark.Realista - Suecia- Director
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From Ernst Lubitsch's experiences in Sophien Gymnasium (high school) theater, he decided to leave school at the age of 16 and pursue a career on the stage. He had to compromise with his father and keep the account books for the family tailor business while he acted in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911 he joined the Deutsches Theater of famous director/producer/impresario Max Reinhardt, and was able to move up to leading acting roles in a short time. He took an extra job as a handyman while learning silent film acting at Berlin's Bioscope film studios. The next year he launched his own film career by appearing in a series of comedies showcasing traditional ethnic Jewish slice-of-life fare. Finding great success in these character roles, Lubitsch turned to broader comedy, then beginning in 1914 started writing and directing his own films.
His breakthrough film came in 1918 with The Eyes of the Mummy (1918) ("The Eyes of the Mummy"), a tragedy starring future Hollywood star Pola Negri. Also that year he made Carmen (1918), again with Negri, a film that was commercially successful on the international level. His work already showed his genius for catching the eye as well as the ear in not only comedy but historical drama. The year 1919 found Lubitsch directing seven films, the two standouts being his lavish Passion (1919) with two of his favorite actors--Negri (yet again) and Emil Jannings. His other standout was the witty parody of the American upper crust, The Oyster Princess (1919) ("The Oyster Princess"). This film was a perfect example of what became known as the Lubitsch style, or the "Lubitsch Touch", as it became known--sophisticated humor combined with inspired staging that economically presented a visual synopsis of storyline, scenes and characters.
His success in Europe brought him to the shores of America to promote The Loves of Pharaoh (1922) ("The Loves of Pharaoh") and he become acquainted with the thriving US film industry. He soon returned to Europe, but came back to the US for good to direct new friend and influential star Mary Pickford in his first American hit, Rosita (1923). The Marriage Circle (1924) began Lubitsch's unprecedented run of sophisticated films that mirrored the American scene (though always relocated to foreign or imaginary lands) and all its skewed panorama of the human condition. There was a smooth transition between his silent films for Warner Bros. and the sound movies--usually at Paramount--now embellished with the flow of speech of Hollywood's greats lending personal nuances to continually heighten the popularity at the box office and the fame of Lubitsch's first-rate versatility in crafting a smart film. There was a mix of pioneering musical films and some drama also through the 1930s. The of those films resulted in Paramount making him its production chief in 1935, so he could produce his own films and supervise production of others. In 1938 he signed a three-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.
Certainly two of his most beloved films near the end of his career dealt with the political landscape of the World War II era. He moved to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka (1939), a fast-paced comedy of "decadent" Westerners meeting Soviet "comrades" who were seeking more of life than the mother country could--or would--offer. During the war he directed perhaps his most beloved comedy--controversial to say the least, dark in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way--but certainly a razor-sharp tour de force in smart, precise dialog, staging and story: To Be or Not to Be (1942), produced by his own company, Romaine Film Corp. It was a biting satire of Nazi tyranny that also poked fun at Lubitsch's own theater roots with the problems and bickering--but also the triumph--of a somewhat raggedy acting troupe in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. Jack Benny's perfect deadpan humor worked well with the zany vivaciousness of Carole Lombard, and a cast of veteran character actors from both Hollywood and Lubitsch's native Germany provided all the chemistry needed to make this a classic comedy, as well as a fierce statement against the perpetrators of war. The most poignant scene was profoundly so, with Felix Bressart--another of Reinhardt's students--as the only Jewish bit player in the company. His supreme hope is a chance to someday play Shylock. He gets his chance as part of a ruse in front of Adolf Hitler's SS bodyguards. The famous soliloquy was a bold declaration to the world of the Axis' brutal inhumanity to man, as in its treatment of and plans for the Jewry of Europe.
Lubitsch had a massive heart attack in 1943 after having signed a producer/director's contract with 20th Century-Fox earlier that year, but completed Heaven Can Wait (1943). His continued efforts in film were severely stymied but he worked as he could. In late 1944 Otto Preminger, another disciple of Reinhardt's Viennese theater work, took over the direction of A Royal Scandal (1945), with Lubitsch credited as nominal producer. March of 1947, the year of his passing, brought a special Academy Award (he was nominated three times) to the fading producer/director for his "25-year contribution to motion pictures." At his funeral, two of his fellow directorial émigrés from Germany put his epitaph succinctly as they left. Billy Wilder noted, "No more Lubitsch." William Wyler answered, "Worse than that - no more Lubitsch films."El Gato Motes - Comedia Critica - Alemania- Writer
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Born an illegitimate son of a wealthy physician, Abel Flamant, and a working class mother, Francoise Perethon. He was raised by his mother and her boyfriend, who later became her husband, Adolphe Gance. Pressured by his parents, he began his working career as a lawyer's clerk in hopes of achieving a prosperous career in law. But his passion for the theatre lured him to the stage and at 19 he made his stage debut in Brussels. Within a year, after returning to Paris, he made his screen debut as an actor in Moliere (1909). He made other film appearances in minor roles as well as taking a crack at screen-writing.
Living in poverty during this period in his life, he suffered from starvation and tuberculosis. But he regained strength enough to form a production company in 1911, and made his debut as a director that same year with La Digue (1911). However, like the rest of his early films, it was unsuccessful and as a consequence, he returned to the stage with a five-hour long play, Victoire de Samothrace, which he wrote himself. It was due to be a success with Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role, but the sudden outbreak of WWI canceled the premiere.
Due to his ill health he was kept out of most of the war. During this time he managed to achieve a profitable status at the Film d'Arte company as a director. He turned out such successful films as Mater Dolorosa (1917) and La Dixieme Symphonie (1918), but he gained a reputation at Film d'Arte as a wild experimentalist - using such outlandish techniques for the time as close-ups and dolly shots. As a consequence, he was frequently at odds with the management. At the point of being one of the most well known film directors in France, he entered the tail end of WWI. He was discharged shortly after due to mustard gas poisoning. But he requested that he be redrafted so that he could shoot on-location battle scenes for his latest idea for a film J'accuse! (1919). The three-hour long, triangular melodrama about the "futility of war" became a box-office smash all over Europe. It was Europe's first fictional film to show authentic footage of the catastrophes of war. Being an experimentalist, he employed a rapid cutting technique that is said to have influenced such Russian filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein and Pudovkin.
During the making of his next film, The Wheel (1923), he and his second wife, Ida Danis, fell ill with the flu. Although he recovered and worked on the film in stages, his wife did not - she died shortly before the film's release. Grieved by death of his wife and friend, actor Severin Mars, who starred in many of his films, he fled Europe and sailed to America. The trip turned out to be a nationwide promotion of I Accuse. He recalls that he did not like the Hollywood filmmaking system and refused an offer from MGM to direct for a hefty sum. The happiest moment was D.W. Griffith's praise of I Accuse at a screening in New York.
Returning to France, Gance released the final cut of La Roue to much acclaim, especially for its montage sequence. His most important and outstanding film is Napoleon (1927). Considered to be a dictionary of all the techniques of the silent film era and an introduction to some techniques to come. It was shot using a three-camera panoramic process that involves the use of three projectors and a curved windscreen to create a deep, vast panoramic look. A couple thousand extras were used to fill the shots. Being the experimentalist that he was, he shot scenes in color, more than a decade before Hollywood would make The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939) in color, and in 3-D. But he decided against incorporating them into the film in fear that they would jar the audience's attention. The film received a standing ovation the night of its premiere at the Paris Opera. It was then shown only in 8 European cities due to the expensive and technical apparatus and large size theatre needed to project the film. In the US, MGM purchased the distribution rights and elected not to show the film using the three projector windscreen equipment, claiming that it would interfere with the introduction of sound. Nonetheless, that doesn't explain why MGM decided to drastically cut the film and rearrange it. As a consequence, the general release in the US was a not a success, audiences laughed at the film and critics panned it. It was the last film of Gance's career that was to possess that magnitude of creativeness. His sound films were mainly done for studios, where he lacked the ability to be creative. He would return to Napoleon a couple times in his career. In 1934 he added stereophonic sound effects to the original film using a Pictographe. He had criticized film historians throughout the rest of his life for not giving his film Napoleon (1927) the attention it deserves. Finally, British director Kevin Brownlow spent two decades doing the arduous task of putting the film back together in its original format. It was first screened in London using the three projector format with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis in 1979. Francis Ford Coppola produced the screenings at the Radio City Hall in the US, in 1981 to much acclaim. His father Carmine Coppola, composed and conducted the score in the US. Finally, Napoleon (1927) and its director received the respect they deserve.El Circulo - Impresionista - Francia- Writer
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Robert Wiene was born on 24 April 1873 in Breslau, Silesia, Germany [now Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland]. He was a writer and director, known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Das wandernde Licht (1916) and The Knight of the Rose (1925). He died on 17 July 1938 in Paris, France.Expresionista - Alemania- Director
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Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.Metropolis - Expresionsita - Alemania- Director
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The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.Rusia- Director
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Coming from a lower class family Mizoguchi entered the production company Nikkatsu as an actor specialized in female roles. Later he became an assistant director and made his first film in 1922. Although he filmed almost 90 movies in the silent era, only his last 12 productions are really known outside of Japan because they were especially produced for Venice (e.g The Life of Oharu (1952) or Sansho the Bailiff (1954). He only filmed two productions in color: Yôkihi (1955) and Taira Clan Saga (1955).- Director
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Yonggang Wu was born on 1 November 1907 in Wu Xian, Jiangsu, China. Yonggang was a director and writer, known for Shen nu (1934), Evening Rain (1980) and The Pirates of the Yellow Sea (1938). Yonggang died on 18 December 1982.Realismo - China