Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
the early planning stages with Murnau, 'Film-Dichter' Carl Mayer, and cinematographer
Karl Freund, Together they created the concept of the camera unbound' (entfesselte
Kamera) and cinematic mixture of actors, lighting, and décor that is typical of these films.
Léon Barsacq ( 1976) writes: 'The sets are reduced to the essential, sometimes to a ceiling
and a mirror. In his initial sketches Herlth, influenced by Murnau, began by roughing in
characters as they were positioned in a particular scene; then the volume of the set seemed
to create itself. Thus interiors became simpler and simpler, barer and barer, Despite the
simplification, all the tricks of set design and camera movements were utilized, and some
times invented, for this film [ The Last Laugh]. Scale models on top of actual buildings
made it possible to give a vertigionous height to the façade of the Grand Hotel.'
Towards the end of the silent period Herlth and Röhrig joined forces for one of Ufa's best
films, Joe May's Asphalt ( 1928). They built a Berlin street crossing complete with shops,
cars, and buses, using the former Zeppelin hangar-turned-film-studio at Staaken. After the
introduction of sound they stayed with the Pommer team at Ufa, working with some of
his young talents such as Robert Siodmak and Anatole Litvak and also creating the lavish
period sets for the opulent and very successful multilingual versions of operettas such as
Erik Charell's Der Kongress tanzt ( 1931) and Ludwig Berger's Walzerkreig ( 1933).In
1929 they started a collaboration with the director Gustav Ucicky which afforded them a
smooth transition into the Ufa of the Nazi period. Ucicky, a former cinematographer and
reliable craftsman, specialized in entertainment with a nationalistic touch, and Herlth and
Röhrig were able to avoid the hard propaganda films by working on popular
entertainment. In 1935 they designed the Greek temples for Reinhold Schünzel's satirical
comedy Amphitryon ( 1935), which mocked the pseudo-classical architecture of Albert
Speer's Nazi buildings. Michael Esser describes their concept: 'Set design doesn't create
copies of real buildings; it brings found details into a new context. Their relation to the
originals is a distancing one, often even an ironic one.'In 1935 Herlth and Röhrig wrote,
designed, and directed the fairy-tale Hans im Glück. Shortly afterwards the collaboration
ended.After constructing the technical buildings for Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia ( 1938).
Herlth (whose wife was Jewish) worked for Tobis, then Terra, designing mainly
entertainment films. His first production in colour was Bolvary's operetta Die Fledermaus,
which was shot in winter 1944-5 and released after the was by DEFA.After the war Herlth
first worked as stage designer for theatres in Berlin. In 1947 he designed the ruins of a
Grand Hotel for Harald Braun's Zwischen gestern und morgen ( 1947). Throughout the
1950s he was again mainly involved with entertainment films made by the better directors
of the period such as Rolf Hansen and Kurt Hoffman. For one of his last big productions,
Alfred Weidenmann's two-part adaptation of Thomas Mann's Die Buddenbrooks ( 1959)
(designed in collaboration with his younger brother Kurt Herlth and Arno Richter) Robert
Herlth was awarded a 'Deutscher Filmpreis'.HANS-MICHAEL BOCKSELECT
FILMOGRAPHY Der Schatz ( 1923); The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) ( 1924); Tartüff
( 1925); Faust ( 1926); Asphalt ( 1928); The Congress Dances (Der Kongress tanzt)
( 1931); Amphitryon ( 1935); Hans im glück ( 1936); Olympia ( 1938); Kleider machen
Leute ( 1940); Die Fledermaus ( 1945); Die Buddenbrooks ( 1959)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barsacq, Léon ( 1976), Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions.
Herlth, Robert ( 1979), 'Dreharben mit Murnau'.
Längsfeld, Wolfgang (ed.) ( 1965), Filmarchitektur Robert Herlth.
The Scandinavian Style
PAOLO CHERCHI USAI
For a brief period after 1910, the countries of Scandinavia, despite their low population
(less than 2.5 million in Denmark in 1901; around 5 million in Sweden in 1900) and their
marginal place in the western economic system, played a major role in the early evolution
of cinema, both as an art and as an industry. Their influence was concentrated into two
phases: the first centred on Denmark in the four-year period 1910-13, which saw the
international success of the production company Nordisk Film Kompagni; and the second
on Sweden between 1917 and 1923. And, far from consisting of an isolated blossoming of
local culture, Scandinavian silent cinema was extensively integrated into a wider
European context. For at least ten years the aesthetic identity of Danish and Swedish films
was intimately related to that of Russian and German cinema, each evolving in symbiotic
relation to the others, linked by complementary distribution strategies and exchanges of
directors and technical expertise. Within this network of co-operation only a marginal role
was played by the other northern European nations. Finland, which did have a
linguistically independent cinema, remained largely an adjunct of tsarist Russia until
1917. Iceland -- part of Denmark until 1918 -- only saw its first film theatre opened in
1906, by the future director Alfred Lind. And Norway produced only seventeen fiction
titles, from its first film Fiskerlivets farer: et drama på havet ('The perils of fishing: a
drama of the sea', 1908) until 1918.
ORIGINS
The first display of moving pictures in Scandinavia took place in Norway on 6 April 1896
at the Variété Club in Oslo (or Christiania as it was then called) and was organized by two
pioneers of German cinema, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky. Such was the
success of their show, and of their Bioskop projection equipment, that they stayed on until
5 May. In Denmark, the earliest documented moving picture show was put on by the
painter Vilhelm. Pacht, who installed a Lumière Cinématographe in the wooden pavilion
of the Raadhusplasen in Copenhagen on 7 June 1896. The equipment and the pavilion
were both destroyed in a fire started by a recently sacked electrician out for revenge, but
the show was relaunched on 30 June to a fanfare of publicity. Even the royal family had
visited Pacht's Kinopticon on 11 June.
The arrival of cinema in Finland followed a few weeks on from its first appearance in St
Petersburg on 16 May. Although the Lumière Cinématographe remained in the Helsinki
town hall for only eight days after opening on 28 June, owing to the high prices of seats
and the relatively small size of the city, the photographer Karl Emil Stählberg was
inspired to take action. He took on the distribution of Lumière films from January 1897,
and outside Helsinki the 'living pictures' were made available through the exhibitor Oskar
Alonen. In 1904, Stählberg set up in Helsinki the first permanent cinema in Finland, the
Maailman YmpÁri ('Around the world'). In the same year were produced the first 'real-
life' sequences, but it is not clear whether or not StÁhlberg was also responsible for these.
On 28 June 1896 the Industrial Exhibition at the Summer Palace in Malmö hosted the first
projection in Sweden, again with Lumière material, organized by the Danish showman
Harald Limkilde. The Cinématographe spread north a few weeks afterwards, when a
correspondent of the Parisian daily Le Soir, Charles Marcel, presented films with the
Edison Kinetoscope on 21 July at the Victoria Theatre, Stockholm, in the Glace Palace of
the Djurgärten. They were not a great success, however, and the Edison films were soon
supplanted by the Skladanowsky brothers, who shot some sequences at Djurgärten itself:
these were the first moving pictures to be shot in Sweden.
A scene from Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages), made in Sweden in 1921 by the
Danish director Benjamin Christensen
FINLAND
The first Finnish film company, Pohjola, began distributing films in 1899 under the
direction of a circus impresario, J. A. W. Grönroos. The first location officially designated
for the projection of films was the Kinematograf International, opened at the end of 1901.
But, like the two other cinemas which opened shortly afterwards, it survived for only a
few weeks, and it was not until Karl Emil Stählberg's initiative in 1904 that film theatres
were definitively established on a permanent basis. In 1911 there were 17 cinemas in
Helsinki, and 81 in the rest of the country. By 1921, the figures had risen to 20 and 118
respectively.
The first Finnish fiction film, Salaviinanpolttajat ('Bootleggers'), was directed in 1907 by
the Swede Louis Sparre assisted by Teuvo Puro, an actor with Finland's National Theatre,
for the production company Atelier Apollo, run by Stählberg. In the following ten years,
Finland produced another 27 fiction films and 312 documentary shorts, as well as two
publicity films. Stählberg's near monopoly on production -- between 1906 and 1913 he
distributed 110 shorts, around half the entire national production -- was short-lived.
Already in 1907 the Swede David Fernander and the Norwegian Rasmus Hallseth had
founded the Pohjoismaiden Biografi Komppania, which produced forty-seven shorts in
little more than a decade. The Swedish cameraman on Salaviinanpolttajat, Frans
Engström, split with Stählberg and set up -- with little success -his own production
company with the two protagonists of the film, Teuvo Puro and Teppo Raikas. An extant
fragment of Sylvi ( 1913), directed by Puro, constitutes the earliest example of Finnish
fiction film preserved today. Greater success awaited Erik Estlander, who founded
Finlandia Filmi (forty-nine films between 1912 and 1916, including some shorts shot in
the extreme north of the country), and the most important figure of the time, Hjalmar V.
Pohjanheimo, who from 1910 onwards began to acquire several film halls, and soon
turned to production. The films distributed by Pohjanheimo under the aegis of Lyyra
Filmi were documentaries ( 1911), newsreels (from 1914), and comic and dramatic
narratives, made with the help of his sons Adolf, Hilarius, Asser, and Berger, and the
theatrical director Kaarle Halme.
The First World War brought the intervention of the Russian authorities, who in 1916
banned all cinematographic activity. The ban lapsed after the Revolution of February
1917 and was definitively removed in December when Finland declared its independence.
The post-war period was dominated by a production company founded by Puro and the
actor Erkki Karu, Suomi Filmi. Its first important feature-length film was Anna-Liisa
( Teuvo Puro and Jussi Snellman, 1922), taken from a work by Minna Canth and
influenced by Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness ( 1886): a young girl who has killed her
child is overwhelmed by remorse and confesses to expiate her crime. The actor Konrad
Tallroth, who had already been active in Finland before the war but had then emigrated to
Sweden following the banning of the film Eräs elämän murhenäytelmä ('The tragedy of a
life'), was taken on in 1922 by Suomi for Rakkauden kaikkivalta -- Amor Omnia ('Love
conquers all'), an uneven and isolated attempt to adapt Finnish cinema to the mainstream
features emerging from western Europe and the United States. Production in the
following years was limited in quantity, and tended to return to traditional themes of
everyday life, in the line of contemporary Swedish narrative and stylistic models. Judging
by accounts written at the time, only the documentary Finlandia (Erkki Karu and Eero
Leväluoma/ Suomi Filmi, 1922) achieved a certain success abroad. Around eighty silent
feature films were produced in Finland up to 1933. About forty fiction films, including
shorts, are conserved at the Suomen Elokuva-Arkisto in Helsinki.
NORWAY
The first Norwegian film company of any significance was Christiania Film Co. A/S, set
up in 1916. Before then, national production-represented by Norsk Kinematograf A/S,
Internationalt Film Kompagni A/S, Nora Film Co. A/S, and Gladtvet Film -- had been in
an embryonic stage. Fewer than ten fiction films had been produced between 1908 and
1913, and no record exists of important productions for the two following years.
For the entire period of silent cinema, Norway boasted no studio to speak of, and thus the
affirmation of a 'national style' particular to it derived in large part from the exploitation