Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films
Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films
Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films
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A SURVEY BY THE STIFTUNG DEUTSCHE KINEMATHEK<br />
38<br />
No examination of the history of cinema is complete without a survey as to the<br />
most important or favorite films of all time. In an international context American<br />
titles dominate; films such as Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane<br />
through to Schindler’s List and Titanic. In 1995, on the occasion of the<br />
100th Birthday of the Cinema, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek<br />
organized a survey of film historians, journalists, editors and filmmakers to ask<br />
them which 100 <strong>German</strong> films, from the very beginning to the present day, they<br />
considered to be the most significant. They were asked to name those films<br />
”which, for the spectrum of <strong>German</strong> film history, are of outstanding significance<br />
artistically, politically or socially.“<br />
324 industry experts voted in the first round to decide places 1 to 75. The result<br />
was announced in February 1994 at the International Film Festival in Berlin. In<br />
the second round of voting, for places 76 to 100, 228 people were asked for<br />
their opinion. The results were collected in autumn 1994 and announced in the<br />
anniversary year.<br />
Highlights of<br />
<strong>German</strong> Film History<br />
THE 100 MOST SIGNIFICANT<br />
GERMAN FILMS<br />
Among those who voted were film makers Herbert Achternbusch, Frank Beyer,<br />
Alexander Kluge, Kurt Maetzig, Edgar Reitz, Christoph Schlingensief, Volker<br />
Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders and Bernhard Wicki,<br />
journalists Peter Buchka, Wolf Donner, Peter W. Jansen, Hellmuth Karasek,<br />
Ponkie and Will Tremper, the internationally renowned film historians Freddy<br />
Buache, Bernard Eisenschitz, Ulrich Gregor, Naum Klejman, Ib Monty, Enno<br />
Patalas, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Jerzy Toeplitz and Karsten Witte, producers<br />
Günter Rohrbach, Joachim von Vietinghoff and Jürgen Wohlrabe. Some of these<br />
are, sadly, no longer with us but their ballots, along with the others, have been<br />
archived for posterity at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek.<br />
Two of the 100 selected films were made before 1914, 37 are from the Weimar<br />
Republic, 8 from the time of the Third Reich, 5 from the early post-war years,<br />
36 from the Federal Republic and 12 from the <strong>German</strong> Democratic Republic.<br />
Of the 100 titles, 24 films are silent and 76 are with sound. Fritz Lang, Georg<br />
Wilhelm Pabst and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are represented by<br />
more than six titles (Fassbinder is also included for his participation in<br />
Deutschland im Herbst), Pabst for his co-direction on Die weiße Hölle<br />
vom Piz Palu). Helmut Käutner, Wolfgang Staudte, Wim<br />
Wenders and Konrad Wolf are each represented by four films, Friedrich<br />
Wilhelm Murnau and Volker Schlöndorff by three.<br />
Because the survey was so wide ranging, the first 100 rankings are principally<br />
the most well-known and famous titles. But five documentaries, three large-scale<br />
television productions and a few experimental works are also included.<br />
Even six years on, the result of the survey is still representative. The highlights<br />
of <strong>German</strong> film history are not meant to be written in stone for eternity, but<br />
whoever has seen all one hundred films will have a solid basic historical knowledge<br />
of <strong>German</strong> filmmaking. Each year the number of new films one could term<br />
really “significant” is, as we know, not particularly long.<br />
Information about the 100 films can be found on the CD-Rom ”Die deutschen<br />
Filme“, which was released in 2000 by the <strong>German</strong> Film Institute<br />
in Frankfurt and is also available from the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek<br />
in Berlin.<br />
Hans Helmut Prinzler