Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films

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are, sadly, no longer with us but their ballots, along with the others, have been
archived for posterity at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek.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