NP Star Maidens ...

[Slug]

Otto Sell wrote:
> 
> Stereotype, no, not at all.
> 
> I have forgotten who had said it but someone once said that if Karl May had
> said to the generation of 1914: Don't go to war - the First World War would
> not have happened. This guy had a big influence on the German male of the
> 20th century. The massive input of American movies after WW-2 was a second
> step. We all grew up with more knowledge about the pioneer-period of
> American history than about our own past. Every German boy of the last 60-80
> years played cowboys versus Indians, so "Sitting Bull" and "Geronimo" are as
> familiar as "Roland" or "Dietrich von Bern."

Thank You, can't get this kind of His story anyplace else. 



The decline of From 1925 to 1930 many German directors
and actors went to the United States to work in Hollywood,
and, despite loans and cooperation from American companies,
the studio's financial stability weakened. In 1927
controlling stock was purchased by Alfred Hugenberg, a
conservative newspaper owner and future supporter of the
dictator Adolf Hitler. By 1938 the Nazi government had
complete control of the German film industry, and it used
Ufa as a propaganda tool until the end of World War II, when
the  government fell and the company ceased to exist. The
studio itself, however, located in Berlin, remains a
production centre to this day. In 1924 the German mark was
stabilized by the so-called Dawes Plan, which  financed the
long-term payment of Germany's war reparations debt and
curtailed all exports. This created an artificial prosperity
in the economy at large, which lasted only until the stock
market crash of 1929, but it was devastating to the film
industry, the bulk of whose revenues came from foreign
markets. Hollywood then seized the opportunity to cripple
its only serious European rival, saturating Germany with
American films and buying its independent theatre chains. As
a result of these forays and its own internal mismanagement,
UFA stood on the brink of bankruptcy by the end of 1925. It
was saved by a $4,000,000 loan offered by two major American
studios, Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in exchange for collaborative rights to
UFA studios, theatres, and creative personnel. This
arrangement resulted in the founding of the Parufamet
(Paramount-UFA-Metro) Distribution Company in early 1926 and
the almost immediate emigration of UFA film artists and
technicians to Hollywood, where they worked for a variety of
studios. This first Germanic migration was temporary. Many
of the filmmakers returned to UFA  disgusted at the
assembly-line character of the American studio system, but
many--such as Lubitsch, Freund, Murnau, and Kertész--stayed
on to launch full-fledged Hollywood careers, and many more
would come back during the 1930s to escape Adolf Hitler. In
the meantime, the new sensibility that had entered German
intellectual life turned away from the morbid psychological
themes of Expressionism toward an acceptance of "life as it
is lived." Called die neue Sachlichkeit ("the new
objectivity"), this spirit stemmed from the economic
dislocations that beset German society in the wake of the
war, particularly the impoverishment of the middle classes
through raging inflation. In cinema, die neue Sachlichkeit
translated into the grim social realism of the "street"
films of the late 1920s, including G.W. Pabst's Die
freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), Bruno Rhan's
Dirnentragödie (Tragedy of the Streets, 1927), Joe May's
Asphalt (1929), and Piel Jutzi's Berlin-Alexanderplatz
(1931). Named for their prototype, Karl Grune's Die Strasse
(The Street, 1923), these films focused on the
disillusionment, cynicism, and ultimate resignation of
ordinary German people whose lives were crippled during the
postwar inflation.

"Thank you for calling Central Services. This has not been a
recording." (Brazil)

For the complete Notes, type UFA in the P-L archive search. 

See  Lewis Jacobs' (another Colombian) THE RISE OF AMERICAN
FILM, A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH  An ESSAY:  EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA IN AMERICA 1921-1947, Teachers  College Press,
Teachers College, Columbia University New  York, 1939, Forth
Printing, 1974.

Yours, 

Lyle A.
SlimyMassOfAggregatedAmoeboidCellsFromWhichTheSporophoreOfACellularSlimeMold
Develops.

PS Always wanted a name like my Hero, Pele.