Oertel, Curt

Cameraman, Director, Producer, Functionary

Born: 10.05.1890 in Osterfeld (Thuringia)

Died: 01.01.1960 in Limburg

The son of an art publisher and photographer, he began training as a photographer in Munich at the age of thirteen, worked in Berlin photo studios from 1907-1910 and then founded his own photographic art workshop. He was deployed as an aerial observer during the First World War and subsequently studied art history in Berlin. He came to film in 1925 as the second cameraman on G.W. Papst's "Die freudlose Gasse". This was followed by further work as a cameraman for Papst (including in "Geheimnisse einer Seele"), Erwin Piscator (for whose theater production "Hoppla, wir leben!" he shot the film sequences in 1927) and Georg Asagaroff ("Revolte im Erziehungshaus").

In 1932, together with Rudolf Bamberger, he made a short film about the sculptures of Naumburg Cathedral: "Die steinernen Wunder von Naumburg". The following year, he co-directed the Theodor Storm adaptation "Der Schimmelreiter" with Hans Deppe, followed by "Pole Poppenstäler" (1935), which he directed alone for the first time.

In the years that followed, his preferred genre became the so-called cultural film. His most important work in this respect is "Michelangelo" (1938-40), which received an Oscar in a shortened and revised version in 1951 (under the title "The Titan").

After the end of the Second World War, he came to Wiesbaden at the invitation of the mayor at the time, Hans Heinrich Redlhammer, to coordinate the reorganization of German film institutions in agreement with the US occupation authorities. Under his leadership, the Voluntary Self-Regulation of the Film Industry (FSK) was established, replacing state censorship and the Allied control commissions, and began its work in October 1949 under his chairmanship in Schloss Biebrich. In the same year, the Archive for Film Studies, which had been based in Wiesbaden since 1948 with the support of Curt Oertel, also moved into Schloss Biebrich. In 1949, the Archive for Film Studies was renamed the German Institute for Film Studies (DIF) (now the German Film Institute), which he also helped to found. The film archive of the Deutsches Filminstitut is still located in Wiesbaden today.

After producers, distributors and theater owners moved the headquarters of their associations to Wiesbaden, he was elected president of their umbrella organization, the German Film Industry Association (SPIO), on October 4, 1950, but resigned from all offices three days later after misleading interview comments he had made about alleged nationalistic tendencies in the German film industry led to a controversy about his person.

He supported the relocation of the Aktiengesellschaft für Filmfabrikation (AFIFA) from Berlin to Wiesbaden and thus contributed significantly to Wiesbaden's upswing as a film city during the 1950s. Finally, he supported the emerging German film club movement and realized his own cultural film projects with his Wiesbaden-based "Curt Oertel Filmstudiengesellschaft mbH".