Hans Cürlis

1889 - 1982

Hans Cürlis filmed Kandinsky, Grosz, Pechstein, Dix, Kollwitz, Liebermann, and Calder at work, many years before Paul Hasaert’s Visite à Picasso. Cürlis had studed with Wölflin and had written his thesis on Dürer. In 1919 he established the Institut für Kulturforschung, "the first German scientific institution which consciously selected the cinema as a form of expression through the results of its own work" (Cürlis, 1929). That he is not considering simply a form of documentation is demonstrated by the fact that among his first collaborators can be listed animation and silhouette artists such as Bartosch, Carl Koch, Lotte Reiniger, and Toni Rabold. After a film on African sculpture and a number of geographical documentaries, in 1922 he began the series Schaffende Hände: short films not "on art" so much as the physical process of the creation of a work of art turned into cinema.

Фильмы

Schwarz - Weiß - Gelb

Hans Cürlis

A film commissioned by the Documentary Film Unit of the OMGUS.

Schwarz - Weiß - Gelb

1949

Германия, документальный

Schaffende Hände: Max Oppenheimer

Hans Cürlis

In the best films of Hans Cürlis the acts of filming and painting coincide. The portrait of a portraitist. Max Oppenheimer (Mopp; 1885-1954) was a well-known portraitist and painter of musicians and orchestras. In this case he paints the portrait of Heinrich Mann, while Cürlis portrays Heinrich Mann as he is being portrayed by Mopp and Mopp as he is portraying Heinrich Mann. Thus the "Schaffende Hände" — Creative Hands — are both those of the painter and those of the film director Cürlis: these are hand-made films.

Schaffende Hände: Max Oppenheimer

1924

Schaffende Hände: George Grosz

Hans Cürlis

Hans Cürlis films George Grosz at work.

Schaffende Hände: George Grosz

1923

документальный

Schaffende Hände: Wassily Kandinsky in der Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf

Hans Cürlis

Vassily Kandinsky

Hans Cürlis films Kandinsky at work.

Schaffende Hände: Wassily Kandinsky in der Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf

1926

документальный

Schaffende Hände: Lovis Corinth

Hans Cürlis

Hans Cürlis films Lovis Corinth at work. "In the physical act of applying the colour spots, Corinth discovered something: drama, tempo; things were processes, in the technical sense also, which were brought together in the unity of expression" (Carl Einstein). Cürlis makes this visible.

Schaffende Hände: Lovis Corinth

1922

документальный