Cinema Without Rest
A Journey Through Harald Reinl's Genre Cinema
Measured by the influence that Austrian-born Harald Reinl (1908-1986) had on popular West German cinema from the 1950s to the late 1960s, he must be considered one of Germany's most important filmmakers, contrary to conventional film history. The venerable Cahiers du Cinéma even called him the “master of German trivial cinema.” A German Howard Hawks? In any case, Reinl moved with somnambulistic certainty between very different genres of entertainment cinema. Technically masterful, with a keen sense for the everyday needs of the audience, for what appealed to as many people as possible.
New projects were welcome challenges for Reinl. He worked at a frenetic pace. His producers thanked him for it and appreciated him as a pragmatist and filmmaker without airs and graces. Over 60 feature-length films were made in this way in a good forty years. A cinema without rest. It was also a restless cinema, because every story with kinetic potential, with rapid transitions from A to B, from spectacle to spectacle, found an accomplished, imaginative director in Reinl. Stars were born in passing: Joachim “Blacky” Fuchsberger, Karin Dor (to whom Reinl was temporarily married), and the “imports” Lex Barker and Pierre Brice. Their names are also closely associated with Reinl's genre-defining magnum opus: the eerily foggy studio London of the Edgar Wallace series, which began with Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959), or the landscapes filmed in Ultrascope for the western Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962) and the Winnetou trilogy (1963-65), adaptations of Karl May's Wild West fantasies that are now critically discussed for their exoticism, but which were box office hits at the time, while the Young German Film movement was just setting out to challenge the “unrealistic” cinema of the previous generation.
What threatens to be overlooked in Reinl's omnipresence in mainstream cinema of the 1960s—remember also the new edition of the Dr. Mabuse crime thrillers, Reinl's Jerry Cotton spy films, and the comedy series Die Lümmel von der ersten Bank—is his early work, such as his early work in cultural films or the emotionally charged religious dramas influenced by Reinl's patron Leni Riefenstahl. And his later work? When Reinl's star began to fade in the 1970s, he returned to the themes of his early cinema, spirituality, homeland, and community. Early, middle, and late works—for the retrospective Cinema Without Rest —A Journey Through Harald Reinl's Genre Cinema, the stages of his career are given equal weight. The film series not only invites viewers to engage intensively with one of the most prolific and successful directors in German-language film history, it also provides illustrative material for a cultural and social history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Curated by Tilman Schumacher, the retrospective brings together 25 films by the entertainment film professional, 22 of which are 35mm copies. We would like to thank the major film heritage institutions, as well as private collectors, without whose copies this retrospective could not take place in this form. It may sound paradoxical, but it is precisely the mainstream cinema of the second half of the 20th century, which was seen by tens of millions of viewers and brought to the screen in hundreds of copies, that is poorly preserved in material form and even threatened with disappearance due to a lack of collection preferences. This makes it all the more wonderful that we have nevertheless managed to locate so many analog copies—and bring them back into the light of the projection lamps. (Tilman Schumacher)
