Well, not exactly a reblog, because his isn’t a WordPress site, but I couldn’t resist the tremendous new post that Gordon Skene has just put up on his splendid The Past Daily site: nothing less than an hour-long 1971 radio interview with Lotte Eisner. So, with his permission, here’s a taster and a link — a hand-crafted reblog, if you like:
Fans of film history no doubt are familiar with the highly charged atmosphere of Cinema in Europe between the World Wars. Nowhere was this atmosphere more prevalent than in pre-Hitler Berlin. A hotbed of creativity and experimentation, the German cinema of the 1920s revolutionized film expression and elevated Movies to an art-form.
One of the people who observed and wrote about this revolution at length was the celebrated film critic and historian Lotte Eisner. Born in 1896, Eisner was witness to much of the upheaval and surge of creativity taking place. She wrote for a number of publications and was instrumental in spreading the word about this new wave of film making.
Fleeing Germany shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Eisner settled in Paris, where she continued to write and help establish the Cinematheque Francaise in order to preserve films from this pivotal period. Eisner changed her identity during the war, and aided in hiding the treasure trove of films, which Nazi Germany had now declared Degenerate Art and ordered destroyed.
After the War, . . . . . . . .
Noirish 