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68-879: Hundreds of films, including Fritz Lang 's Metropolis and Josef von Sternberg 's The Blue Angel were filmed there. More recent productions include V for Vendetta , Captain America: Civil War , Æon Flux , The Bourne Ultimatum , Valkyrie , Inglourious Basterds , Cloud Atlas , The Grand Budapest Hotel , The Hunger Games , Isle of Dogs and The Matrix Resurrections . Today, Studio Babelsberg remains operational mainly for feature film productions. It also acts as producer on German productions and co-producer on international high-budget productions. Since January 2022 it has been owned by TPG Real Estate Partners (TREP) and Filmbetriebe Berlin Brandenburg GmbH (FBB), and promoted as part of

136-466: A clown in Lola's troupe to pay the bills. His growing insecurities about Lola's profession as a "shared woman" eventually consume him with lust and jealousy. The troupe returns to The Blue Angel, where everyone attends to watch the former professor play a clown. On stage, Rath is humiliated by the magician Kiepert, who breaks eggs on Rath's head, and by seeing Lola embrace and kiss the strongman Mazeppa. Rath

204-745: A number of films for Paramount, none of which were box-office successes. However, Paramount's sister studio in Germany, UFA , asked him to direct Emil Jannings in his first sound film. Jannings was the Oscar-winning star of Sternberg's 1928 film The Last Command , and had specially requested Sternberg's participation, despite an "early clash of temperaments" on the set. Though The Blue Angel and Morocco , both from 1930, are often cited as his first sound films, Sternberg had already directed "a startling experiment" in asynchronous sound techniques with his 1929 Thunderbolt . Singer Lucie Mannheim

272-624: A promiscuous cabaret singer. During filming, Sternberg altered dialogue, added scenes and modified cast characterizations that "gave the script an entirely new dimension." The professor's descent from sexual infatuation to jealous rage and insanity was entirely Sternberg's invention. In order to maximize the film's profitability, The Blue Angel was filmed in both German and English, shot in tandem for efficiency. The shooting spanned 11 weeks, from 4 November 1929 to 22 January 1930, at an estimated budget of $ 500,000—remarkably expensive for an UFA production of that period. During filming, although he

340-542: A psychological development in Dietrich's Lola from mere sensual passivity to a more forceful fatalism about the nature of her desires. Lola's first instinct is to accept the Professor's paternal protection and her last is to affirm her natural instincts, not as coquettish expedients but as the very terms by which she expresses her existence. Thus, as the Professor has been defeated by Lola's beauty, Lola has been ennobled by

408-565: A series of new Mabuse films, which were produced by Brauner (including the remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse ), though Lang did not direct any of the sequels. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, and it was his final project as director. In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard 's film Contempt . On February 8, 1960, Lang received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to

476-644: A strategic alliance to produce feature films from the Dark Castle production slate at the world's oldest film studio. International co-productions made in Babelsberg include Quentin Tarantino 's Inglourious Basterds (released 2009), Roman Polanski 's The Ghost Writer (2010), Brian De Palma's Passion (2012), George Clooney 's The Monuments Men (2014), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016). In 2019,

544-640: A version of Ferenc Molnár 's Liliom , starring Charles Boyer . That was Lang's only film in French (excluding the French version of Testament ). He then moved to the United States. Lang made twenty-two features in his 20-year American career, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood , and occasionally producing his films as an independent. He became a naturalized citizen of

612-597: Is a professor at the local Gymnasium (high school for students expected to proceed to university) in Weimar Germany . The boys disrespect and play pranks on him. Rath punishes several of his students for circulating photographs of the beautiful Lola Lola, the headliner at the local cabaret called The Blue Angel. Hoping to catch the boys at the club, Rath goes there later that evening. He does find some students there, but while chasing them, he also finds Lola backstage and becomes infatuated with her. When he returns to

680-557: Is based on Heinrich Mann 's 1905 novel Professor Unrat ( Professor Filth ) and set in an unspecified northern German port city. The Blue Angel presents the tragic transformation of a respectable professor into a cabaret clown and his descent into madness. The film was the first feature-length German sound film and brought Dietrich international fame. It also introduced her signature song, Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann's " Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It) ". The film

748-482: Is considered a central film in the genre. One of Lang's most praised films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), known for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame 's face. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in

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816-590: Is considered a classic of German cinema. The film was shot simultaneously in German- and English- language versions . Though the English version was once considered a lost film , a print was discovered in a German film archive, restored and screened at San Francisco's Berlin and Beyond film festival on January 19, 2009. The German version is considered to be "obviously superior"; it is longer and not marred by actors struggling with English pronunciation. Immanuel Rath

884-490: Is credited with launching or developing many different genres of film. Philip French of The Observer believed that Lang helped craft the "entertainment war flick" and that his interpretation of the story of Bonnie and Clyde "helped launch the Hollywood film noir". Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute believed he set the "blueprint for the serial killer movie" through M . In December 2021, Lang

952-463: Is double-edged in a way Sternberg could not have anticipated when he undertook the project. The rise of Lola Lola and fall of Professor Immanuel Rath in reel [ sic ] life is paralleled in the real life by the rise of Marlene Dietrich and the fall of Emil Jannings..." </ref> The Blue Angel was scheduled for its Berlin premiere on 1 April 1930, but UFA owner and industrialist Alfred Hugenberg , unhappy with socialist Heinrich Mann's association with

1020-555: Is enraged to the point of insanity. He attempts to strangle Lola, but Mazeppa and others subdue him and lock him in a straitjacket . Later that night, Rath is released and he revisits his old classroom. Rejected, humiliated and destitute, he dies clutching the desk at which he once taught. The film also features the famous carillon of the Garrison Church at Potsdam playing " Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit " ("Always Be True and Faithful") as well as an orchestral version of

1088-421: Is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey , but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. During the climactic final scene in M , Lang allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. Lang, who

1156-462: Is making love to the cabaret strongman Mazeppa, Sternberg declines to show Rath, now a madman, at the moment when he is violently subdued by the authorities and placed in a straitjacket. Sternberg rewards the degraded Professor Rath for having "achieved a moment of masculine beauty [by] crowing like a maddened rooster" at Lola's deception: "Sternberg will not cheapen that moment by degrading a man who has been defeated." Sternberg presents "the spectacle of

1224-602: The Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema . In 1920, Lang met his future second wife, the writer Thea von Harbou . She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler ("Dr. Mabuse

1292-585: The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda . In banning the film, Goebbels stated that the film "showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence", and that the film posed a threat to public health and safety. Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and co-screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with

1360-669: The Soviet occupation zone of Germany and Babelsberg Studio was made its headquarters the next year. DEFA became the state-owned film production company in East Germany , producing over 800 feature films, including 150 children's films until 1990. In addition, over 600 films were made for television from 1959 to 1990. The DEFA period was honored by a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art ( MOMA ) in New York City in 2005. After

1428-732: The Technical University of Vienna , where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. He left Vienna in 1910 in order to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa, and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris . At the outbreak of World War I , Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian Army and fought in Russia and Romania , where he

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1496-445: The 1920s which had ultimately been directed by Joe May ), so Lang returned to Germany to make his "Indian Epic" (consisting of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb ). Following the production, Brauner was preparing for a remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding a new original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), whose success led to

1564-573: The Gambler," 1922 – which ran for over four hours, in two parts in the original version, and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy), the five-hour Die Nibelungen (1924), the dystopian film Metropolis (1927), and the science fiction film Woman in the Moon (1929). Metropolis went far over budget and nearly destroyed UFA, which was bought by right-wing businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg . It

1632-511: The German bourgeoisie." The film proved to be "an instant international success." Dietrich, at Sternberg's insistence, was brought to Hollywood under contract to Paramount, where the studio would film and release Morocco in 1930 before The Blue Angel would appear in American theatres in 1931. The Blue Angel , ostensibly a story of the downfall of a respectable middle-age academic at

1700-678: The Heart with Willy Fritsch was shot in the "Tonkreuz" and in Hungary in 1929, although this was followed in April 1930 by the premiere of The Blue Angel (which was made at Babelsberg) by Josef von Sternberg , with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in the main roles. In the 1930s and 1940s, Babelsberg was famous for its music and revue films , such as Congress Dances (1931), La Habanera (1937), The Woman of My Dreams (1944). From 1933 to 1945, around 1,000 feature films were made in

1768-485: The Hollywood studios before Pearl Harbor" as it is "clean and concentrated, elegant and precise, pointed without being preachy." His American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, although the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular. Scarlet Street (1945), one of his films featuring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett ,

1836-579: The Marriage Registry Office in Charlottenburg , Berlin, Lang married a theater actress, Elisabeth Rosenthal, who died on 25 September 1920, in their bathtub, under mysterious circumstances, of a single gunshot wound, deemed to have been fired by Lang's Browning revolver , from World War I. Lang's writing stint was brief, as he soon started to work as a director at the German film studio UFA , and later Nero-Film , just as

1904-522: The Nazis in the early 1930s, and later joined the Nazi party in 1940. After he discovered von Harbou in bed with Ayi Tendulkar , an Indian journalist and student 17 years younger than her, they soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under the racist Nuremberg Laws he would be identified as half-Jewish even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he

1972-435: The Professor's jealousy..." Biographer John Baxter echoes this the key thematic sequence that reveals "the tragic dignity" of Rath's downfall: "[T]he tragedy of Immanuel Rath was not that he lost his head over a woman, but that he could not reconcile the loss of power with the acquisition of freedom." When Rath is forced to relinquish "his authority [over] his students, he sinks into alienated apathy…Rath's failure to grasp

2040-453: The United States in 1939. Signing first with MGM Studios, Lang's crime drama Fury (1936) saw Spencer Tracy cast as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. However, in Fury , he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticize racism, which was his original intention. By

2108-504: The Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang was born in Vienna , as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940), an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang ( née Schlesinger; 1864–1920). His mother was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism. His father

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2176-480: The amount of 25,000 Reichsmarks. Sternberg first saw 29-year-old Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich at a music revue called the Zwei Krawatten (Two Neckties), which was produced by dramatist Georg Kaiser . Sternberg began immediately to groom Dietrich into "the woman he saw she could become." Critic Andrew Sarris remarks on the irony of the relationship: "Josef von Sternberg is too often subordinated to

2244-548: The banks had closed by the time the meeting was over. Lang claimed that, after selling his wife's jewelry, he fled by train to Paris that evening, leaving most of his money and personal possessions behind. However, his passport of the time showed that he traveled to and from Germany a few times during 1933. Lang left Berlin for good on July 31, 1933, four months after his meeting with Goebbels and his initial departure. He moved to Paris, having divorced Thea von Harbou , who stayed behind, earlier in 1933. In Paris, Lang filmed

2312-566: The cabaret the following evening to return a pair of panties that was smuggled into his coat by one of his students, he spends the night with her. The next morning, reeling from his night of passion, Rath arrives late to school to find his classroom in chaos; the principal is furious and demands Rath's resignation. Rath resigns his position at the school and marries Lola. Their happiness is short-lived, however, as Rath becomes humiliatingly dependent on Lola. Over several years, he sinks lower and lower, first selling dirty postcards, and then becoming

2380-408: The chance opened to him…is portrayed in terms of his increasing silence, as he sinks more and more sullenly into the guise of the ridiculous, ironically named clown…In the end, the authoritarian master of language is bereft of articulate speech", finally erupting into a "paraoxysmic cockscrow" when he discovers that he has been cuckolded by Lola. When Rath, in a jealous rage, enters the room where Lola

2448-632: The chemist Carl Moritz Schleussner of the photochemicals firm Schleussner AG in Frankfurt/Main . Carl Schleussner had been involved since 1896 in producing negative film stock for Röntgen photography soon after its discovery. In February 1908 Carl Schleussner bought a majority share in Deutsche Bioscop as a film manufacturing, duplicating and sales operation, for a two thirds share of 140,000 marks , with one third provided by Jules Greenbaum and his brother Max. Ownership of Deutsche Bioscop

2516-515: The cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Finding it difficult to find congenial production conditions and backers in Hollywood, particularly as his health declined with age, Lang contemplated retirement. The German producer Artur Brauner had expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (from an original story by Thea von Harbou, that Lang had developed in

2584-469: The end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse . Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film, as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character. A screening of the film was cancelled by Joseph Goebbels , and it was later banned by

2652-553: The events. With this, the Babelsberg film studio was working on a part of its own story. Recent co-productions of Studio Babelsberg include The Matrix Resurrections (2021), Uncharted (2022) and Retribution (2022). Recent TV series are Babylon Berlin (2016-2022), Dark (2017-2020) and 1899 (2021/2022). In 2021, the largest permanent virtual production stage in Europe was set up in Studio Babelsberg for

2720-629: The fall of the Berlin Wall , the Treuhand took over the responsibility for the privatisation of the former DEFA. In August 1992, the Treuhandanstalt sold the former DEFA film studios in Babelsberg to the French group Compagnie Générale des Eaux (later absorbed into Vivendi Universal ). Over the following 12 years the company invested around €500 million updating the studio's infrastructure. In July 2004, Vivendi sold Studio Babelsberg to

2788-487: The film team of the science fiction silent film Woman in the Moon (1929), completely made in the Babelsberg studios, a famous achievement: the countdown was born in Babelsberg. The first sound stage in Europe, the "Tonkreuz", was built during 1929 in Babelsberg, to make use of the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film process to which Ufa acquired the rights. Ufa's first successful full-sound film Melodie des Herzens / Melody of

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2856-427: The hands of a pretty young cabaret singer, is Sternberg's "most brutal and least humorous" film of his œuvre . The harshness of the narrative "transcends the trivial genre of bourgeois male corrupted by bohemian female" and the complexity of Sternberg's character development rejects "the old stereotype of the seductress" who ruthlessly cuckolds her men. Sarris outlines Sternberg's "complex interplay" between Lola and

2924-566: The influential M (1931), a film noir precursor. His 1929 film Woman in the Moon showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket , and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad (a rocket standing upright against a tall building before launch having been slowly rolled into place) and the rocket-launch countdown clock. His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and after moving to Hollywood in 1934, Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in

2992-576: The investment company FBB ( Filmbetriebe Berlin Brandenburg GmbH ), which has Carl Woebcken and Christoph Fisser as shareholders. In spring of 2005, the restructured studio presented an initial public offering and began trading on the free market. 2007 was the most profitable year since the studio's privatization in 1992 – 12 feature films were shot at Studio Babelsberg, among them Valkyrie with Tom Cruise , The International with Clive Owen and The Reader with Kate Winslet . In 2008, Studio Babelsberg and Hollywood producer Joel Silver formed

3060-596: The large studio (which is now known as the "Marlene Dietrich Halle") in 1926 for the major film production of Metropolis by Fritz Lang . The " German Expressionism in film " is closely connected with Babelsberg. Cameraman Karl Freund invented the so-called " Unchained camera technique " while working on the film The Last Laugh (1924), directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau . Numerous filmmakers such as Marlene Dietrich , Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder learned at that time in Babelsberg and began their world careers here. Spaceflight owes director Fritz Lang and

3128-521: The love story Dream Factory conquered the European cinema screens. The starting point is true events: the construction of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the German-German border on August 13, 1961, brings the international co-productions to a close, affects the film studio and is the stroke of fate for the two main characters, a German extra and a French dance double, who are separated by

3196-464: The major European Netflix production 1899 . The studio is operated by Dark Bay GmbH, which is managed by Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Netflix and the investment bank of the state of Brandenburg financed the project. In order to raise the necessary funds, Netflix has committed to realizing several projects in the Dark Bay studio in the coming years. The Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs funded

3264-683: The motion picture industry, located at 1600 Vine Street . Lang died from a stroke on August 2, 1976, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles . While his career had ended without fanfare, Lang's American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma , such as François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette . Truffaut wrote that Lang, especially in his American career,

3332-577: The mystique of Marlene Dietrich...the Svengali-Trilby publicity that enshrouded The Blue Angel – and the other six Sternberg-Dietrich film collaborations – obscured the more meaningful merits not only of these particular works but of Sternberg's career as a whole." After arriving at Berlin's UFA studios, Sternberg declined an offer to direct a film about Grigori Rasputin , the Russian spiritual advisor to Czar Nicholas II 's family. However, he

3400-465: The platform Cinespace Film Studios . In 1911, the film production company Deutsche Bioscope bought the current site in Babelsberg and built its first glasshouse film studio (early studios designed to take advantage of natural light) in Neubabelsberg. The company had been originally formed by Jules Greenbaum in 1899 and incorporated in 1902. As his business increased, Greenbaum made a deal with

3468-646: The production, blocked release. Production manager Pommer defended the film, and Mann issued a statement distancing his anti-bourgeois critique from Sternberg's more sympathetic portrayal of professor Immanuel Rath in his movie version. Sternberg, who declared himself apolitical, had departed the country in February, shortly after the film was completed, and conflict ensued. Hugenberg ultimately relented on grounds of financial expediency, still convinced that Sternberg had concealed within The Blue Angel "a parody of

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3536-434: The professor: " The Blue Angel achieved its most electrifying effects through careful grading and construction. When Dietrich sings "Falling in Love Again" for the first time, the delivery is playful, flirtatious, and self-consciously seductive. The final rendition is harsher, colder, and remorseless. The difference in delivery is not related to the old sterotype of the seductress finally showing her true colors, but rather to

3604-408: The project with around two million euros. 52°23′13″N 13°07′10″E  /  52.38694°N 13.11944°E  / 52.38694; 13.11944 Fritz Lang Friedrich Christian Anton Lang ( Austrian German pronunciation: [ˈfriːdʁɪç ˈkrɪsti̯a(ː)n ˈantɔn ˈlaŋ] ; December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976), better known as Fritz Lang ( pronounced [frɪts ˈlaŋ] ),

3672-675: The song. The original melody was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for Papageno's aria " Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen " from The Magic Flute . In the German Reich and subsequently the Weimar Republic , the lyrics of " Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit " symbolized Prussian virtues : "Use always fidelity and honesty / Up to your cold grave / And stray not one inch / From the ways of the Lord". By 1929, Sternberg had completed

3740-508: The studios and on the studio lot. Under the direction of Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels , the studio churned out hundreds of films including Leni Riefenstahl 's openly propagandistic Triumph of the Will (1935). The virulently anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süss ( The Jew Süss ) (1940), was also made at Babelsberg. On May 17, 1946, the DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) was established in

3808-516: The time Fury was released, Lang had been involved in the creation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, working with Otto Katz , a Czech who was a Comintern spy. He made four films with an explicitly anti-Nazi theme, Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946). Man Hunt , wrote Dave Kehr in 2009, "may be the best" of the "many interventionist films produced by

3876-421: Was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spies (1928) and Woman in the Moon , produced by Lang's own company. In 1931, independent producer Seymour Nebenzahl hired Lang to direct M for Nero-Film. His first "talking" picture , considered by many film scholars to be a masterpiece of the early sound era, M is a disturbing story of a child murderer ( Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who

3944-455: Was an Austrian-American film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism , he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute . He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic science-fiction film Metropolis (1927) and

4012-556: Was described as a "lapsed Catholic." He was baptized on December 28, 1890, at the Schottenkirche in Vienna. He had an elder brother, Adolf (1884–1961). Lang's parents were of Moravian descent. At one point, he noted that he was “born [a] Catholic and very puritan". Ultimately describing himself as an atheist , Lang believed that religion was important for teaching ethics. After finishing school, Lang briefly attended

4080-479: Was favored by UFA producer Erich Pommer for the part of Lola, with support from leading man Emil Jannings, but Sternberg vetoed her as insufficiently glamorous for a major production. Sternberg also rejected author Heinrich Mann's actress-girlfriend Trude Hesterberg . Brigitte Helm , seriously considered by Sternberg, was not available for the part. Sternberg and Pommer settled on stage and film actress Käthe Haack for

4148-421: Was greatly underappreciated by "cinema historians and critics" who "deny him any genius when he 'signs' spy movies ... war movies ... or simple thrillers." Filmmakers that were influenced by his work include George Lucas , Jacques Rivette , William Friedkin , Steven Spielberg , Christopher Nolan , Luis Buñuel , Osamu Tezuka , Alfred Hitchcock , Satyajit Ray , Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick . Lang

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4216-438: Was intrigued with a story by socialist reformer Heinrich Mann entitled Professor Unrat ( Professor Filth ) (1905), which critiques "the false morality and corrupt values of the German middle class," and agreed to adapt it. The narrative of Mann's story was largely abandoned by Sternberg (with Mann's consent), retaining only scenes describing an affair between a college professor of high rectitude who becomes infatuated with

4284-457: Was known for being hard to work with, epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical Germanic film director, a type embodied also by Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger ; Lang wore a monocle , adding to the stereotype. In the films of his German period, Lang produced a coherent oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to film noir , with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. At

4352-440: Was raised as such. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him – apologetically – that The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was being banned but, nevertheless, he was so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially Metropolis ), that he offered Lang the position of head of German film studio UFA. Lang said it was during that meeting he had decided to leave for Paris – but that

4420-407: Was still the nominal star of the film (with top billing), Jannings became jealous over the growing closeness between Sternberg and Dietrich and engaged in histrionics and threatened quit the production. The Blue Angel was to be his last great cinematic moment, and it was also one of UFA's last successful films. Sarris comments on this double irony: "The ultimately tragic irony of The Blue Angel

4488-559: Was the subject for BBC Radio 4's In Our Time . The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Lang's films, including Human Desire and Man Hunt . Works Papers Metadata Texts Der blaue Engel The Blue Angel ( German : Der blaue Engel ) is a 1930 German musical comedy-drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich , Emil Jannings and Kurt Gerron . Written by Carl Zuckmayer , Karl Vollmöller and Robert Liebmann , with uncredited contributions by Sternberg, it

4556-647: Was transferred to Schleussner AG and registered on 27 February 1908: Schleussner bought out the Greenbaums' remaining share of Deutsche Bioscop in 1909. The first filming in Babelsberg began as early as February 1912 for The Dance of Death by Danish director Urban Gad . In 1920 the Deutsche Bioscop Gesellschaft merged with Erich Pommer 's Decla-Film GmbH to form " Decla-Bioscop ". In 1928, Decla-Bioscop merged with Universum Film AG (Ufa) which had been founded in 1917. This company built

4624-543: Was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye, the first of many vision issues he would face in his lifetime. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla Film , Erich Pommer 's Berlin-based production company. On 13 February 1919, in

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