Hans Cürlis

Biography

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.

Movies & TV Shows

1. German Film Award (1951) — Self

Directed

1. Der Film entdeckte Kunstwerke indianischer Vorzeit (1951) — Director
2. Schaffende Hände: Lovis Corinth (1922) — Director
3. Schaffende Hände: Wassily Kandinsky in der Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf (1926) — Director
4. Schaffende Hände: George Grosz (1923) — Director
5. Fleckfieber droht! (1946) — Director
6. Vitamins in the Street (1946) — Director
7. Schwarz - Weiß - Gelb (1949) — Director
8. The Lower Danube (1929) — Director
9. Alceo Dossena (1929) — Director
10. Alexander Calder (1929) — Director
11. Schaffende Hände: Max Oppenheimer (1924) — Director
12. Drei Meister schneiden in Holz (1952) — Director
13. Bach - Mozart - Beethoven (1942) — Director
14. People and Books (1929) — Director
15. Die Weltgeschichte als Kolonialgeschichte (1926) — Director
16. Geheimnisse der Mumien (1934) — Director