Name Lotte Eisner | Role Film critic | |
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Books The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German cinema and the influence of Max Reinhardt, F.W. Murnau Movies Fata Morgana, Portrait Werner Herzog Similar People Werner Herzog, Beate Mainka‑Jellinghaus, Jorg Schmidt‑Reitwein | ||
Lotte H. Eisner (6 March 1896, Berlin – 26 November 1983, Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris) was a German-French film critic, historian, writer and poet. Eisner worked extensively with French film historian and archivist Henri Langlois. She was a mentor to the director Werner Herzog.
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Early life, education and career
She was born Lotte Henriette Regina Eisner in Berlin, the daughter of textile manufacturer Hugo Eisner and his wife Margarethe Feodora Aron. Eisner grew up in a prosperous Jewish middle-class milieu and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Rostock. Her dissertation was on the development of Greek vases. Hans Feld, editor of the film newspaper Filmkurier, invited Eisner to contribute and she became one of the first women film critics in 1927.
Eisner's Jewish background and enthusiasm for German Expressionist cinema made her a target for the Nazis. After Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Eisner fled to France. During World War II, Eisner hid for a time but was caught and interned in the French concentration camp at Gurs in Aquitaine. Eisner managed to escape with forged identity papers and spent the rest of the war in hiding under the assumed name of Louise Escoffier.
Eisner had met Henri Langlois before the war. She now worked closely with him as archivist and chief curator at the Cinémathèque Française from 1945 until her retirement in 1975. Eisner not only saved films from destruction but also helped to conserve costumes, set designs and scripts for the Cinémathèque. Eisner continued to publish essays and reviews in Revue du cinéma, which later became Cahiers du cinéma. In 1952, Eisner published her most highly acclaimed book, L'Écran démoniaque, translated into English as The Haunted Screen in 1969: her study of the influence of the spirit of German Expressionism on cinema. Eisner subsequently published studies of F. W. Murnau (1964) and of Fritz Lang (1977), which Lang collaborated with.
Eisner was alienated from Germany by the death of her mother in Theresienstadt concentration camp, but in the 1970s she became a friend of and mentor of Werner Herzog and other leading young German film makers. When Eisner was gravely ill in 1974, Herzog walked from Munich to Paris in winter. Herzog commented: "It was clear to me that if I did it, Eisner wouldn't die". Eisner appears in Herzog's autobiographical documentary Portrait Werner Herzog (1986).
On her death in 1983, French Minister of Culture Jack Lang declared that the loss of Eisner would be "a great loss for the French cinema" which would be "felt with profound sadness by her numerous friends in the film world."
Posthumously in 1984, Eisner's memoir Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland (I Once Had a Beautiful Fatherland) was published. The title is a quotation from the poem In der Fremde (Abroad) by Heinrich Heine.