Screening & Symposium
A two-day event exploring and celebrating the work and legacy of Lotte Eisner, author of the seminal text on Weimar silent film The Haunted Screen (orig.1952). A film critic, journalist and, for over thirty years, archivist at the Cinémathèque Française, Eisner was born in Berlin in 1896 as the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. She died in Paris in 1983, having fled there in 1933.
Eisner spent her career writing about other people and collecting and archiving their work, first as a journalist in Berlin and then as an archivist in Paris. This symposium is an opportunity to focus entirely on Eisner’s own outstanding contribution to film history, from her early days writing for the
Film-Kurier in Berlin, through her books,
The Haunted Screen,
FW Murnau (1964) and
Fritz Lang (1976), to her thirty-five year career working for the Cinémathèque Française.
Following a
prelude screening at the Goethe-Institut London of Wim Wenders’ Palme d’Or-winning
Paris Texas (1983-4), which he dedicated to Eisner, the symposium begins on Friday 26th October with an introduction and screening in the Birkbeck Cinema of Sohrab Shahid Saless’ extended film interview with Eisner,
The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner (1979). The event continues at King’s College London on Saturday 27th October with rare audio recordings of Eisner, and presentations from Professor Janet Bergstrom (UCLA), Professor Michael Wedel (Cinepoetics Berlin/Film University Potsdam), Naomi DeCelles (UC Santa Barbara) and Julia Eisner (King’s College London). The symposium focuses among other topics on Eisner’s writing on Murnau, and features a screening of Murnau’s
City Girl (1930).
Wednesday 26 September, 19.00:
Paris Texas (Wenders 1983/4): Goethe-Institut London, 50 Princes Gate, Exhibition Road, SW7 2PH
Friday 26 October, 18.00
Day 1: Screening:
The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner
Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD
Saturday 27 October, 9.30 – 18.00
Day 2: Symposium
Nash Lecture Theatre, Room K2.31, King’s Building, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
Supported by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service); Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI); Goethe-Institut London, King’s College London; and the German Screen Studies Network.
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