CINEMA: Europe’s Oldest Studios Enter Digital Age

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Francesca B. Dziadek

BERLIN, Jul 23 1996 (IPS) - The oldest European motion picture site, Berlin’s ‘Babelsberg’, is transforming itself into the continent’s most modern multi-media resource centre and film studios.

Made famous by the classic German films producer here in the 1920’s, such as ‘The Blue Angel’ starring Marlene Dietrich, the place is now set to become “Europe’s answer to Hollywood by the year 2000”, according to project managers.

Babelsberg has a rich history. Here, Fritz Lang directed ‘Metropolis’ in 1926, a classic of the German expressionist genre and one of the greatest box office flops in cinema history.

Lang had employed 800 actors and more than 30,000 extras. The film toke close to a year to shoot. It cost so much that the German film industry had to be bailed out by Hollywood, and Germany had to allow increasing import quotas of American films.

Had today’s digital technology been available to Lang, he could have employed some of the ‘computer assisted’ methods to ‘create’ crowds – saving large amounts of time and money.

Like it or not, the computer has taken over the process of image production and it is here to stay. In the past century, movie making has gone from the silent age, to sound, the hand-held camera revolution of the 1950’s to the manufacturing of image with the advances of telecommunications and information technology as we have seen in the 1990’s with the first experimentation of this kind.

The dinosaurs in ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘Forrest Gump’ shaking President John Kennedy’s hand and the animation classic ‘Toy Story’ were only made possible by the latest developments in multi- media digital technology, which are bringing about as big a revolution in film making as sound or colour did when they first became possible.

The Babelsberg film studios were set up in 1917, as the UFA Film Fabrik. In the 1920’s, classic films like Lang’s ‘Mabuse’ and Erich von Sternberg’s ‘The Blue Angel’ were produced here during the complex’s ‘Golden Age’.

During the nazi period the studios became an important nerve- centre of nazi propoganda under Joseph Goebbels, whose last film project ‘Kolberg’ (1945) with 187,000 extras mirrored the extremes of vaingloriousness reached by the regime as the Russian armies were on its doorstep.

The Red Army occupied the site in April 1945. One year later, the UFA had been re-baptised as DEFA, or East German State Studios, and the first anti-nazi propaganda films were made.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, DEFA was privatised and sold to the French conglomerate CGE (Compagnie Generale des Eaux), to redevelop and remodernise the site which was again renamed as today’s ‘Studio Babelsberg’.

Many have already expressed great praise for the facilities available here – Director Francis Ford Coppola has called its mixing studio “the largest in Europe and one of the most advanced in the world”, and director and script writer Billy Wilder said recently, “I am convinced that once again Babelsberg will be among the finest film studios in the world”.

Like most of the rest of East Berlin, the studios now look like a huge building site as massive reconstruction is underway. Indoors though, filming never stops. The German private TV channel RTL is producing soap series here, while feature films are being made made in both old and new sets.

The latest development on the former UFA/DEFA site is the ‘High Tech Centre’, which represents one of the core developments aiming to make the Babelsberg studios fit for the digital age of film making. It will be fully operational from 1988.

“We are now building the state-of-the-art digital media production and post-production service facility for the film industry of the 21st century,” said HTC Director Peter Krieg.

Keyword for the HTC is multimedia. While in the past a computer, TV and hifi system were all separate objects and the postman delivered your letters, increasingly the Internet and data superhighways mean that all these systems become integrated processes, as the E-mail replaces the postman.

“Technically for the first time such a centre is designed around the upcoming broadband (optical fibre) data-superhighway allowing not only access of many services through broadband telecommunication lines but also offering a training and development environment for the media production methodologies of tomorrow,” explained Krieg.

For example, he said, “Oliver Stone was able to check the German version of his latest film, from the United States in real time, and commented on the excellent sound quality.”

But it is not all about technique. The media community moving in will be accommodated in a residential area in a beautiful, lush woody location with newly built residential area, recreation facilities, a film school and, of course, a cybercafe.

In the multi-media digital age of film making you don’t have to “be there”, but it looks like many will be passing through all the same.