He was a calming influence in the often jerky cultural politics of the city of Berlin, in an often undecided, hapless undertaking, the Berlinale, which was striving to become a real world cinema festival. For many years, Hans Helmut Prinzler was responsible for their film history retrospective, together with his colleagues from the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation, which in 2000 became the Berlin Film Museum on Potsdamer Platz. The retros were a reliable, vital element that magically attracted you in the stress of the festival.
Working in the Prinzler team was an exciting, essential experience. I was exhibited for the first time in 1981, ten late summer days in Berlin, the 1982 retrospective was being prepared. Film prints were ordered from all over the world, examined and shown to us, which we were then supposed to write about. We saw “The Woman You Long For” with Marlene Dietrich, “Conflict” with Humphrey Bogart, “Possessed” with Joan Crawford, “Interrupted Melody” with Eleanor Parker. “Rebellion of Emotions”, the title of the retro and the volume, was dedicated to the German Hollywood director Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt.
Film historian and publicist, that’s how Prinzler described himself on his website (hhprinzler.de), where he regularly presented new books and DVDs until the end. He was born on September 23, 1938 in Berlin. From 1958 to 1966 he studied journalism, theater studies and German in Munich and Berlin. From 1979 he was head of department at the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation and from 2000 to 2006 director of the film museum. “The new logo was an M,” he wrote at the opening, “it stood for Museum, but also for Marlene, ‘Metropolis’ and Fritz Lang’s big film ‘M'”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. Since 1996, Prinzler has been a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, in the film and media arts section.
In the 1960s and 1970s, cinema in Germany received a strong boost, as did filmmaking and writing about films. They wanted, quite vehemently, to catch up on what had happened in France with the Cahiers du cinema happened, whose authors then became the directors of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard, Truffaut, Rivette. People wanted to revitalize the whole of cinema, the old and the new, art and commerce, film history and experimentation, to reaffirm an old passion for cinema. Hans Helmut Prinzler promoted these impulses, was a stimulus, adviser, mediator for young, sometimes impetuous authors such as Norbert Grob, Norbert Jochum, Karsten Witte. He was what was once called – a strong, bombastic word – a mentor.
Hans Helmut Prinzler was a film lover without a rigid canon
A mentor who loved the cinema, also the spectacular thing about him, the German of course, because of his job, but also Hollywood. The Hollywood that became a film exile, into which many German filmmakers were forced in their thirties – this exile was of particular interest to the Kinemathek with exhibitions for Franz Lederer and Hertha Thiele, the brothers Robert and Curt Siodmak.
Hans Helmut Prinzler shared lifelong solidarity and friendship with the (then) young German filmmakers, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Peter Lilienthal and Rudolf Thome. In 1979 he documented “Film in the Federal Republic of Germany” in a volume with Hans Günther Pflaum, in 1993 the “History of German Film” – two standard works.
The Film bei Hanser series was also created with the support of the Kinemathek, and Prinzler often compiled the film and bibliography for it. It began with Truffaut and ended in 1990 with Murnau, Woody Allen was there, Herbert Achternbusch, Bogart and Kubrick, Schroeter and Bertolucci, Rossellini and Resnais. For a few years, it was thought, including in German publishers, that there was a strong interest in cinema here, comparable to that in France… today one can only marvel at the volumes that were planned at the time, right down to Yasujiro Ozu!
Hans Helmut Prinzler was a film lover without a rigid canon, he liked going to the cinema, including the new action cinema, he let himself be seduced and always saw the pictures on the screen in the context of their society, their history. He liked listening when filmmakers talked about their experiences, with old King Vidor as well as with Klaus Wildenhahn. In 2007 he made the film “Eye in Eye” with Michael Althen: ten filmmakers are confronted with ten works from German cinema history.
Film legends like Jane Russell also came to his legendary Berlinale parties
Team Prinzler, that was a real complicity, a family. The party that he organized with his wife Antje Goldau at every Berlinale was legendary – only Jane Russell, to whom a retrospective was dedicated in 1991, grumbled, it is said, because the lift broke down that evening and she had to climb a few stairs.
Film historian and publicist, you have to see it in the broadest sense. Take time for film history, give others the time to get an idea of the individual film, of the cinema, to reflect on its surroundings. Unthinkable today, when digitization and the Internet demand speed and short-sightedness, aggressive getting to the point. Hans Helmut Prinzler possessed what Walter Benjamin calls the “gift of listening” in his wonderful text “The Storyteller” – a gift that disappears in the 20th century, and with it “the community of listeners disappears. Telling stories is always the Art of telling them on, and that is lost when the stories are no longer remembered.”
In the picture on his website, the narrator Hans Helmut Prinzler looks curiously shyly into the camera, behind him you can see the beautiful poster for Yasujiro Ozu’s “Banshun / Later Spring” on the wall, which Gerhard Ullmann designed in the Munich Film Museum, the famous Radler -Sequence with Setsuko Hara. Hans Helmut Prinzler loved Ozu and Hara, the intertwining of movement and stillness that is the secret of cinema. A secret he pursued throughout his life. Hans Helmut Prinzler died on Sunday at the age of 84.