Architects build for eternity, at least that’s what they think. Film architects are more realistic, they work for transience: their constructions serve the moment, after the end of shooting they are dismantled, scrapped or destroyed. Rolf Zehetbauer knew that, of course, but he still decided to become a film architect. He built the grandest and most megalomaniac sets; only to take it apart again a short time later, almost like a child playing with building blocks. You probably also need childish curiosity and wild imagination if you regularly venture into new worlds and epochs, climb to lofty heights or dive into wet depths.
He created fantasies and the space patrol Orion
How else could he have created the fairytale kingdom of Fantastica from The Neverending Story or the command center stocked with irons and pencil sharpeners in Space Patrol Orion? The surreal harbor landscape in Fassbinder’s “Querelle” or the 1930s world of the “Comedian Harmonists”?
Rolf Zehetbauer liked to use the hardware store to equip the “Space Patrol Orion”. So the microphones on the spaceship were actually bathtub enemas. Here is a film scene with Ursular Lillig, Claus Holm, Dietmar Schönherr and Wolfgang Volz
(Photo: imago images/Mary Evans)
Rolf Zehetbauer was born in Munich in 1929. After the Second World War he studied art and worked as a set assistant at Bavaria Film. Soon he was promoted to production designer, working on films like “Scampolo” with Romy Schneider or “Nachts, when the Teufel came” with Mario Adorf. In 1963 he became the studio’s chief set designer. In the years that followed, international productions such as “The Last Escape”, “The Odessa Files” and “The Snake Egg” by Ingmar Bergman were also made there.
“I try it in English,” he said at the Oscars
However, his most famous film was to be a film-musical that combined the political developments in Germany in the 1930s with the artificial world of a number cabaret: “Cabaret” starring Liza Minelli became a world hit and won eight Oscars. Rolf Zehetbauer won in the “Art Direction” category, together with his colleagues Hans Jürgen Kiebach and Herbert Strabel. It was also Zehetbauer who received the Oscar in March 1973 in Los Angeles. “I try it in English,” he said with a Bavarian accent, pointing out that this achievement would not have been possible without director Bob Fosse.
Teamwork was important to him, he left big performances to others. He was too busy for that, a film database shows 150 productions for him. In September 1981, Wolfgang Petersen’s war film “Das Boot” celebrated its premiere. Rolf Zehetbauer built several submarine models for it, and the film was shot in the studio in Geiselgasteig and in the French port city of La Rochelle. The film was shown in theaters worldwide and was nominated for six Oscars.
Zehetbauer also designed the scenery for the “Neverending Story”.
(Photo: Constantin Film)
Film craftsmen often claim that the greatest compliment is when their work is inconspicuous, when the costumes, hairstyles, props or structures are so coherent that they make a big picture. In the case of “Das Boot” that didn’t quite work out: an original model from the film has been an attraction in the Bavaria Filmstadt for decades, generations of students squeezed through the narrow submarine tube.
In the 1990s he planned the exhibition rooms of the Deutsches Museum Bonn, in 2004 he redesigned the Hacker tent at the Oktoberfest, and since then visitors have been drinking their beer in “Heaven of Bavaria”. On January 23, Rolf Zehetbauer died at the age of 92, and his family thanked him in an obituary “for the extraordinary time we had together.” Some of his films have survived many an architect’s temple, so they seem made for eternity after all.