Jun 15, 2010 - In 1922 Hanns Walter Kornblum produced a long and comprehensive educational film on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity that made. • • 2.3k Downloads • Abstract In 1922 Hanns Walter Kornblum produced a long and comprehensive educational film on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that made extensive use of trick shots. His film was considered to be a milestone in the history of film and also in the popularization of science. Although the original film has been lost, I have reconstructed its content and its reception by members of the German film industry and cultural sector, laymen, scientists and academics, and politically motivated opponents based upon the large collection of newspaper clippings that was assembled by the antirelativist physicist Ernst Gehrcke. On April 2, 1922, a film entitled “The Basic Principles of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” premiered at the Frankfurt Trade Fair. This film is virtually unknown today and seems to have been lost: Of the two-to-three-hour film only a thirty-minute excerpt has been preserved. Two of its fascinating aspects are, first, that no other educational film in science reached such a wide audience at the time, and second, that no other educational film in any area was so controversial and discussed by such a broad cross section of German society. My main focus here is not the film itself, but to examine how this educational film became a box-office hit and simultaneously the subject of heated public debate. I first sketch the making and content of the film and then clarify some aspects of the public controversy it generated. My discussion and analysis is based on a collection of thousands of newspaper clippings that the physicist Ernst Gehrcke (1878–1960) assembled in the early 1920s. Gehrcke, a fierce opponent of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, attempted to use these newspaper clippings to expose the success of Einstein’s theory as a result of the “mass suggestion” that the “propaganda” of the daily press induced in the German public. He organized these newspaper clippings thematically in folders containing over seventy reports on the “Einstein film.” The Making of the Film. The “Einstein film,” as it was called for publicity purposes before Einstein (1879–1955) asked the film company to choose “a more fitting, objective title,” was the brainchild of Hanns Walter Kornblum (1878–1970, figure ), the former director of the educational film department of the German Film Society ( Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft, Deulig), who became committed to its production. It seems that neither Deulig nor other established film companies with educational-film departments, such as Universum Film AG (Ufa), wanted to produce a film about Einstein’s theory of relativity, presumably because of the financial risks involved in such an undertaking. For this reason, Kornblum founded the Colonna Film Company ( Colonna Filmgesellschaft) in Berlin in 1922 for the purpose of using film to portray “complete scientific fields and theories of general interest in a logically structured and comprehensible way.”. Einstein himself maintained that he had nothing to do with the film, and a newspaper even reported that he had explicitly distanced himself from it. However, on a private sound recording that the Kornblums made to document their family history, ninety-year-old director Hanns Walter Kornblum reported that he had approached Einstein (figure ) as early as 1919 with the idea of making a film on his theory of relativity, and Einstein had assured him that he would look over the screenplay—provided that this would not be made public. I will comment later on Einstein’s peculiar behavior here. The educational film ( Lehrfilm or Kulturfilm) in Germany was in its infancy in the 1920s. From 1895, following the invention of cinematography, short silent films were projected onto screens and shown to the public. However, the two major German companies that produced educational films, Deulig and Ufa, were founded only in 1916 and 1917, respectively. In general, educational films constituted a rather small fraction of the films that were produced, and were closely connected to the educational-reform movement that often spread progressive ideas in German society. Thus, in addition to the large number of nature films, a substantial fraction of the educational films that were produced in the 1910s and 1920s dealt with the organization of work or personal hygiene. There were a few films on mathematics and physics, but these were often less than a tenth as long as Kornblum’s 2,045-meter film on Einstein’s theory of relativity, and treated more restricted topics such as the Pythagorean theorem (Ufa, 126 meters). After Kornblum set up his film company, the success of his new project depended upon the technical feasibility of his ambitious plan. In 1922 his film on Einstein’s theory of relativity was one of the longest educational films ever made; its screening lasted two to three hours, depending upon how many breaks were included for accompanying verbal explanations. It had the longest trick sequences of any film in its genre at the time, some of which were produced using techniques that were developed especially for this purpose (figure ). Last but not least, Kornblum’s film dared to present an abstract field of theoretical physics to the German public, and therefore ventured into entirely new thematic territory for educational films. Fig. 3 Hanns Walter Kornblum (1878–1970, right) and his assistants making a trick shot.
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