Curt Courant

Curt Courant (11 May 1899 – 20 April 1968) was a German-American cinematographer whose work includes more than 100 German and international films from the silent and early sound eras.

In 1927, Courant signed with Ufa and went on to make grandiose exotic spectacles such as Secrets of the Orient (1927/28) and The White Devil (1929), but also melodramas, including Kurt Bernhardt's The Woman One Longs For (1929) starring Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Kortner.

After the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, the Jewish Courant left Germany and gained an international reputation with a number of British and French films.

In Great Britain, he worked for Alfred Hitchcock on the thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), for Berthold Viertel on The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), a fascinating combination of documentary realism and spiritual allegory, and on John Brahms' remake of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1936).

Particularly in technical professions, American trade unions were keen to protect the interests of their members, which is why emigrated cameramen such as Courant or Eugen Schüfftan were rarely officially employed in film productions.