Weissensee Studios
The two main studios comprising the complex were almost next-door neighbours, and this has given rise to confusion as to the identity of the film companies involved and which premises they leased or owned.
The studio buildings discussed in this article retained completely separate identities throughout their existence although they were occupied by several different film production companies.
No films were ever made or released by "The Weissensee Studios" or "Filmstadt Weißensee", and there was never at any time any sort of joint or corporate entity with such a name.
The two main locations were: The first studio to be built in the area, at 5-7 Franz Josef-Straße (now Liebermannstraße) in Weißensee, was opened on 1 October 1913 by Deutsche Vitascope, owned by Jules Greenbaum.
The director Adolf Gärtner (who worked on Joe May's Stuart Webbs detective series) also moved to Greenbaum-Film and directed nine films in Weißensee.
[10] All these studios including Weissensee were involved in shooting May's 8-part epic Die Herrin der Welt, released weekly from December 1919.
[11] Eric Pommer, as head of production at Ufa, concentrated his main efforts on producing quality "art films" (Großfilmen) with an international appeal.
[3] "Serious" dramas were also filmed at 5-7 Franz Josef-Straße where a group of new talents gathered around Joe May, such as the architect Martin Jacoby-Boy [de] (for many years technical director of the studio), his successors Fritz Maurischat and Paul Leni (whose own company was also located in the May-Atelier and who shot Das Wachsfigurenkabinett here in 1924), the directors E. A. Dupont, Uwe Jens Krafft and Fritz Lang (who established his partnership with Thea von Harbou here).
Despite an issue of share certificates in 1924[14] by the mid-1920s May's film enterprises had run into financial difficulties, not least because of the somewhat chaotic and technically complex production of May-Film AG's The Farmer from Texas.
At the same time, another French film production company, Éclair, which also sold its own brand of movie camera equipment, was looking to increase its presence in Austria.
Pommer left Gaumont and established the Viennese subsidiary branch of Éclair in 1913 with Marcel Vandal and Charles Jourjon, answering directly to Paris and not through Berlin.
[21] As noted previously, all the assets of foreign film production firms were confiscated by the German government soon after the start of the war, including Gaumont, Pathé and Éclair.
9 Franz Josef-Straße, with the company being guided by Pommer's wife Gertrud, Erich Morawsky [de] and/or Carl Wilhelm who also directed a number of its early films.
[29] Decla used the studio during the production of at least three titles: Otto Rippert's historical spectacular 7-reeler Pest in Florenz, with a script by Fritz Lang (some interior scenes only).
[17] Journalists were invited to the Weissensee studios to watch some of the shooting in September 1919, arriving in carriages and rented cars paid for by Decla.
[29] The Weissensee studio, sometimes referred to as the Decla-Atelier, was also used for some interiors in Part 2 of Lang's own Die Spinnen; and, most famously, for the whole of Robert Wiene's oppressive horror Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, from December 1919 to January 1920.
[30] In about April 1920 Decla merged with Bioscop-Film (which had been sold by Jules Greenbaum to Carl Schleussner in 1908–09) to form Decla-Bioscop AG, which brought the much larger Babelsberg Studios to the new partnership.
[31][d] The following year the merged firm was itself absorbed into the larger UFA conglomerate which owned further assets in the German capital including the Tempelhof Studios.
The film output of the various production companies discussed above was always entirely independent, and the "Weissensee Studios" never existed as any sort of corporate identity.
