- Rüdiger Suchsland was born in 1968 in Germany. He is a writer and director, known for Hitler's Hollywood (2017), From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014) and Caligari - Wie der Horror ins Kino kam (2014).
- German film critic and author.
- Member on the 'FIPRESCI' jury and the 'Best First Film' jury at the Istanbul International Film Festival.
- Member of the 'Caligari Filmpreis' jury at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in 2016.
- Member of the 'FIPRESCI' jury (Forum) at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in 2017.
- [on From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014)] Youth, freedom, irony, curiosity: Weimar is Modernity at its best and 'the' time of German cinema: By far the prime and richest period of our filmmaking. Cinema mirrors the turbulent era of the Twenties. These movies had it all! But more or less everything of it is forgotten, reduced to two or three footnotes. I wanted to take us all on an adventurous trip to this lost time, a trip which should entertain, move, surprise and remind us all of an open wound in our past. Siegfried Kracauer, a forgotten genius of cultural critique, is the perfect guide to an era, which is fascinating in its contradictions. This fascination and, yes: my love for this time and its cinema, I hope to share.
- [on his motivation to write and direct From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014)] So far, there has not been a single movie that shows the variety and richness of German films in the period between 1918 and 1933.
- [from his 2013 review "From Hitler to Hobbit", a homage to Siegfried Kracauer:] The connection between fascism and fantasy is obviously clear, since fascism has been one of the biggest political fantasy-projects of the last century. Less clear is the answer to the question if the equation works in both directions. Not always of course. But fascist fantasies are clearly present in some of the fairy tales, horror tropes and science-fiction films of the Weimar Republic cinema. Hans Werckmeister's Algol: Tragedy of Power (1920) or Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or the first three Dr. Mabuse films [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) and the French version The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)], Henrik Allgén's A Daughter of Destiny (1928) or Faust (1926) and Nosferatu (1922) by F.W. Murnau - like many other films of the Weimar era they are all connected to dreams of almighty powers and murder fantasies, full of ominous anticipation and premonition of future evil, and as such these films were a seismograph of "things to come" (H.G. Wells).
- There are many documentary films about cinema [at the 'Venice Film Festival 2014']. The historical consciousness in cinema is not as strong as, let's say, in literature, where a new edition of a book by Theodor Fontane or Friedrich Schiller would be covered by the newspapers and compared with previous editions. In cinema, television, and motion pictures, we don't have this kind of tradition of dealing with the history of the medium. That's of course because it's the newest medium. There should be a lot more [attention paid to film history] because all of the new films are based on the classics. Today, many people's knowledge of film, even at film schools, begins with Quentin Tarantino.
- Films like Nosferatu (1922) and Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis (1927), The Blue Angel (1930) Metropolis (1927) or M (1931) are extremely famous. They're often more famous abroad, where there is more interest in history. People know that German film was the most important in the world during the 1920s - sometimes even more important than Hollywood. Hollywood essentially advanced when immigrants from Europe started coming over, such as filmmakers Ernst Lubitsch or F.W. Murnau, who immigrated before Hitler and 1933. And then there was Fritz Lang, who went to the US in 1933.
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