Nash Lecture Theatre, Room K2.31, King’s Building, King’s College London, Strand, London

Saturday 27th October 2018: 09:30 – 18:00
Free entrance, book your tickets here.

Symposium

Lotte Eisner: writer, archivist, curator.

27th October 2018

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI); King’s College London

German Screen Studies Network

Register here for Day 2 of this two-day event exploring and celebrating the work and legacy of Lotte Eisner, author of the seminal text on Weimar silent film The Haunted Screen (orig.1952). A film critic, journalist and, for over thirty years, archivist at the Cinémathèque Française, Eisner, was born in Berlin in 1896 as the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. She died in Paris in 1983, having fled there in 1933 and where she remained for the rest of her life.

Eisner spent her life and career writing about other people and collecting and archiving their work, first as a journalist in Berlin and then as an archivist in Paris. This symposium is an opportunity to focus entirely on Eisner’s own outstanding contribution to film history, from her early days writing for the Film-Kurier in Berlin, through her books, The Haunted Screen, FW Murnau (1964) and Fritz Lang (1976), to her extraordinary thirty-five year career collecting and archiving for the Cinémathèque Française.

Havin begun on Friday 26th with an introduction and screening in the Birkbeck Cinema of Sohrab Saless’ extended film interview with Eisner, The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner (1979) the symposium continues at King’s College London on Saturday 27th with rare audio recordings of Eisner, and presentations from Professor Janet Bergstrom (UCLA), Professor Michael Wedel (Cinepoetics Berlin/Film University Potsdam), Naomi DeCelles (UC Santa Barbara) and Julia Eisner (King’s College London). The symposium focuses among other topics on Eisner’s writing on Murnau, and features a screening of Murnau’s City Girl (1930).

The organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Goethe-Institut London; DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service); Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI); King’s College London; and the German Screen Studies Network.