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405: Czech Avant-Garde

Archival Spaces 404:

Voskovec & Werich

Uploaded 24 July 2026

My Dad grew up in Prague in the 1930s, a teenager. He later raved to me about Voskovec and Werich, who he had seen both on stage at the Liberated Theatre, and in the cinema. I thought about him when I recently pulled out of my shelf a 4 DVD box set of four Voskovec and Werich films, produced by the Czech National Film Archive (2010). Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, both born 1905, were comedians who managed to be both avant-garde and popular. Although I had a vague memory of seeing Hej rup! / Heave Ho! (1934), I was not prepared for the comic madness visible in that film and the others: Pudr a Benzin / Powder and Gas (1931), Peníze nebo život / Your Money or Your Life (1932), and Svět patří nám / The World is Ours (1937). Both emigrated to America before the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in March 1939, where Jiři becomes George Voskovec in Hollywood, most prominently in Twelve Angry Men (both Studio One, 1954,and Siney Lumet theatrical feature, 1957), while Werich returned to (Communist) Czechoslovakia.

**Adolf Hoffmeister’s “The Bride” at Liberated Theatre (1927)**

Jiří Voskovec, originally Jiří Wachsmann and Jewish, and Jan Werich, from Prague-Smichov, a working-class district, met in high school in Prague’s New Town, then joined the Osvobozené divaldo /Liberated Theatre, founded in 1925 by the Czech avant-garde group, Devětsil. Under the leadership of the art theorist Karel Teige and his Dadaist Manifesto, Devětsil’s nearly 100 members included poets, architects, painters, photographers, film and theatre directors. Prominent among the were poet Vítěslav Nezval, literary theorist, Roman Jakobsen, journalist, translator, and Kafka’s lover, Milena Jesenská, and the art photographer, Jaroslav Rössler. Like the Russian Constructivists and the Italian Futurists, Devětsil called for work that was close to life, but eschewed realism, giving preference to popular culture, poetry in everyday objects, skyscrapers, airplanes, mime and graphic design. Voskovec and Werich had their first theatrical hit in 1927 at the Liberated Theatre with “The Vest Pocket Revue,” which amalgamated comedy homages to Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other American silent film comedians. The same year they took control of the directorship of the Liberated Theatre, where they performed in ever more stringent anti-fascist plays until it was closed down in 1938.

***Powder and Gas* (1931, **Jindřich Honzl****)

**Voskovec & Werrich bust in** ***Powder and Gas***

While Voskovec had appeared in a few Czech silent films under the pseudonym Petr Dolan, Voskovec and Werich’s first film together was Powder and Gas (1931, Jindřich Honzl). The film opens with a trick: A view of Prague’s Hradčin castle is revealed to be on a plate in a tourist shop, the following scenes satirizing the city’s tourist agency, Čedok. The title itself refers to cocaine and petrol, since the somewhat episodic plot mixes gangster film conventions (a cocaine ring) with a backstage musical, the two most popular American cinema genres in 1930. The cabaret numbers are staged by Voskovec and Werich, who are seen as a taxi driver and policeman, a boxer, and as amateur actors. The comedy routines, like the opening traffic accident, a picnic with their mutual love interest, a boxing match, and their songs, ”Aesop and the Puppet” and “Life is just a coincidence,” originated in their stage revues. The plot revolves around two male friends pursuing a girl, the actress Marta (Ela Šárkova), who actually is in love with the musical play’s author, while the actress’s brother has been dealing coke and is trying to escape his gangster suppliers. It’s all a bit discombobulated as classical narrative cinema, but Voskovec and Werich were clearly applying Dada principles of comedic collage, assembly, and juxtapositions of popular culture.

***Your Money or Your Life*** (**1932,** **Jindřich Honzl)**

Voskovec and Werich’s second sound film, Your Money and Your Life (1932) opens with a more than ten-minute montage sequence that visualizes without dialogue the path of a stolen necklace from its owner through dozens of hands to Tonda (Werich) who accidentally comes into possession of the stolen goods. In a park he meets his childhood friend, Pepic (Voskovec), who is attempting to hang himself, due to his wife’s infidelity, and together they look for the necklace’s owner, pursued by the gang of thieves, and a desperate fake German count who hopes to pay his debts with it. An endless chase, with a less than coherent plot, involving Pepic’s new unfaithfu bride, the film is filled with absurdist elements, individual scenes turning into skits and dialogue jokes, pure slapstick and physical comedy in homage to silent American comedians, including a hilarious boating scene.

**Helena Bošova, Werich, Voskovec in *Workers, Let’s Go* (1934, Martin Frič)**

Worker’s, Let’s Go is a Dadaist fantasy of Karl Marx’s proletarian paradise where the workers seize the means of production and outsmart the capitalists, simultaneously exposing the plight of the unemployed in the midst of the world-wide Depression. The film opens when Mr. Worst (Josef Skrivan), the owner of the canned milk trust decides to destroy Simonides (Werich), the owner of the milk cannery-trust by keeping him drunk. Worst is a nasty old man in wheelchair (the actor died in 1942 in Auschwitz), while Simonides figures out he got screwed by unscrupulous bankers, and joins forces with the unemployed worker, Filip (Voskovec). After spending a night in a homeless shelter, Filip and Simonides (and many unemployed workers) finish a building on a piece of real estate the former capitalist still owns, then create a worker-owned milk cooperative that eventually defeats Worst. Numerous scenes are played for comedy, e.g. when Simonides presses his pants with steam roller, which runs amok, the fast-motion construction of the building to the tune of the song “Heave, Ho!”, or when Worst’s police attempt to keep the workers from attending a stockholder’s meeting, leading to a Keystone Cop-like chase. When Filip meets a young woman (Helena Bošova), they discuss their love of cinema, in particular, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Mozhukhin.

Given that Svět patří nám / The World is Ours (1937) is an overtly anti-Fascist film, one of the few anti-Nazi flms produced in Europe in the 1930s, it deserves more than a few lines; I will discuss it in my next blog.

403: Ellen Richter

Archival Spaces 403:

Weimar Germany’s Most Popular Unknown Film Star

Uploaded 10 July 2026

**Ellen Richter in *Moral* (1928, Willi Wolff)**

Despite having starred in ca. 70 films, despite having been one of the most popular actresses in Weimar Germany, and despite operating her own production company throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Ellen Richter is invisible in the canons of classic German film histories of Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner, Heinrich Fraenkel, Enno Patalas, and Thomas Elsaesser. Such a lapse is the result of an implicit bias for art cinema and against popular film genres, and a blinndspot for women filmmakers (and actresses) who could be agents of their own fate. It also didn’t help that her career came to a crashing halt with the rise of the Nazis, and that she (like Mary Pickford) was functioning more as a film producer than a film star, once sound films entered the picture. Not until the third decade of the 21st century with the publication of Philipp Stiasny and Oliver Hanley’s Ellen Richter. Die große Unbekannte des Weimarer Kinos (Vienna: Synema, 2026), which translates as Ellen Richter. The Great Unknown of Weimar Cinema, has that glaring omission been rectified.

**Elle Richter**, **Lupu Pick, Rudolf & Joseph Schildkraut, Kaethe Oswald in *Schlemiehl* (1915, Richard Oswald)**, **Photo Filmmuseum Duesseldorf.**

**Werner Kraus, Ellen Richter in *Das Bacchanal dees Todes* (1917, RichardEichberg) Photo Eye Museum, Amsterdam**

Born in Vienna in July 1891 as Käthe Weiß, the daughter of a Jewish tailor and his wife, who had emigrated to the capital from Hungary, she took the name Ellen Richter with her theatrical debut at the Brno City Theater in 1908. After residencies in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin, she forsakes the theater in 1915 for a career in the new medium of film, where she almost immediately lands starring roles, e.g. in Richard Oswald’s Schlemiehl (1915) and Richard Eichberg’s Life for a Life (1916); her star image is already apparent in the latter film: young, slender, her dark hair and eyes marking her as “southern European,” a code for the emotional and sexual. Between 1915 and 1918, she will star for Eichberg in 13 melodramas, often with crime and action elements, opulent sets, and stirring mass scenes, making them both stars. Meanwhile, she is also featured in melodramas, adventure films and war propaganda films. For the 1918-19 season, she is the star of her own film series, directed by Rudolf Meiner, produced by the Frankfurter Film Co., and written by Dr. Willi Wolf whom she will marry, and who will soon become her exclusive producer-director.

**Ellen Richter, Karl Geppert in *Lola Montez, die Taenzerin des Koenigs* (1922, Willi Wolff) Photo Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt**

**Leonard Haskel, Ellen Richter in *Lola Montez* (1922) Screen Shot Philipp Stiasny**

The Ellen Richter-Film GmbH is founded in 1920 by Richter and Wolff, their films distributed through the UFA, specializing in then popular historical subjects, beginning with Mary Tudor (1920). She follows up with Madame Sans-Gêne (1921) and Lola Montez, the Dancer of the Queen (1922), in both films playing independent, modern women who defy patriarchal conventions. Lola Montez, which Max Ophüls will remake more than 30 years later, becomes Richter’s favorite role, playing an actress, as in so many of her earlier and later films. When the historical cycle, which had started with Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919), runs its course, Richter and Wolf switch to furiously paced travel/adventure films, often released in multiple parts. In The Mystery of the Sphinx (1921), The Adventuress of Monte Carlo (1921), The Woman with Millions (1923), and Flight Around the Globe (1925), the couple offer German audiences visual pleasure through exotic, real locations (few studio sets) in Southern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia, and thrilling action; the implausibility of the plots, which one contemporary critic calls “lovable nonsense” (p. 145), hardly matters.

**Eduard von Winterstein, E. Richter, Leonhard Haskel in *Die Frau mit den Millionen (1923,, Willi Wolff)* Photo Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin**

**Ellen Richter, Anton Pointner in *Der Flug um den Erdball* (1925, Willi Wolff) Photo Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin**

In the mid-1920s, Richter returns to comedies (and light operettas), genres she had excelled at in her theatre career but only seldom turned to after her early film success, A Great Idea (1916). With Heads Up, Charley! (1927), The Imaginary Baron (1927), Saucy Suzy (1928), and Morality (1928), Ellen Richter epitomizes the modern woman, cross-dressing, changing identities and costumes, her short cropped “Bubikopf” hair signaling her status as a 1920s flapper. The first two films also featured a young Marlene Dietrich in her first starring roles. Despite being based on a 1906 play, Moral, brutally lampooned middle class philistinism, servility, and censorship in what was thought to be libertarian Weimar Germany. The film’s burghers would soon become staunch Nazis.

**Ellen Richter, Ralph Arthur Roberts in *Moral* (1928, Willi Wolff) Photo** **Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna**

**Ellen Richter in *Unmoral. Die sieben Abenteuer der Frau Venus* (1928, Willi Wolff) Photo Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna**

With the coming of sound, Ellen Richter continues producing films for her company, but only stars in one film, The Adventuress of Tunis (1931), – a throwback to her most popular adventure/travel films – and appears in a supporting role in three others; her first two produced sound films, Only You (1930) and Madame Pompadour (1930) are musicals needing a star with a stronger singing voice; she does not appear. Critics notice Richter’s strong Viennese accent in Tunis, but it is probably her age, she is now 40, more than anything else that forces her into supporting roles. Even after the Nazis blacklist both Richter and her Jewish husband, the Ellen Richter Film Co. is allowed to produce two more films, not that the couple can profit from their success. The Richter and Wolff emigrate first to Austria in 1935, then to Paris in 1938, to Hollywood in 1940, after Wolff escapes from a French internment camp. When their foray to Hollywood fails, they move to New York, where Wolff takes up his former profession as a dentist, as he had done in Vienna and Paris.

**Hilde Hildebrand, Alfred Abel, Ivan Petrovich, Ellen Richter in *Manolescu* (1933, Willi Wolff) Foto Deusche Kinemathek, Berlin**

Willi Wolff dies in 1947 in Nice, while Ellen Richter spends the rest of her life until her death in Düsseldorf in 1969, unsuccessfully fighting the German government to recover her wealth and film assets, stolen by the Nazis and their West German successors. Anyone who has seen The Woman in Gold (2015) knows the story. For the authors, Philipp Stiasny and Oliver Hanley, who have done an amazing job working in film archives, researching Richter’s surviving film prints and her history, the actress won them over, thanks to her “self-deprecating irony, her humor, her incredible camera presence, her cross-dressing, and her many multifaceted characters, whether femme fatales or world-traveling adventuresses.”(p. 12, my translation)

This book also proves to me that well-made popular cinema was not just the purview of American cinema, but also existed in Berlin; maybe that is why so many German-Jewish émigrés were successful in Hollywood.

**Shades of German Expressionism in *Lola Montez* (1922) Photo Deutsches Fiminstitut & Filmmusem, Frankfurt**

401: FIAF Prize to Ouagadougou

Archival Spaces 401:

Ardiouma Soma Accepts Award

Uploaded 26 June 2026

In April, at the 2026 FIAF Conference in Rabat, Morocco, Ardiouma Soma, the retired festival director of the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) and a representative of the Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou (CAO), received the prestigious FIAF Award from FIAF President Peter Bagrov. According to a press release, the Award “recognizes, in particular, the recipient’s dedication and contribution to the preservation of, and access to, the world’s film heritage, for the pleasure of today’s audiences, as well as for the benefit of future generations.” Previous recipients of the FIAF Award since 2001 have included: Manoel de Oliveira, Ingmar Bergman, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Peter Bogdanovich, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Agnès Varda, Jan Švankmaje, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Christopher Nolan, Jean-Luc Godard, Walter Salles, Tilda Swinton, Guillermo del Toro, and Wim Wenders. FIAF’s Executive Committee members approved Mr. Soma’s Award for his achievements in a long career advancing film archiving in Burkina Faso and more broadly the preservation and promotion of Africa’s rich film heritage.

**Ardiouma Soma at FIAF** **Rabat 2026** **(Photo FIAF**)

FESPACO was founded in 1969 in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkino Faso, thanks to an initiative of Burkinabe filmmaker Ousmane Sembène in association with the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (Carthage Film Festival); the Festival now takes place every other year, alternating with Carthage. While the Tunisian Festival focuses, though not exclusively, on North African and Arab cinema, Ouagadougou has become the continent’s most important film festival for African Cinema. In 1995, the Festival began awarding separate prizes for television work. FESPACO’s new headquarters was inaugurated in 2005, after construction had begun in 1994. Mr. Ardiouma Soma was its Directeur Generale from 2014 to 2020. Festival prize winners have included over the years: Souleymane Cissé’s Baara (1979), Med Hondo’s Sarraounia (1987), Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Tilaï (1991), Abderrahmane Sissako’s En attendant le Bonheur (2003), Hailé Gerima’s Teza (2009),Dani Kouyaté’s Katanga, la danse des scorpions (2025).

In 1973 the filmmakers at the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television (FESPACO) who had formed the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) decided to give their films to establish a collection of films in Burkina Faso. In 1985, FEPACI Secretary General Gaston Kabore appealed again to African filmmakers to donate copies of their films to the future African film library, given that the Festival had been storing large numbers of films from previous festivals. It also asked that the new archive be able to copy and preserve these works. The increase in production of African films, reflecting African cultural values and identities, increased awareness among filmmakers of the need to preserve these images. It took a while, but in 1989, the Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou, now a public institution of Burkino Faso, was established.

The mission of the Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou is two-fold, according to its website: 1. To preserving African film memory for future generations; 2. To promote and enhance this heritage to ensure greater visibility for African cinema worldwide. COA’s goals include: A. Ensuring continuous exposure for African cinema; B. Developing collections to stimulate endogenous reflection and research on African cinema; C. Enabling consultation of films for a better understanding of contemporary African history; D. Serving as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for film and audio-visual professionals; E. Offering screenings through regular programming of retrospectives and by organizing exhibitions to contribute to the cinematographic education of the public. The Film Library currently holds more than 12,000 films of all genres, including 380 35mfilms, 548 16mm films, 2,300 films on ¾” U-Matic videotape, 2,227 films on VHS video, 170 films on BETACAM, 4350 digital films on DVD and Blu-ray, and more than 2,000 films on hard drives, USB drives, and DCPs.

**Sandra Clark, Yacouba Bonkoungou, 2023**

Given that almost all of African cinema is now produced in digital formats and that the rise of Nigerian cinema (Nollywood), in particular, has been the result of lower cost video and digital video formats becoming readily available on the continent, the African Film Library began a project to strengthen its technical, operational, and professional capacities in the digital realm. The project’s launch ceremony in December 2023 was presided over by Burkino Faso’s Minister of Communication, Culture, Arts, and Tourism, represented by his Special Advisor, Yacouba Bonkoungou. At the ceremony the then American Ambassador to Burkino Faso, her Excellency Sandra Clark presented a check for 109.5 million West African CFA francs, or approximately $195,535. According to a press release from FESCAPO, the amount represents the total cost of the project; the funds will be used to strengthen and digitize the African Cinémathèque.

While there are larger film archives in North Africa and in South Africa, it is hoped that FIAF’s recognition of Ardiouma Soma and the Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou will strengthen nascent efforts to preserve the moving image heritage of the whole continent of Africa.

402: F is For Fake

Archival Spaces 402:

Film Preservation Hoaxes

Uploaded 12 June 2026

**Filmmaker Colin McKenzie in *Forgotten Silver* (1995)**

Recently, a story circulated on the net that a film archivist at the Carnegie Library in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Rebecca Lang, had found an unlabeled film canister in the basement, which turned out to be a previously unknown silent film from 1923 with Buster Keaton. The “nearly complete 35mm nitrate print” was The Forgotten Signal, found “along with original distribution notes and a handwritten letter from the local theater owner who had stored it there in 1928.” The sensational news spread like wildfire through the virtual biosphere, as Buster Keaton fans and film historians wondered why no such title could be found in any existing Keaton filmography, nor had the film been copyrighted. According to the source, “the Library of Congress and the Academy Film Archive confirmed the print was of high historical value,” because it contained scenes and gags not found in any known surviving examples of Keaton’s work. Finally, the discovery demonstrated that important cultural artifacts could be found in the most ordinary places. Less than twenty-four hours later, the lost Keaton film was proven to be a hoax.

It was film preservationist Paul E. Gierecke who in a post on 18 May on Facebook exposed the hoax, noting that a anonymous FB poster (Uhhgv622) specialized in sensationalized stories “touting the discovery of rare, lost, or unknown materials, e.g. a lost recording studio hidden behind a wall in a theater, a rediscovered silent film studio, discovery of a lost Buster Keaton film;” even established film historians have fallen prey to his/her hoaxes. Before Paul’s post, other commentators had questioned the authenticity, noting that the frames depicted in the accompanying image of the story were printed horizontally on the film, as if it were Vistavision, a historical impossibility in 1923. As Paul noted, this was AI nonsense, a con, a scam. To prove his point, he included an AI image of a Keaton photographic contact sheet, created by another FB prankster, David B. Pearson, who also specializes in fake AI images of silent movie stars:

All this brouhaha would be eminently forgettable if it circulated only among film historians and buffs who would immediately recognize the hoax, but film preservation and archiving have now entered the public consciousness, so the average consumer may not recognize such fabrications. In fact, we are now inundated with AI images of supposedly historical and/or contemporary events. Who is to know?

Peter Jackson in *Forgotten Silver (1995)*

More than 50 years ago, Orson Welles warned about art forgeries and hoaxes in his film, F is for Fake (1973); Welles had, of course, also staged his own elaborate hoax in 1938 with the radio show, The War of the Worlds. All this reminds me of the most sensational film preservation hoax, perpetuated by New Zealand filmmakers, Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, in Forgotten Silver (1995). First screened in October 1995 on New Zealand’s TV ONE, the program was accompanied by an interview with Peter Jackson in the magazine, New Zealand Listener, explaining how a collection of 35mm nitrate reels had been found in the shed of his late neighbor. The “lost history” of the pioneering New Zealand filmmaker, Colin McKenzie, caused a sensation, prompting scores of letters from people enraptured by the discovery of New Zealand films from before/after World War I, before any filmmaking by natives had been documented. Numerous film experts, including Leonard Maltin, attested to the find’s historical veracity. The day following the broadcast, the “mockumentary” was exposed as a hoax, but nevertheless went on to be screened at countless film festivals and even won prizes.

Born in 1888, McKenzie supposedly began making and screening films at age 12, projecting images with a bicycle-powered system and home-made film emulsion from egg whites (see Lumiere’s autochromes). In 1903, he filmed a successful flight before the Wright Brothers. He produced the first feature-length sound film in 1908, The Warrior Season (Oskar Messter created sound films in 1903). He and his brother used red berries from the (fictional) photina acquafolium to manufacture the first color film in 1911. During World War I, his brother shot footage at the Battle of Gallipoli, before he was killed in action.

His greatest epic, Salome, was more than ten years in the making, lost since 1931, until it was found in a secret vault in the New Zealand jungle, beneath monumental sets, also uncovered after 60 years. His life ended in a battle during the Spanish Civil War, the camera capturing the moment of his death. Forgotten Silver’s last twelve minutes document the world premiere of Salome, a retelling of the well-known biblical tale, at least what was left of the unfinished film. The film starred his brother’s wife, whom he married after his sibling’s death.

Director and Star/Wife in *Forgotten Silver*

Jackson, who was responsible for creating all the historical footage, is a master of cinematic deception. For the untrained eye, Salome looks like a 1920s biblical epic, except the camerawork is too busy and the actors’ faces too modern. The fake newsreel footage of early air flight, Gallipoli and the Spanish Civil War is even more convincing, unless you know that newsreel cameramen knew better than to film in the line of fire. Yet, there are also narrative inconsistencies, and other preposterous “facts.” But Peter Jackson learned his lessons well and would apply them to colorizing, distorting, and even falsifying the footage from the Battle of the Somme in They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).