Between avant-garde and Hollywood

When the young Lazar Wechsler from Russian Poland travels through Switzerland with his mother and brother and the First World War breaks out, little does he know that he will become a central figure in Swiss cinema in the coming decades. For the time being, however, the Jewish family decides to stay in Zurich, and Lazar Wechsler studies at the Zurich ETH Engineering.

In 1924 he founded the company together with media entrepreneur, aviation pioneer and later co-founder of Swissair Walter Mittelholzer. Gift-Movie. There is also Lazar’s wife Amalie Wechsler, who serves as an indispensable partner in a wide variety of roles. All three are constantly on the road, traveling the world. In the 1920s and 1930s her expedition films took her to Ethiopia, Iran and China.

Controversial social issues such as alcoholism and abortion preoccupy them Praesens film about her documentaries, some of which were commissioned. The silent film is from 1929 “The distress of women – the happiness of women”. The educational film about pregnancy and its termination was made with support from the Zurich Health Department and the University Women’s Clinic.

The Soviet film team around Eduard Tissé contrasts the shocking images of the suffering and death of women who secretly have illegal abortions with the professional treatment options of the modern and hygienic women’s clinic. The film is courageous, stirs up people’s emotions, is banned by cantons – and is a success.

Covered a completely different topic “The shadows are getting longer” (1961), a film drama by Hungarian director Ladislao Vajda, set in a girls’ home in Switzerland and dealing with the prostitution and blackmail of young women – at a time when public prostitution still had a shadowy existence.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Jewish director Leopold Lindtberg from Vienna came to Zurich. He became one of the most important directors at the Schauspielhaus Zurich and in Swiss film. Lazar Wechsler first hired him in 1935. Lindtberg directed the central films of the spiritual national defense.

“Fussilier Wipf” (1938), “Landammann Stauffacher” (1941) or “Marie Louise” (1944) represent military preparedness on the one hand and Switzerland’s humanitarian tradition on the other. “Marie Louise” even brings Swiss film to Hollywood. The film received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1946 for the screenplay by Richard Schweizer. It is the first non-English film to receive this award.

But back to Leopold Lindtberg: After the war he realized it “Swiss tour” (1949). The winter sports romance with Hollywood star Cornel Wilde is filmed under catastrophic conditions. Some critics consider the film banal, but it is not a flop: the film was in cinemas for nine weeks in Zurich alone. In “The village” (1953), Lindtberg looks at orphans from the Second World War who find temporary shelter in Switzerland. The film, shot in Switzerland and England, was widely distributed on the international market and won the Bronze Bear at the Berlinale.

The two films were released in quick succession “Heidi” (1952) by the Italian director Luigi Comencini and “Heidi and Peter” (1955), directed by Franz Schnyder, offer the perfect escape to an idyllic mountain world in the post-war period and are also a great success beyond the Swiss border.

The history of the Praesens film continues, there is much more to tell. What is certain is that the Praesens film produced films between the 1920s and the 1960s, all of which together tell a piece of Swiss cultural history and reflect the respective times, politics and society. The perspective of a Russian-Polish producer, Austrian and Italian directors or Soviet film crews create defining Swiss images in the cinemas. These are the beautiful and dark sides of a world between change, war, identity formation and Hollywood fever.

This text, slightly adapted for the blog, originally appeared in the program of the 59th Solothurn Film Days: www.solothurnerfilmtage.ch