Lotte Eisner’s exile correspondence: the case of Gerhard Lamprecht (Julia Eisner, KCL)
This project and its associated workshops derive from PhD research at KCL by Julia Eisner, great-niece of the writer, curator, collector and archivist Lotte Eisner. It brings together holdings from the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cinémathèque Française with hitherto unresearched correspondence from the Eisner family archive, generating a database and translation of correspondence from and to Eisner by German filmmaker-collector Gerhard Lamprecht. Lamprecht and Eisner began corresponding around 1955.
Julia Eisner’s PhD research has so far charted the different trajectories that led to the formation of the Deutsche Kinemathek as a national cultural institution whose mission is to ‘collect, index, restore and preserve national and international film,’ and the Cinémathèque on the other hand as an institution that sits alongside and at a tangent to the CNC French National Film Archives, providing an archive, museum and exhibition space whose explicitly international mission is ‘to collect….preserve and….present films from the past to the public…regardless of origin or format.’
Julia The Lamprecht-Eisner correspondence is examined for the light it sheds on the origins of these two institutions’ distinct approaches to the national-transnational relation that is the focus of Circulating Cinema.
