#erich kettelhut

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The concept art of Erich Kettelhut for Metropolis (1927), dir. Fritz Lang

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Erich Kettelhut and Fritz Lang  Set design drawing for “The Nibelungen: The Death of Siegfried (Die Nibelungen: Siegfrieds Tod)” 1923 BiFi, Collection of La Cinémathèque française, Paris Photo courtesy Collection of La Cinémathèque française, Paris

via artblart

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F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (Karl Hartl, 1932).

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'Fritz Lang's production designers—Erich Kettelhut, Otto Hunte and Kurt Vollbrecht—shaped the fictional city of Metropolis by re-imagining contemporary Manhattan. [T]hey spliced the city with buildings inspired by avant-garde European architects—among them, Cubist architects from the Bauhaus School; expressionists, like Erich Mendelsohn; Le Corbusier, with his vision of high-rise cities; and ... the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia, whose "Città Nuova," presented his future city as a multi-level megastructure shot through with daring interconnecting bridges and vertiginous aerial walkways.' (CNN)

THE  BUILT  ENVIRONMENT  IN  MEDIA —  METROPOLIS (1927), dir. Fritz Lang

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Metropolis (1927) Director: Fritz Lang Cinematography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann Art Direction: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht

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Artwork for ’Metropolis’ dir. by Fritz Lang; 1927.

The city shots of Metropolis were a combination of both two and three dimensional elements, consisting of matte drawings and paintings, flat wooden relief models, and three dimensional models scaled to 1/16th of the simulated heights. All matte drawings of the cityscape were scaled to a height of 1/100. The man responsible for most of the film’s models was Walter Schuzle-Mittendorf. The set designers- Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht- first created a number of concept drawings for the imagined city of Metropolis, following Lang’s plan for the city to be divided into several sections. The emphasis was on the verticality of the structures, intersected by roadway systems and aircraft.

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Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Cast: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Erwin Biswanger, Heinrich George, Brigitte Helm. Screenplay: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang. Cinematography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann. Art direction: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht. 

Metropolis strikes me as the most balletic movie ever made. I'm not referring just to Brigitte Helm's fabulous hoochie-coochie as the False Maria, which so thrills the goggling, slavering gentlemen of Metropolis, but to the fact that as one of the great silent films it brilliantly substitutes movement for the speech and song the medium denies it. In addition to Helm's terrific performance as both Marias, we also have Gustav Fröhlich's wildly over-the-top Freder, who flings himself frenziedly about the sets. We may find the performance laughable today, but it's best to watch the film with the understanding that subtlety just wouldn't work in Fritz Lang's fever-dream of a city. Certainly that's also true of the always emotive Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whose Rotwang is pretty much indistinguishable from his Dr. Mabuse. But even the stillest of the characters in the film -- Alfred Abel's Joh Frederson, Fritz Rasp's superbly creepy Thin Man -- are there to provide a sinister contrast to the hyperactivity going on around them.  And then there are the crowds, a corps de ballet if ever there was one, whether stiffly marching to and from their jobs, or celebrating the fall of the Heart Machine with a riotous ring-around-the-rosy. There are times when Lang's manipulation of crowds reminds me of Busby Berkeley's. Lang's choreographic approach to the film is essential to its success as a portrayal of the subsuming of the human into the mechanical. Is there a more brilliant depiction of the alienation of work than that of the man who must shift the hands around a gigantic clock face to keep up with randomly illuminated light bulbs? Metropolis is usually cited as a triumph of design, and it probably wouldn't have the hold over us that it does without the sets of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht, whose influence over our visions of the future seems indelible. Would we have the decor of the Star Wars movies or any of today's superhero epics without their work? There are those who would argue that the film is long on visual excitement but short on intellectual content -- the moral banality, that the Heart must mediate between the Head and the Hand, hardly seems to suffice as a justification for the film's Sturm und Drang -- which weakens its reputation as a masterpiece. But that seems to me to ask more of movies than they were ever designed to provide. So much in Metropolis reverberates with history -- from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Nazis -- that it's a film we can never get out of our heads, and probably shouldn't.

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Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922)

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Aud Egede-Nissen, Gertrud Welcker, Alfred Abel, Bernhard Goetzke, Paul Richter, Robert Forster-Larrinaga, Hans Adalbert Schlettow, Georg John, K��roly Huszár, Grete Berger, Julius Falkenstein. Screenplay: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, based on a novel by Norbert Jacques. Cinematography: Carl Hoffmann. Art direction: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Stahl-Urach, Karl Vollbrecht. 

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is a four-and-a-half-hour movie, and I’ve seen two-hour movies that felt longer. It zips along because Fritz Lang never fails to give us something to look at and anticipate. There is, first and foremost, the almost literally hypnotic performance of Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Mabuse, a role that could have degenerated into mere villainous mannerisms. There is his dogged and thwarted but always charismatic opponent, von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), who seems on occasion to resist Mabuse’s power by mere force of cheekbones. There is the extraordinary art decoration provided by Otto Hunte and Erich Kettelhut, which often gives the film its nightmare power: Consider, for example, the exceedingly odd stage decor provided for the Folies-Bergère performance by Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen), in which she contends with gigantic heads with phallic noses (or perhaps beaks), or the collection of primitive and Expressionist art belonging to the effete Count Told (Alfred Abel). The story itself, adapted from the novel by Norbert Jacques by Lang’s wife-to-be Thea von Harbou, is typically melodramatic stuff about a megalomaniac psychiatrist, who uses his powers to become a master criminal. But l think it succeeds not only because it has so much to say about the period in which it was made but also because of our continuing fascination with mind control. It sometimes feels like there’s a little Mabuse in everyone who seeks power. Somehow we continually lose our skepticism, born of hard experience, about the manipulators and find ourselves once again yielding to them. And somehow we usually, like von Wenk, find a way to pull ourselves back from the brink. But, as Lang himself experienced, we don’t always manage to do so. 

GERTRUDE WELCKER in DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922) dir. Fritz Lang

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Erich Kettelhut was a German production designer, art director and set decorator.

https://www.uow.edu.au/~morgan/Metrop.htm

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/04/18/the-metropolis-money-and-abstraction/torre-de-babel-em-desenho-de-erich-kettelhut/

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/04/18/the-metropolis-money-and-abstraction/erich-kettelhut-sketch-for-fritz-laings-metropolis-1925/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Kettelhut

https://twitter.com/peterpopkencom/status/935908207545016320

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“Dawn”, “City from Above with Tower of Babel”, and “Tower of Babel”: Concept art for Metropolis (1927) by Erich Kettelhut.

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Metropolis

“Metropolis” n’est pas le premier film de Science Fiction, mais c’est celui qui a le plus déterminé le "look” de la ville du futur chez les cinéastes. Ce classique du genre étonne toujours par son inventivité et par sa démesure.

La ville est organisé verticalement avec des immeubles s’élevant jusqu’à 500 m et des passerelles qui aujourd’hui encore, font pâlir même un Rudy Ricciotti.

Elle parait d’abord comme utopique et agréable avec des vastes stades et des jardins paradisiaques à son sommet. Mais ces endroits sont réservé à une élite tiré sur le volet.  

Puis le film montre son versant dystopique avec exploitation des travailleurs pauvres qui se tuent à la tache pour la faire fonctionner.  

Entre les deux : la dynamique d’une ville en mouvement perpétuel qui se développe sur des plateaux multiples.  Fritz Lang, fils d’architecte, a lui-même commencé des études d’architecture avant de faire des films et la ville qu’il crée à l’écran est le reflet de différents styles de son époque : la silhouette New-yorkaise, qu’il a vu impressionné en 1922 pour les plans large,

l’avant-garde russe et le Bauhaus pour les plans rapprochés. Ce mélange de styles souligne le côté cosmopolite de la ville, également renforcé par les multiples affiches, écrites dans des langues fantaisistes.

Même l’expressionnisme à la « Caligari » trouve sa place dans la maison biscornue qu’abrite l’inventeur et savant fou Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge). L’importance des poteaux métalliques élancés, qui soutiennent passerelles et autoroutes, souligne le savoir faire de l’ingénieur, omniprésent dans la cité futuriste. 

Fritz Lang n’hésite pas à caricaturer la condition des ouvriers lobotomisés dans leurs cages à lapins souterrains, sans se douter que cette architecture systématisée et impersonnelle deviendra une réalité dans certaines banlieues des années 60/70.

Grace à sa richesse visuelle, “Metropolis” est devenue le modèle-type de la ville du futur. Metropolis est l’Eden pour les riches et l’enfer pour les démunies ; l’utopie et la dystopie en même temps. 

Département artistique : Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Walter Schulze-Mitteldorff, Karl Vollbrecht, Edgar G. Ulmer / Décors : Willy Müller / Effets combinés : Eugen Schüfftan

METROPOLIS 1926 Fritz Lang

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Das indische Grabmal erster Teil (Joe May, 1921).

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Metropolis (1927)

“...and where are the people, father, whose hands built your city?”

Country: Germany

Directed by: Fritz Lang

Written by: Lang & Thea von Harbou Based on the novel by: von Harbou

Cinematography by: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau & Walter Ruttmann

Produced by: Erich Pommer

Music by: Gottfried Huppertz

Art Direction by: Karl Vollbrecht, Otto Hunte & Erich Kettelhut

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Metropolis 

Directed by Fritz Lang (1927) Art direction led by Otto Hunte, with Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht

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Sketch by Erich Kettelhut for Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang, 1927 

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Erich Kettelhut and Fritz Lang 

Set design drawing for “The Nibelungen: The Death of Siegfried (Die Nibelungen: Siegfrieds Tod)” 1923

(via Art Blart)