Curt Courant

Curt Courant
Fritz Lang with cameraman Curt Courant (middle) on film Frau im Mond (1929)
Born	11 May 1899 Katowice, German Empire
Died	20 April 1968(1968-04-20) (aged 68) Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Cinematographer
Years active	1917–1962

Curt Courant (11 May 1899 – 20 April 1968) was a German-American cinematographer whose work includes more than 100 German and international films from the silent and early sound eras.^[1] Courant worked in several European countries, collaborating with figures such as Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin. As he was of Jewish ancestry, Courant was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and go into exile following the Nazi takeover of power.

Curt Courant began his professional career as a cameraman in 1917 at Joe May's film production company in Berlin. In the following years, Courant became one of the most important cinematographers in German film. In 1920, the actress Asta Nielsen engaged him for her film version of Hamlet, in which he was behind the camera together with Axel Graatkjær. In 1924, he traveled to Rome to film the spectacular historical epic Quo Vadis (1924). The film impressed not only with its star cast, its army of extras and its circus animals, but also with its early experiments with widescreen formats. In 1927, Courant signed with Ufa and went on to make grandiose exotic spectacles such as Secrets of the Orient (1927/28) and The White Devil (1929), but also melodramas, including Kurt Bernhardt's The Woman One Longs For (1929) starring Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Kortner. In 1928/29, he shot Fritz Lang's science fiction adventure Frau im Mond together wit Otto Kanturek.

After the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, the Jewish Courant left Germany and gained an international reputation with a number of British and French films.

In Great Britain, he worked for Alfred Hitchcock on the thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), for Berthold Viertel on The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), a fascinating combination of documentary realism and spiritual allegory, and on John Brahms' remake of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1936).

In France, Courant filmed some of the most important French films of the decade and worked with directors such as Jean Renoir (La Bête Humaine, 1938), Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, 1939) and Max Ophüls (Sarajevo, 1940).

After the invasion of the Wehrmacht and the capitulation of France in 1940, Courant, like many other German artists and intellectuals, fled to the United States. Courant moved to Los Angeles and hoped to continue his career in the Hollywood film business. When the USA entered the war in 1941, he was assigned to the Special Services Division under Frank Capra. Courant's family remained in Germany. His mother, Nuscha Fanny Courant, was killed in the Chełmno extermination camp on May 13, 1942.^[2]

Despite several applications, the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) refused him membership, which excluded him from studio work in Hollywood. Particularly in technical professions, American trade unions were keen to protect the interests of their members, which is why emigrated cameramen such as Courant or Eugen Schüfftan were rarely officially employed in film productions.^[3] Courant tried to sue for his membership in court and lost the case in 1950. Nevertheless, he worked as a co-cameraman for Charles Chaplin in 1947 on his film adaptation of Monsieur Verdoux. In 1961, he was behind the camera for the last time for the Jayne Mansfield film It Happened in Athens. In the absence of continuous film work, Courant began teaching as a lecturer at UCLA. He died on April 20, 1968 in Los Angeles.

• Bock, Hans-Michael & Bergfelder, Tim. The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema. Berghahn Books, 2009.

• Curt Courant at IMDb