Jules Greenbaum

Jules Greenbaum (1867–1924) was a German pioneering film producer. He founded the production company Deutsche Bioscope^[1] and was a dominant figure in German cinema in the years before the First World War. He is also known for his early experiments with sound films around twenty years before the success of The Jazz Singer made them a more established feature of cinema.

Pioneer

Greenbaum was born in Berlin in 1867 as Julius Grünbaum. He was originally in the textile industry and lived for many years in Chicago in the United States. After returning to Germany in 1895 Greenbaum moved into the newly established film business and founded Deutsche Bioscope in 1899.^[2] Greenbaum began acquiring cinemas and established a vertically integrated network after establishing Vitascope in 1906 to handle distribution.

Sound

Greenbaum's firm invented and used Synchroscope, which synchronised the visual picture of films with phonograph records to create a working sound system. Greenbaum produced a number of these sound shorts. The head of America's Universal Pictures Carl Laemmle was impressed by the technology when he visited Germany and hired Greembaum's company to install the system in a number of American cinemas, mostly in German-speaking communities.^[3] Synchroscope largely petered out because not enough sound films were made to meet demand and because it could only last for two or three reels while the standard length of films was increasingly four or five reels long.^[4]

Mergers

In 1914 Greenbaum merged his firm with PAGU, owned by his rival Paul Davidson, in order to compete with the larger French studios who were flooding the German market with their films. Just a year later, however, Greenbaum broke with Davidson and founded Greenbaum-Film.^[5] With the outbreak of the First World War, foreign films were barred from Germany allowing domestic production to boom. In 1919 Greenbaum affiliated with UFA, which the State had secretly established as the giant of German industry during the war,^[6] but the deal led to a series of legal disputes and the virtual bankcruptcy of Greenbaum-Film. After Greenbaum's death in 1924, the company was revived by his two sons and continued producing films until 1932.^[7]

During his life Greenbaum launched the career of a number of leading German directors and actors including Max Mack, Richard Oswald and Maria Orska. His son Mutz Greenbaum became a leading cinematographer.

Selected filmography

• Detektiv Braun (1914)
• Ivan Koschula (1914)
• Dämon und Mensch (1915)

References

Bibliography

• Bergfelder, Tim & Bock, Hans-Michael. The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopedia of German. Berghahn Books, 2009.
• Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
• Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. (1996). The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-874242-8. 
• Prawer, S.S. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910-1933. Berghahn Books, 2007.

External links

• Jules Greenbaum at the Internet Movie Database