DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum: First World War Films

>>View collection The corpus of films digitised by DFF within the framework of EFG1914 is largely composed of non-fiction material such as newsreels, documentaries, propaganda films, and amateur footage. Fictional films make up a smaller part of the material and include, beyond feature films, some “Tonbilder” (sound pictures) – short films that were synchronously accompanied by a gramophone record in cinema.

All in all the digitised material adds up to about eight hours of film. Many of the films will be introduced to a larger public for the first time on the European Film Gateway, among them are some unidentified fragments as well as materials of two interesting amateur filmmakers: Oskar Barnack logged the time of World War One by a self-constructed camera in the Hessian town of Wetzlar, showing, among other things, life in a prisoner of war camp. William Held, an American doctor, produced three documentaries while visiting Berlin between 1919 and 1922, addressing the consequences of the war with respect to health issues and food supply in Germany.