Erich Pommer

Erich Pommer (20 July 1889 – 8 May 1966) was a German-born film producer and executive. Pommer was perhaps the most powerful person in the German and European Film Industries in the 1920s and 1930s.

As producer, Erich Pommer was involved in the German Expressionist film movement during the silent era. As the head of production at Decla, Decla-Bioscop and from 1924 to 1926 at Ufa Pommer was responsible for many of the best known movies of the Weimar Republic such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Michael (1924), Der Letzte Mann / The Last Laugh (1924), Variety (1925), Tartuffe (1926), Manon Lescaut (1926) Faust (1926), Metropolis (1927) and The Blue Angel (1930). He later worked in American exile before returning to Germany to help rebuild the German film industry after the war.

Pommer was born in Hildesheim, Province of Hanover, to Gustav Pommer and his wife Anna. After a brief apprenticeship with the Herrenkonfektion Machol & Lewin, Pommer began his film career in 1907, with the Berlin branch of the Gaumont company, eventually taking over as director of its Viennese branch in 1910. In 1912, Pommer concluded his military service and became a representative of the French Éclair camera company in Vienna, where he was responsible for film distribution to Central and Eastern Europe. In 1913, he became Éclair's general representative for Central Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Poland, based in Berlin. In the same year, he married Gertrud Levy and became, together with Marcel Vandal, the director-general of the Viennese office of Éclair. Under Pommer's direction, the company began the production of feature films including Das Geheimnis der Lüfte / Le mystère de l'air (in English, the Mystery of the Air), the first films he produced. Another five films followed in 1915.

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