Welcome to the Weimar Talkies Project (WTP), a platform dedicated to preserving and making accessible the reviews of feature sound films produced in the Weimar Republic from 1929 to 1933. Led by doctoral student Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert, WTP seeks to provide an unprecedented source of information about Weimar Republic films, increase their impact and influence, and facilitate research into film history and criticism.
Alfred Weiner’s Film-Kurier, a renowned Berlin-based daily trade paper with notable writers and editors such as Lotte Eisner and Willy Haas, has often been referenced in Weimar film studies. WTP has made this invaluable resource digitally accessible for the first time. Thus, Film-Kurier remains an essential source for gaining insight into Weimar cinema.
Through our innovative digitization process, we have been able to preserve reviews from deterioration and potential loss over time, as well as create a platform for future generations to explore their cultural, social, and political contexts.
Launched in 2018, the project has been praised for its potential to create innovative online presentations, facilitate education, and foster research – as evidenced by its inclusion in an issue of the film studies journal Synoptique devoted to moving image archival training. After two years of hard work, the project was successfully relocated to UCLA HumSpace in 2020, and the website is now regularly updated with new entries every week.
Our long-term goal is to make our project accessible to people around the globe by providing all releases in English. We recognize the power of knowledge and the importance of education, and we are delighted to keep contributing to this field. We invite you to explore WTP, and we thank you for joining us on this journey. We trust you will find something to pique your interest.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to the technological tools that made this Digital Humanities (DH) project possible. In particular, we extend our sincerest appreciation to ABBYY FineReader for their powerful software, which enabled us to quickly and accurately convert content into digital text format. Additionally, we thank Airtable for providing us with a hybrid spreadsheet-database solution for creating our database. Further, we are thankful to DeepL Translator‘s neural networks and deep learning technology, and OpenAI‘s GPT-3 language-generation model for assisting us in translating and editing historical materials. Lastly, we would like to thank WordPress for powering our website and giving us a platform to share content with the world.
We are immensely grateful to our mentors Todd Presner, Dawn Childress, Ashley Sanders Garcia, Wendy Kurtz, and Anthony Caldwell, who enabled us to bring our project to completion. We would also like to thank the UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program (GSRM), the Digital Research Start-Up Partnerships (DResSUP), the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS), and the Center for European and Russian Studies for their support. Additionally, we are thankful to the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and the Austrian Film Archive for the priceless opportunity to gain insights into German film history. We are thrilled to be able to share our work with the world, and we look forward to continuing to develop it in the years to come.
