Edgar G. Ulmer–Der Mann im Off
Austria,
2004, 77 min
Shown in 2005
CREDITS
- dir
-
Michael Palm
- prod
-
Arianné Ulmer Cipes, Georg Misch, Ralph Wieser
- scr
-
Michael Palm
- cam
-
Joreg Burger
- editor
-
Michael Palm, Marek Kralovsky
- source
-
Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp, 3651 Stone Canyon Ave, Sherman Oaks, CA 91403-4530. FAX: 818-789-2477. EMAIL: aucipes@aol.com.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Michael Palm and Arianné Ulmer Cipes in person.
OTHER
This documentary is as resourceful as one of its subject’s own Poverty Row productions. At its heart is Ulmer’s daughter, Arianné, dedicated to preserving her father’s cinematic legacy—an arduous task, since Ulmer, who emigrated to America in the early 1930s, was blackballed into the Hollywood margins after “stealing” a studio boss’s daughter-in-law-to-be. While Ufa-trained colleagues such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder went on to major studio success, Ulmer churned out bottom-scraping B pictures. Since no footage of the director exists, the task of recreating him falls to an oddball assortment of colleagues, filmmakers and movie geeks, ranging from collaborators such as Ann Savage and John Saxon, to director/historian Peter Bogdanovich, to Ulmer’s kindred spirit Roger Corman. Evocative use is made of Bogdanovich’s old audio interviews; Ulmer whispers wisdom from beyond the grave to such modern-day protégés as John Landis and Wim Wenders. Ulmer’s fascination with movie trickery is shared by director Michael Palm, whose delight in mimicking the director’s penny-wise techniques pays off in weirdly inspired interviews featuring Detour-like back projection and fog machines straight out of Man from Planet X. The film is a fitting combination of passion and regret—a vivid distillation of Ulmer’s love of cinema.
—Eddie Muller
FACTOID #162
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.
