Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin - Von der Schoenhauser Allee nach Hollywood (Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin - From Schoenhauser Allee to Hollywood). 2006. Written and directed by Robert Fischer. With Nicola Lubitsch, Tom Tykwer, Wolfgang Becker, Evy Bettelheim-Bentley. Fischer, a former curator of the Munich Film Museum and maker of documentaries about cinema, tells the story of how a young son of a Jewish tailor in Berlin joined the theatre at nineteen, began performing in film comedies at twenty-one and made his first film a year later in 1914. By 1918 he became one of Germany’s most important filmmakers, a position he maintained until he left for Hollywood in 1922. Rare film clips, photographs, newsreel footage of Lubitsch and the city of Berlin, interviews with Lubitsch’s daughter, current German comedy directors, and noted film historians, trace the genesis of the “Lubitsch Touch” and fashion a cultural narrative about a man and his metropolis. In German, English; English subtitles. 110 min.

Titus Theaters
MoMA
11 West 53rd Street

As a special section of Kino!, MoMA’s annual survey of new German cinema, the Department of Film presents Kino Berlin, an exhibition of notable films made in Berlin since reunification. Organized by MoMA Senior Curator of Film Laurence Kardish, the series includes Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run (1998), Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Andreas Dresen’s Night Shapes (1999) and Summer in Berlin (2005), the Hissen Brothers’ documentary Dem Deutschen Volk (1996) on Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), as well as the American premieres of two documentaries: Hanna Schygulla’s Hanna Hannah (2007) on Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial and Manfred Wilhelms’s Berlin: Pictures of a City (1998) on the city’s radical architectural changes.

For information on buying tickets to films at MoMA, go to moma.org/visit_moma/admissions.html or call MoMA at 212-708-9400.