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Updated Monday, February 13, 2012 0:06 am TWN, By Deborah Cole, AFP



	The back lot set “Berliner Street” is pictured at Studio Babelsberg, in Potsdam Babelsberg, eastern Germany, on Jan. 18. The world's oldest major film studio celebrates its 100th birthday this month with Hollywood stars and European players ready to toast the mythic Studio Babelsberg outside Berlin. (AFP) Enlarge Photo

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Oldest major film studio celebrates 100th anniversary

POTSDAM, Germany--The world's oldest major film studio celebrates its 100th birthday this month with Hollywood stars and European players ready to toast the mythic Studio Babelsberg outside Berlin.

It survived the Nazis and the communists and is now capitalizing on its legendary status among cinema history buffs like Quentin Tarantino to beat back tough competition from the likes of London, Prague and Budapest.

Marlene Dietrich smoldered on its sound stages, science-fiction trailblazer “Metropolis” took off from Babelsberg in 1926 and Alfred Hitchcock learned the ropes here as a fresh-faced assistant director.

“All the Hollywood people say 'What a history, it's an honor to work here', whether it's Tom Hanks or Tarantino, who of course knew every film that was ever made here,” Eike Wolf, Babelsberg's head of publicity, told AFP on a tour of the sprawling site ahead of the centennial jubilee on Feb. 12.

Hanks just wrapped up filming “Cloud Atlas,” which, with a budget of around US$100 million, its producers have called the most expensive German-produced film of all time.

Tarantino, for his part, lovingly constructed a replica of an old-time Paris cinema here only to blow it to smithereens at the end of “Inglourious Basterds,” with Hitler inside.

And Clive Owen made Swiss cheese of a nearly life-size replica of New York's Guggenheim Museum that was built here, in a shoot-out in “The International.”

“Berlin is very attractive for creative types — it's a great location and it is much more affordable than London, for example,” studio Chief Executive Charlie Woebcken told AFP.

A string of all-star parties, exhibitions and books are planned for the anniversary of the day in 1912 when work began on “Totentanz” (The Dance of the Dead), starring Danish superstar of the era Asta Nielsen.

The Berlin film festival running from Feb. 9-19 will show a retrospective of Babelsberg's greatest hits, with events also planned in Cannes, Los Angeles, New York and London.

On a walk across the lot, a visitor can struggle to picture Dietrich as just another blonde in the crowd of young actresses who turned out for the casting call of “The Blue Angel” which would rocket her to immortality.

“In today's Marlene Dietrich Studio, there are corridors with wooden floors that Marlene actually walked on,” Woebcken said. “We left them as-is to maintain that historical flair.”

The golden age promptly ended as Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels took the reins under the Third Reich.

Babelsberg became a movie factory, churning out light entertainment and vile anti-Semitic propaganda such as the notorious “Jud Suess.”

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After the war, the communists also recognized the power of cinema to influence the masses, and the then-DEFA Studios were dubbed “Honnywood” for longtime East German leader Erich Honecker.

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