The film artist Helmut Herbst died at the age of 86.
When cinema was invented, magic and reality did not want to be separated. For the filmmaker and film professor Helmut Herbst, it retained this wonderful omnipotence throughout his life. Childish curiosity and scientific ambition allowed him to successively conquer animation, documentary and feature films and ultimately inspire generations of film students – first at the Berlin DFFB, later in Kingston and from 1985-2000 at the HfG Offenbach. For Helmut Herbst, the camera and trick table remained magic boxes that produced truth.
It was a crank camera from the silent movie era with which he began to shoot animation elements for the NDR’s “Panorama” magazine in 1961. Klaus Wildenhahn had discovered his talent. Just one year later he and his company Cinegrafik produced some of the few real masterpieces of the West German post-war animation film in addition to commissioned work: With the poet Peter Rühmkorf, he created “Brief Instruction for a Happy Life” in 1962/63 and “Black-White-Red” in 1963/64 : Laying trick armies march three times in this satirical work of art under the unfortunate color triad: first for the emperor and the leader, and finally for the “Bild” newspaper.
He discovered his love for cinema in the late 1950s as a painting student in Paris. He later transferred the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague to his now classic short film “So what?”, Which he directed in 1966/67 together with leading actor Markwart Bohm. In the 1960s and 1970s, Herbst was one of the defining personalities of the other cinema. But even when German television became colorful in 1967, the first picture came of him: This animation was as friendly as a cake topper and yet intoxicated and drunk with color, cinema in its purest form as an alluring temptation.
As successful as Herbst was with his animation film studio at that time, he always used his resources for productions of uncompromising independence. Between encyclopedic documentaries about “Germany DADA”, the collage artist John Heartfield (whose style he continues in the animated film) or “Happening. Art and Protest 1968 ”continued to make cartoons of almost anarchic poetry. In 1992 he turned his love for early cinema into a fictional film of rapturous splendor, “The Serpentine Dancer”, starring Karina Fallenstein, Ben Becker, Eva Mattes and Otto Sander.
Herbst was not only a gifted mediator in his documentaries. He passed on to his students what he had taught himself: the right mix of tools and a spirit of freedom. In public he usually spoke up on an important film-political question, the urgent need to secure the film heritage.
In his home studio in the Odenwald, where he worked with his wife, the editor Renate Merck, his artistic work did not come to a standstill either. It was not until 2019 that he experienced an audience success at the Ludwigshafen Festival as the producer and editor of the documentary “Es geht ein dunkle Wolk”. On Saturday, Helmut Herbst died at the age of 86 in Brombachtal.
