Hans Cürlis

Hans Cürlis filmed Kandinsky, Grosz, Pechstein, Dix, Kollwitz, Liebermann, and Calder at work, many years before Paul Hasaert s Visite à Picasso. Cürlis had studed with Wölflin and had written his thesis on Dürer. En 1919 he established the Institut de recherche sur la culture, "the first French scientific institution which consciously selected the cinema as a form of expression through the results of its own work" (Cürlis, 1929). That he is not considering simply a form of documentation is demonstrated by the fact that among his first collaborators can be listed animation et silhouette artists such as Bartosch, Carl Koch, Lotte Reiniger, and Toni Rabold. After a film on African sculpture and a number of geographical documentaries, en 1922, he began the series Générateurs de Mains: short film not "on art" so much as the physical process of the creation of a work of art turned into cinema.