Background
Carl Mayer was born onn 20 November 1894 in Graz, Steiermark, Austria.
Carl Mayer was born onn 20 November 1894 in Graz, Steiermark, Austria.
When Mayer was sixteen, his father committed suicide, having failed to break the bank at Monte Carlo with a system. That Dostoyevskyan background forced Mayer to fend for the family. He did any job involved with the theatre, painting, or drawing.
During the war, he seems to have been on the verge of mental illness. That experience may have conspired in his association until Hans Janowitz on the screenplav of Das Kabinett cles Dr. Caligari (19, Robert Wiene). The potency of that film may be curiously anonymous in that its novelty came about by accident. Caligari was unlike the body of Mayer’s work, but it undoubtedly fixed his ambitions on the cinema.
In the next few years, Mayer became the most significant writer in German films. Rotha claimed that he often influenced the direction and supervised the editing of films. That is always a difficult claim to assess, but it seems clear that Mayers importance in affecting the kammerspielfilm was nonliterary: Brandhcrd (20, Hans Kobe); Der Bucklige unci die Tanzerin (20, Murnau); Dcr Gang in Die Nacht (20, Murnau); Genuine (20, Wiene); Johannes Goth (20, Karl Gerhardt); Das Lachende Grauen (20, Lupu Pick); Grausige Nachte (21, Pick); Die Hintertreppe (21, Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni); Scherben (21, Pick); Schloss Vogelocl (21, Murnau); Phantom (22, Murnau); Tragikomodie (22, Wiene); Vanina oder die Galgenhochzeit (22, Arthur von Gerlach); Erdgeist (23, Jessner); Der Puppenmacher von Kiang-Ning (23, Wiene); the original story for Die Strasse (23, Karl Grune); Sylvester (23, Pick); The Last Laugh (24, Murnau); Tartuff (25, Murnau); the idea for Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt (27, Walter Ruttmann).
When Murnau was hidden to America by Fox, it was Mayer—still in Germany—who wrote the screenplay for Sunrise (27, Murnau), a remarkable instance of German material being made into an American subject (it came from a Hermann Sudermann novel). Mayer also supplied the script for Murnaus next American film. Four Devils (28).
He went to Paris and wrote the scripts for two Paul Czinner Elizabeth Bergner films: Ariane (31) and Der Traumencle Mund (32). In 1932, he went to England and never had another screen credit. He was not entirely inactive. Among other films, he worked on Pygmalion (38, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard), Major Barbara (41, Gabriel Pascal), and World of Plenty (43, Rotha). He was advisor to Two Cities and a friend of Rotha and Gabriel Pascal, but the idleness must have made him despair, or dream of some evil genius who had invented a scheme for scooping the pool at the nearest casino.
Das Kabinett cles Dr. Caligari
1919Grausige Nachte
1921The Last Laugh
1924Schloss Vogelocl
1921Mayer is a central figure in silent German cinema, an author who hardly wrote for any other medium than film, and a man closely involved with the development of the most purely cinematic branch of German filmmaking, the work of F. W. Murnau. His role in the history of kammerspieljihn cannot be contested. Mayer was responsible for scripts that abandoned titles, that endeavored to represent psychological atmosphere, and that led directly to Mumau’s expressive camera movements.
Quotes from others about the person
“He was a careful, patient worker," wrote Paul Rotha. “He would take days over a few shots, a year or more over a script. He would wrestle and fight with his problems all day and all night. He would go long, lonely walks with them. He would never deliver a script until he was wholly satisfied that the problems were solved. He would rather cancel his contract and return the money than be forced to finish a script in the wrong way. He had iron principles arising from the film medium itself, and never once departed from them. His instinct and love for film dominated his way of living. Film mattered most and he gave everything, including his health, to it.”