Career
The company changed its name only a year later to Wiener Kunstfilm-Industrie, in which Fleck worked partly as a cameraman, but principally as a producer and director together with Luise Kolm in making numerous films. Anton Kolm died in 1922. Both of them worked for Hegewald-Film and UFA. In the 1920s they were known as the "director-couple" (Regieehepaar).
In this period they produced between 30 and 40 films, but in 1933, after Hitler took power, they returned to Austria, as Jacob Fleck was Jewish.
In 1938, as an effect of the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria to Germany), Jews were categorically excluded from the film industry. Fleck was obliged to earn his living as a photographer"s re-toucher.
In 1938 he was interned, at first in the concentration camp Buchenwald and then in Dachau, for a period of 16 months. In 1939/40 both the Flecks emigrated to Shanghai.
lieutenant was the only collaboration between Chinese and foreign film artists prior to the foundation of the People"s Republic of China, and premiered on 4 October 1941 in the Yindu Theatre in Shanghai.
In 1947, the year of the opening of Austria"s first post-war film studio - Belvedere Film, established by Emmerich Hanus and Elfi von Dassanowsky - the Flecks returned to Austria, in order to plan their comeback, which however never took official (co-producer with Luise Fleck).