Piel, Harry

Film producer, director, actor

Born: 12.07.1892 in Benrath near Düsseldorf

died: 27.03.1963 in Munich

Piel was briefly a cadet in the merchant navy and completed a commercial apprenticeship in 1909-11. In 1912, he founded his "Kunst-Film-Verlags-Gesellschaft" in Berlin, for whose numerous, initially short productions he wrote the scripts, directed, acted and sometimes operated the camera himself. Piel remained committed to this auteur principle, which was not uncommon in the early days of cinema, even after the specialization of the creative fields had made a reorientation necessary.

He experienced his most successful period in the silent film era, in the years during and after the First World War, when his films, characterized by artistic physical action and breakneck chases, attracted a mass audience. With the introduction of sound film in the early 1930s, Piel's productions, which relied on spectacular show values, increasingly struggled. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, Piel's colportage-like films set in the circus or artist milieu increasingly revealed their limitations. After the Second World War, they seemed anachronistic. Accordingly, the film "Der Tiger Akbar", which premiered in April 1951 in Frankfurt's Turm-Palast, was only moderately successful.

Piel had been living in Wiesbaden since 1949 and founded his company Ariel-Film here in early 1951 to realize his first post-war production Unter den Eichen. Prior to this, Piel had served a five-year professional ban - due to his NSDAP membership, which was hardly conducive to his career during the Nazi dictatorship. Piel then completed his Africa film "Panic" in Wiesbaden, which had been aborted during the war and was released in cinemas in 1953 under the title "The Elephants are on the loose". The fact that the melodramatic story about a large animal trapper in Tanganyika met with a somewhat stronger response did not change the fact that Piel was unable to connect with the German post-war film industry. The offices of his Wiesbaden-based Ariel production were closed in 1960 and Piel moved to Munich, where he spent the last years of his life in poverty.