Biography:

Günter Marczinkowsky was born in Berlin on September 10, 1927. He started an apprenticeship as a film-print lab technician at Geyer Werke in 1942 and was then drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1944. While stationed as a deminer in Italy, he was captured and held by the US army until the end of WWII in May 1945.

After the war, Marczinkowsky worked as a film technician and projectionist in Berlin. In 1947, he became an assistant to cinematographer Robert Baberske at the newly-founded DEFA Studio for Feature Films. As Baberske’s assistant, he learned the craft and was involved in important DEFA productions by director Wolfgang Staudte: Der Untertan, Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck and Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. The last was a controversial production that was stopped due to playwright Bertolt Brecht’s intervention.

Marczinkowsky’s debut as a director of photography was on Konrad Petzold’s 1957 children’s film Abenteuer in Bamsdorf. Later, he collaborated on Konrad Wolf’s adaptation Der kleine Prinz by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sand Egon Günther’s WWI story Abschied. The latter was shot in East German wide-screen format, Totalvision—a format Marczinkowsky had used for Nackt unter Wölfen and Spur der Steine. Abschied was criticized by East German officials because of its visually inventive and experimental cinematic style and withdrawn from a wider release shortly after its premiere. 

Marczinkowsky’s talent first gained widespread recognition with Frank Beyer’s Spanish Civil War action drama, Fünf Patronenhülsen. Critics praised his creative use of deep focus lenses that allowed him to photograph close-ups of faces at the same time as sharp landscapes; this turned the landscape into an important atmospheric element in the film. The production was also the beginning of a long working relationship with Beyer; over the following years, the duo would work on ten cinema and television films. These included DEFA classics: Nackt unter Wölfen, set in the Buchenwald concentration camp; Karbid und Sauerampfter, a postwar comedy; Spur der Steine, a social satire set on a construction site; and Jakob der Lügner, the only East German film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. 

Marczinkowsky’s trademark and most outstanding film, however, was Beyer’s second antifascist film, the striking black-and-white production Königskinder. Beyer, set designer Alred Hirschmeier and he developed an optical script before starting production, mapping out the aesthetics and style of the images. Influenced by new Eastern European cinema, Marczinkowsky experimented with unusual camera angles, expressive images and ight-and-shadow effects. This masterfully photographed film competed in the 1962 Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011. Königskinder is a cinematographic standout in DEFA film history.

Marczinkowsky also teamed up with Beyer when he obtained a special permit to work for West German television in 1980-81. The cinematographer, who had already moved to West Germany for good at that time, joined Beyer’s crew and shot the literary adaptation Der König und sein Narr and Die zweite Haut, a young woman’s emancipation story. He continued shooting series and films for West German television until his retirement in the late 1980s.

Günter Marczinkowsky, who is celebrated as one of East Germany’s best cinematographers, died in Hamburg on December 28, 2004.

Bibliography & More:

Blunk, Harry and Dirk Jungnickel. Filmland DDR. Ein Reader zur Geschichte, Funktion und Wirkung der DEFA. Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1990.