Barcelona 1925. Photo: Historiathek

Hidden History Footage

The film below is part of a 40 minute footage collection which includes several reels of 35mm nitro film, shot by a Bavarian princess between 1925 and 1930 in Bavaria and Spain.

The footage was found in a metal box containing 19 reels of 35mm nitro film. The find was offered to Dr. Bleek in 2007 by a Munich family the ancestors had worked for the princess until her death in 1987. The family had received the box together with several household items after her death.

Historic background:

Princess Pilar of Bavaria (1891-1987) was the great-granddaughter King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Her mother and grandmother were Spanish infantas, this explains her strong connection to the Spanish royal dynasty. Her father was Prince Ferdinand Maria of Bavaria, General of the Bavarian cavalry and physician and nephew of the prince regent Luitpold who governed Bavaria during the years before World War I. He was married to Maria de la Paz of Spain, daughter of the Spanish King.

Pilar grew up in a cosmopolitan family with passion for the modernization of live that technology and society achieved already in the early 20 century. In 1911, at the age of nineteen she undertook a journey with a Mercedes Benz automobile from Munich to Spain. During World War I she worked as Nurse in her father’s hospital in Munich facing the horror of the technological improved warfare.

After the end of war and the revolution of November 1918 that removed the Bavarian Royals from power she started to study fine arts at the Munich Academy. She was a talented painter during all her lifetime. A long interview with her, broadcasted in the 1970ies in German Public TV give some expressions of her life but the footage is now underlying the narration with a great visual impact of 1920ies private life.

In the mid 1920ies, Pilar must have discovered her interest in motion pictures, and she soon began to film with her own camera – before Leni Rieffenstahl even got in touch with the matter.

Pilar was a modern and emancipated woman, the type of content she selected for her shootings and her perspective towards it underline this impression. It is exciting to imagine a young modern minded woman of the 20ies going around with her camera shooting. She is someway a representative of the young, emancipated women of the “Golden 20ties” upper class in Germany like Putzi von Opel or the “Flying Fräulein” Thea Rasche.

This film material has been discovered now for the first time, so far nobody knew of its existence. It is one of the rare examples of early private film making. Especially in Germany most of such materials were lost during WWII.

Content background:

The film reels show a broad range of different scenarios – be it in Bavaria or Spain, be it royal, urban or rural life of these times. Since Pilar was a princess herself, some of the pictures have been made at close range to her royal family. As far as we can conclude from the memories of her brother prince Adalbert of Bavaria, who was the first German Ambassador in Spain in the 50ties, the film material must have been shot partly on excursions they made in 1927 to Spain. Other trips to diverse European Capitals are as well dated in 1927/28. The reels shot in Munich and surroundings are dated 1926. They show diverse landmarks of the city.

Technical background:

The footage was shot with one of the first 35mm hand-cameras from this period (ARRI-Flex or ICA Kinamo). As she had relationships to ARRI Munich, we might conclude that the camera used was an ARRI-Flex.

We found 19 reels of nitro film with a total of more than 1500 meters. Dr. Bleek scanned the nitro material in 2008 with a Cintel Millenium Machine at Scanwerk Munich on 2k format. As the material was damaged in parts we made a careful restoration of the reels – including stabilization and other state-of-the-art techniques.

The entire collection was sent to the German Federal Film Archive (Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv) in Berlin, where further steps of preservation of the originals including dubbing and other preservation methods have been applied.

Stephan Bleek

About Stephan Bleek

Stephan made his PhD in contemporary history at Munich University. He worked as director of documentaries for the German TV station Bayerischer Rundfunk for about 20 years before he founded the motion footage library Framepool in 2001. He left Framepool in 2017 and directed some documentaries for the German TV channel ZDF. He still works in the film and photography sector and writes on subjects of contemporary history.