Obituary for filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt: Munich cinema romantics

For him, the cinema was a dream world in which you had to lose yourself unconditionally: on the death of Eckhart Schmidt, director of “Jet Generation” and “The Fan”.

“Marines Let’s Go” was one of his favorite films, a men’s film from the early 1960s by old Hollywood veteran Raoul Walsh about a group of American GIs in the Korean War who experience women’s stories in Japan. Eckhart Schmidt’s first own films were of course all set in Munich; he came to the city in 1958 and wrote film reviews for a few years, including for them South German newspaper. Munich, seen anew with the experiences gained in American genre cinema, was the great undertaking of the young Munich filmmakers of the 1960s, Schmidt and Klaus Lemke, Max Zihlmann, Rudolf Thome.