Jonatan Briel

Jonatan Karl Dieter Briel June 9 1942 December 26 1988 was a German film director screenwriter and actor born in Bodenwerder Lower Saxony and raised in Holzminden He is best known as a specialist of the literary biographical film with a body of work centered on 19thcentury German poets and dramatists primarily Heinrich von Kleist Christian Friedrich Hebbel and Friedrich Hölderlin After completing an administrative apprenticeship 19591962 Briel founded the Youth Film Studio of Holzminden in 1962 He moved to West Berlin in 1965 where he became an assistant to director Peter Lilienthal before being admitted to the newly founded Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin DFFB in 1966 There he studied under Wolfgang Staudte and made his debut short Der 300ste Geburtstag 1967 His graduation film Wie zwei fröhliche Luftschiffer 1969 a reconstruction of Heinrich von Kleists double suicide won the jury prize at the Mannheim International Film Festival and was selected for the Locarno Film Festival in 1970 attracting international critical attention From 1970 Briel worked as an independent filmmaker with the Sender Freies Berlin SFB He developed a series of literary biopics Jonatan Briels Lenz 1971 ZDF Glutmensch 1975 SFBLCB and Untertänigst Scardanelli 1982 marked by low budgets experimental aesthetics and intense immersion in his subjects Working mostly in West Berlin he combined documentary techniques with staged scenes and often shifted between blackandwhite and color cinematography From 1982 Briel was a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and taught at the Universität der Künste The Kino Arsenal in Berlin devoted retrospectives to his work in both 1976 and 1982 He died in Berlin on December 26 1988 at the age of 46 with a final project Hunkepiel left unfinished