UFA, German motion-picture production company that made artistically outstanding and technically competent films during the silent era. Located in Berlin, its studios were the best equipped and most modern in the world. It encouraged experimentation and imaginative camera work and employed such directors as Ernst Lubitsch, famous for directing sophisticated comedies, and G.W. Pabst, a pioneer in the expressive use of camera position and editing techniques.
UFA was established in 1917 when the German government consolidated most of the nation’s leading studios. Its purpose was to promote German culture and, in the years following World War I, to enhance Germany’s international image. At first, UFA produced mostly historical and costume dramas, including Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918; The Eyes of the Mummy) and Carmen (1918), both directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Pola Negri. The company soon acquired several theatres throughout Germany and inaugurated Berlin’s lavish Film Palast am Zoo with the premiere of Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919; also released as Passion), an international hit that did much to open the door for German films in countries where they had been banned since the war.
In 1923 the studio acquired one of the world’s largest production facilities, at Neubabelsberg, as a result of its merger with the film company Decla Bioscop. This move, however, coincided with the increasing popularity in Germany of Hollywood films, and UFA’s resulting financial crises compelled the studio to produce mostly inexpensive documentary films for the next few years. Distribution deals with the American studios Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ultimately proved disastrous, but UFA rallied long enough to produce such classics as F.W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1924; The Last Laugh), Edwald André Dupont’s Variété (1925; Variety), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
On the brink of financial ruin, the company was purchased in 1927 by the powerful financier Alfred Hugenberg, a future Hitler supporter who mandated that the company devote itself to films that promoted German nationalism. The company still produced such notable efforts as Der blaue Engel (1930; The Blue Angel) and Der Kongress tanzt (1931; Congress Dances) but was coerced to make National Socialist films almost exclusively when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The resulting films proved popular in Germany, but rising production costs and a shrinking international market (owing to Nazi policies) led to large deficits. The government purchased the company in 1937 and thereafter tightly controlled film content. Such directors as Helmut Kaütner, Josef von Báky, and Georg Jacoby were able to produce quality, apolitical films within this environment, but the company ceased to exist after the war’s end in 1945. A new company called UFA was launched in 1956, but it eventually went bankrupt.