Zeughauskino: The Lady with the Torch – 
Homage to Columbia Pictures

A Hollywood landmark: the woman with the torch, reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty and initially even draped in the American flag. The Columbia Pictures studio, which emerged from a renaming of the Cohn-Brandt-Cohn film company in 1924, employed renowned directors such as Frank Borzage, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra and John Ford as well as Dorothy Arzner, one of the first female directors in Hollywood. They made some of their best-known and most surprising films at Columbia and were later celebrated for their individual production styles. The majority of studio productions, on the other hand, were made by less famous filmmakers. Many of them came from Europe and found a livelihood in the American film industry after 1933, when the National Socialists came to power and threatened their lives. These directors were just as responsible for the commercial success of the film studio as the actors in the spotlight who played a central role in marketing the films. Stars such as Rosalind Russell, Rita Hayworth, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper appeared in Columbia Pictures films and covered a broad spectrum of genres, stories and styles: dramatic and melodramatic stories, screwball comedies and westerns, police and war films, lavish prestige productions and B-movies with tight budgets. A striking number of these films are characterized by a feel for the social issues of their time. They ask about moral standards, about law and justice, they create images of morality, they tell of problematic psychological dispositions and their effects. Directed by some of the most original filmmakers of their time, these Columbia productions proved to be seismographs of their time.
The retrospective curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, which presents a number of films in new restorations, was first shown at the Locarno Film Festival in 2024. A selection can now be seen at the Zeughauskino. It offers an overview of productions from the 1930s to the 1950s and brings together lesser-known works by directors born and raised in Europe who found a film exile at Columbia Pictures, alongside classics of Hollywood cinema and formative Columbia productions.