Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer started writing about film in the mid-1970s and, with his books on Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Jodie Foster, Bernhard Wicki, Jean-Pierre Melville, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Bresson, André Bazin and François Truffaut, soon became one of Germany's foremost film historians. For his translations of Truffaut's complete writings into German, he was named Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Cultural Minister Jack Lang. Together with Joe Hembus he wrote a history of the New German Cinema. After a five-year stint as Vice Director at the Munich Film Museum, where he was involved in the reconstruction of Orson Welles' unfinished films, he switched to filmmaking in 1999. His documentary Monsieur Truffaut Meets Mr. Hitchcock was screened at the Cinemathèque Française in Paris, at New York's Film Forum and at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. In 2000, his documentary Milos Forman: Film Is Truth opened the Forman retrospective at the Munich Film Festival. Fassbinder in Hollywood (2002) and Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin (2006) have both been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fischer was a curator for the Munich Film Festival for 25 years and, since 2002, has worked as a consulting producer for The Criterion Collection and other prestigious DVD labels. In December 2016, he was named Officer in the National Order of Merit for his achievements in French culture by President François Hollande.