Hermann Warm

Art director and painter, trained in stage design in Düsseldorf and at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. Hermann Warm was an important figure in the German expressionist cinema of the 1920's and early 30's. He was instrumental in changing traditional concepts of using painted backdrops in favour of three-dimensional constructions. He was also among the first to petition producers to give the art director copies of film scripts, in order for pre-production sketches to be made. Warm began in films in 1912 with Deutsche Vitaskop, after working as a theatrical designer. Following a stint designing stage sets for the German Army in Vilnius, he joined Decla-Bioskop as full art director in 1919, often working in close collaboration with Walter Röhrig. Some of Warm's best work was for the directors Fritz Lang, (designing the famous sets for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)), Henrik Galeen (The Man Who Cheated Life (1926)) and Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr (1932)). By the late 1930's, Warm found regular film work as a free-lancer more difficult to come by, having repeatedly failed to obtain a long-term contract from Ufa. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1941. Though he returned to Germany six years later, he never again achieved the same level of artistic success.