Luise Fleck

Her father Louis Veltée run an panoptikum wax museum in Vienna and already showed movies from 1896. Luise Fleck Kolm sat at the cash-box as a child and came in contact with this new medium very early.

After her first direction for "Am Gänsehäusl" (1908) she realised movies as a director from 1911 regularly.

Her cinematical career began in 1910 when she founded together with her husband Anton Kolm and the director Jakob Fleck the "Erste österreichische Kinofilms-Industrie". This company was renamed into "Wiener Kunstfilm-Industrie" in 1911. It soon crystallized that Luise Fleck Kolm was the artistic head whereas her husband was especially responsible for the financial part.

In 1919 she founded together with her husband the Vita Film and they realised other well-known productions like "Durch Wahrheit zum Narren" (1920), "Der tanzende Tod" (1920), "Eva, die Sünde" (1920), "Eine Million Dollar" (1921), "Revanche" (22) and "Die Tochter der Frau Iarsac" (24) under her direction. The production company went bankrupt in 1924. She successfully continued her cinematical career in the next years despite this setback.

Afte the death of her husband Anton Kolm she went to Germany with Jakob Fleck and got married with him in 1924. Both became well-known as a director couple in the film business. From now on she worked under her new name Luise Fleck.

When Hitler took power in 1933 they returned to Vienna, as Jacob Fleck was Jewish, but continued to produce for "Hegewald-Film" in Vienna and Prague, while Luise's son Walter Kolm-Veltée, who had taken a qualification in sound production at Tobis-Tonbild-Syndikat, was nominally responsible for direction.

Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld ("The Pastor of Kirchfeld") appeared in cinemas in 1937. It was Luise and Jacob Fleck's first sound film production, based on a well-known anti-clerical play of 1870 by Ludwig Anzengruber. It was intended as anti-Nazi and pro-Catholic "Austria propaganda", but was not perceived as such by the critics, who misinterpreted and discounted it.

When in 1938 the National Socialists also took power in Austria in the Anschluss, and control over the Austrian film industry passed virtually overnight into the hands of the Reichskulturkammer, there was no more work for them.

After a torture of her husband through the KZ's in Buchenwald and Dachau for a total of 16 months they were able to emigrate to China thanks to the intervention of Wilhelm Dieterle. There they realised their last cinematical work with "Söhne und Töchter der Welt" (1941) together with director Fei Mu. But the rest of the time they lived in huge poverty.

Luise Fleck Kolm and Jakob Fleck only returned to Austria in 1947. But the planned comeback did not come off, three years later Luise Fleck Kolm died at the age of 77.