Trivia

He first appeared as an actor in the movie "In Nacht und Eis" (12), afterwards he concentrated to the directing of movies.

The director Otto Rippert made his first artistic experiences at the theater where he was active for many years.

He realised his last works as a director in the 20s.

Otto Rippert was busy as an editor after his career as a director, among others for "Variete Nummer 7" (1933).

His most important movies came in the second half of the 10s into being.

He already shot his first movie for Gaumont in 1906 but his real film career started in 1912.

In 1912 he appeared (complete with stick-on beard) as the millionaire Isidor Straus in In Nacht und Eis, one of the first films about the sinking of the Titanic. The film was made by Continental-Kunstfilm of Berlin, where Rippert continued to work as a director, making some ten motion pictures between 1912 and 1914.

Rippert was born in Offenbach am Main, Germany, and began his career as a stage actor, working in theaters in Baden-Baden, Forst (Lausitz), Bamberg and in Berlin.

He had a stroke in 1937 and died in Berlin in 1940.

His reputation as one of the pioneers of German silent film rests on some of his later achievements, for example Homunculus and The Plague of Florence.

Homunculus, produced by Deutsche Bioskop in 1916, is a six-part serial science fiction film involving mad scientists, superhuman androids and sinister technology. The script was written by Robert Reinert, and the film foreshadows various elements of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, as well as serving as a model for later adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein rather than the original 1910 version. The subject-matter of Homunculus is similar to an earlier film about a monstrous man-made being, Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1915).