By the middle of the 1950s, reconstruction of the electrical engineering company had been completed. The Managing Board had long wanted to make the company’s range of offerings, innovative strength and international orientation the subject of a film. One of the main purposes of such a film was to give the numerous new employees who had been working for Siemens since the end of the war a feeling for the extent of their employer’s capabilities. The Munich association for educational films (GBF) was commissioned to produce this “full-length color film with soundtrack.”

The filming of this documentary portrait of all the company’s production and research activities began in 1957; for eight months an external film crew travelled round over 34 countries on four continents. During this time they produced fascinating images of large projects in distant lands. In addition, the film approached the topic of electrical engineering from a completely different angle, showing, for example, a close-up of a teletypewriter in action and the transformation of the crystal structure of aluminum oxide. It was these unique pictures above all that made the Siemens film “Impulse of our Time” the standard documentary of the electrical engineering sector, and for years it had no competition.

The background music for the documentary film also broke new ground: the action, which took place solely in the world of technology, was to be accompanied throughout with technical sounds. In a sound studio built by Siemens specifically for the purpose, the young composer and Orff pupil Josef Anton Riedl created the first computer-aided “electronic music.” The working parts of this Siemens studio for electronic music can now, incidentally, be seen in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.On October 16, 1959, the Siemens film was shown for the first time in a Munich premiere cinema; this was followed initially by internal showings for the Munich workforce and their families and friends. The film was then shown in all large German cities and all Siemens locations in Germany. The reception of this avant-garde company film exceeded all expectations – “Impulse of our Time” was awarded numerous film prizes. The producer and director Otto Martini thus received the Federal German Film Award and two Gold Ribbons at the tenth Berlinale in 1960, and the Wiesbaden film evaluation board rated the industrial film “highly valuable.”

Over the next few years, “Impulse of our Time” was dubbed in a total of 13 languages. In ten years, it was seen by more than eight million viewers in Germany and abroad. 

Alexandra Kinter