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Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm is considered a masterpiece of early sound film and of Soviet avant-garde cinema. Dealing with the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, it was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin and the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s. This 2-disc edition presents the film in two versions: the print preserved in the former Soviet Union's Gosfilmofond as well as Peter Kubelka's fascinating restoration which by re-syncing the image and sound as Kubelka explains in Restoring Entuziazm allows the viewer to experience what Vertov considered the new language of sound cinema.

A silent film about the youth of the leading German 18th century dramatist, poet, and literary theorist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). In 1773 he had to leave home and spent miserable years under strict discipline at the military academy of The Duke Karl Eugen, which only strengthened his longing for freedom. His first play "The Robbers" (1781) spoke of the ideas of liberty and became a landmark in German theatrical. The Filmmuseum München has now carefully restored a film that for a long time was believed to be lost. Following the conventions of the silent movie era, the positive was tinted and furnished with two new piano scores.

In the grand tradition of great comedians such as Chaplin or Keaton, German directors Markus Mischkowski and Kai Maria Steinkühler are also sharing the major roles in their feature film debut Westend, a laconic comedy about two unemployed friends and their unsuccessful attempts to set foot in the modern working world. The film is an inventive black and white comedy, independently produced and filmed in a suburb of Cologne. The DVD offers two more adventures of Mike and Alfred in the short films Westend (1997) and Wolga (2003).

One of the first gay-themed films in the history of cinema, Anders als die Andern / Different from the Others (1919) was banned at the time of its release and was believed lost. Using recently discovered film segments, still photos and censorship documents from different archives, Filmmuseum München has resurrected this truly groundbreaking silent film. The 2-disc DVD also offers a new restoration of the anthology Gefahren der Liebe / Laws of Love (1927) for which Hirschfeld himself re-edited a short version of Anders als die Andern, as well as Geschlecht in Fesseln / Sex in Chains (1928), a feature film about the sexual hardships of prisoners which was promoted by Hirschfeld.

This DVD edition is a new restoration of Carl Theodor Dreyer's adaptation of Holger Drachmann's popular nationalistic play from 1883 is based on Hans Christian Andersen's Svinedrengen and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the loss of approximately half of the moving picture content, the surviving scenes can now be seen in a complete narrative supported by still photos and new intertitles based primarily on original sources.

It was Veit Harlan, the protégé of Joseph Goebbels and the director of the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jew Suess, who dared to do a film about a controversial taboo in 1957: the German penal code's Paragraph 175 which sentenced German homosexual men to jail terms for "unnatural vice between men." Anders als du und ich (Different from You and Me) is not only a film about homosexuality, it also deals with the rebellion of young people against the restorative Germany after the Second World War and with the problems of a mother who broke the law to do "the right thing". The DVD contains the censored version as well as a comparison with the original version Das dritte Geschlecht (The Third Sex), a cut scene and production stills.

Four classics of the best German film comedy which were the box office hits of the early post-war years in Germany. The films are very entertaining historical documents which kept their charme thanks to their brilliant dialogues and the performances of Curt Goetz and Valerie von Martens. The original films were restored from the best surviving elements and complemented by luxurous and rare bonus material.

Erich von Stroheim's directorial debut is set in the alpine scenery of South Tyrol. It still baffles its audiences through its precise visual language and its moral ambiguity. This edition presents the film in its gorgeous tinted Austrian release version, Die Rache der Berge (Blinde Ehemänner) / The Revenge of the Mountains (Blind Husbands), featuring German language intertitles. This print of the film is the longest and oldest version available today. Extras include additional materials from the Austrian Film Museum's Stroheim collection.

In celebration of the 60th Anniversary of The Danish Film Institute / Archive & Cinematheque the first films donated to the Danish State are published on this DVD. The first film archive contains a total of seventy films showing Danish events and people of the period 1899-1913.

The only two surviving films of the film company Det skandinavisk-russiske Handelshus (Scandinavian-Russian Trading) which was specialized in sensational topics. Alfred Lind is the star, the director, the writer and the cinematographer of the successful Den flyvende Cirkus which was soon followed by its sequel Bjørnetæmmeren.

Benjamin Christensen (1879-1959) is probably the most innovative director of Danish silent cinema. He had full control over the creation of his films, not only as a director, but also in many cases by being producer, author and protagonist. Christensen's first films clearly show his mastery of cinematic expression as well as his charismatic screen appearance.

This DVD edition is a restoration of Carl Th. Dreyer's first feature film as director. Already in his debut we are witnesses to the thematic mainstay of most of his later films; the mother left to her own destiny with her illigitimate child. In this film the man is haunted by guilt, which he is not allowed to repent. Besides this DVD presents the one minute fragment of a Zola film adaptation written by Dreyer.

Since 1920 artist, photographer, and filmmaker Ella Bergmann-Michel lived and worked at the "Schmelz", an old paint mill near Frankfurt on Main. With guests such as Kurt Schwitters and László Moholy-Nagy the house became an important locale for modern artists. Between 1931 and 1933 she made five documentary films that constitute a rare example of socially involved and equally artistic film. The DVD contains these five films, a documentary film about the artist and a comprehensive booklet with essays on Ella Bergmann-Michel's films.

Two German silent classics dealing with soccer: Die elf Teufel (The Eleven Devils) starring Gustav Fröhlich (Metropolis) and König der Mittelstürmer (King of the Centre Forwards) starring Paul Richter (Die Nibelungen) which survived only in one print with some severe nitrate deteriotation. Both films are supplied with new music accompaniments and with subtitles in different languages. An early film document showing the 1924 soccer game Germany-Italy is added as a special feature to this 2-disc edition.

The American minimalist poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) was a companion of the painter Ad Reinhardt and the religious philosopher and monk Thomas Merton, who had a strong influence on the poets of the beat generation. After decades of a nomadic life between America and Europe he has lived withdrawn for 30 years on the Greek island of Patmos. The present film published on this DVD is the outcome of a long-standing friendship between Robert Lax and the filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel: A visual poem with beautiful black-and-white photography, added by a short film showing Lax reading his poems and by photos shot by Nicolas Humbert in 1993-1999.

Manfred Noa's adaptation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's stage play is one of the completely forgotten classics of German silent cinema. It is an appeal to peace and tolerance that was violently attacked by the Nazis. The story which takes place againsr the backdrop of religious wars between Christians, Islamists and Jews in 12th-century Jerusalem shows Werner Krauss (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) in one of his best roles. The Filmmuseum München has restored the only surviving elements of this silent masterpiece and researched the film's production and reception.

Valdemar Psilander (1884-1917) was probably the greatest male star of Danish silent cinema. He died in 1917, only 32 years old. Despite his early death, he nevertheless acted in 83 films during his 6 years with the Nordisk Films Kompagni. The three films on this DVD are not only representative of Valdemar Psilander's qualities as an actor, but also the production of Nordisk Films Kompagni during the most productive and successful years of Danish cinema.

Two films in beautifully restored tinted versions by A.W. Sandberg, the leading director at the Nordisk Films Kompagni from 1916 until 1926. The Golden Clown is one of the masterpieces of Danish silent cinema and develops the love triangle between the lovable clown, the circus princess and the Parisian bon vivant. Like so many films of the silent era, it is a tale of the old rural world and the glamour and danger in the big city. The Hill Park Mystery is an entertaining detective story, where a tabloid journalist tries to save the woman he has fallen in love with.

The film is based on Kafka's unfinished novel "Der Verschollene". It doesn't deal with the real United States but it is rather a kind of allegory taking place at no specific time in history. Straub and Huillet's version is about class relations and about the society that is created by capitalism, which is utterly cruel, capricious and ludicrous. This 2-disc DVD offers a film transfer supervised by the filmmakers themselves as well as two rare documentaries about the shooting, different versions of the screenplay by Straub and Huillet, unpublished rushes and photos from the shooting.

A film editor's work is as essential as it is invisible. Its outcome, the finished film, is the result of weeks of concentrated labor. Frequently, in documentary filmmaking, the work's narrative structure is mainly shaped in the editing process. The editor functions as co-author, juggling and organizing the raw material at hand, and structuring the material according to principles of space and time, rhythm and composition. This extensively supplemented 2-disc DVD explores this process in a documentary feature by filmmaker Gabriele Voss, a film editor in her own right. Renowned editors, a brain researcher, as well as writer-director Alexander Kluge, talk about their work, oscillating between craft and art. Selected film clips illustrate the techniques and tricks that make up the magic of film montage.

Projects which are in preparation. Since each project released by Edition Filmmuseum includes meticulous restoration of the film, long time researches for the bonus material and often complex rights clearances, there are still no concretes release dates for these DVD's.

Both films display the high production value Nordisk Film Co. had attained after almost a decade as one of the leading film production companies in the world. In The End of the World (1916) the rumour spreads that a comet is on a collision course with Earth. Inspired by the fear evoked by Halley's Comet in 1910, this film was clearly addressed to a public in an age of war. A Trip to Mars (1918) is a lavishly produced space-travel picture and a milestone in the science fiction genre. The contemporary fascination with aviation is evident: the space-ship has wings and a propeller, and the crew is clad in leather aviator outfits.

Yesterday Girl is about Anita G., a young girl, whose parents are picked up one morning during the time of the Third Reich. She comes from the East and now freezes her way through the West. Three times Germany. In Parttime Work of a Domestic Slave, Roswitha Bronski is a married mother of three at the centre of the protest movement. She finds her plans for social change are easier to realize outside family life. Two films by Alexander Kluge, both starring his sister Alexandra Kluge. Pictures, stories, quotes, documents and scenes which mark the beginning pof the New German Cinema and reflect the West German society of the 60s and early 70s. The 2-disc DVD also offers texts and short films by Alexander Kluge related to the two feature films.

2-disc DVD: In the first century of the third millennium, a galactic civil war is raging between governments, industrial giants and space pirates. Run for your lives! The Big Mess features space captain Douglas, the pirate couple Sterr, a space admiral and countless other characters trying to eke out a living in the cosmos. But whenever they get anywhere, they find they've been beaten to it by monopolist enterprises. In Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet, Willi (Alfred Edel) endeavours to survive in a world where annihilistic galactic battles rage, by taking a job at the centre of power. But it's the wrong side that he takes in this civil war.

2-disc DVD: The Power of Emotion explains that emotion isn't to be confused with sentimentality. Emotion is ancient and more powerful than any art form. The film looks at young couples who run into difficulties as they try to translate their experiences of love into clear decision-making. A woman who has shot her husband provides a judge with a puzzle. Those who love can bring the dead back to life by means of co-operation. That's the focus of the opera, "The Power Plant of Emotions" and the "Opera of the 20th Century" cinema. The Serpentine Gallery Program is a treasure trove of TV films. "He who hopes, dies singing" and other true stories.

Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed: Like her father before her, the circus director Leni Peickert wants to show off high-class artistic performances. Yet she still feels naturalness to be her ideal. Her innovations cause the business to declare bankruptcy. Circus and revolution are radical forms of self-realization. Leni Peickert and her elephants try hard. "Utopia gets better and better as we wait for it." The Indomitable Leni Peickert: The circus director continues to pursue her activities. Circus in winter. Bitter times. "The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us." (T.W. Adorno). The 2-disc DVD also offers a 1970 TV discussion with Alexander Kluge, screenplay drafts and stories about elephants.

In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death: A female prostitute and thief makes her way through the city with a female GDR spy. Frankfurt, 1974. It's Carnival time. At the same time police forcibly evict students from occupied buildings). Strong-Man Ferdinand: A fundamentalist of the security forces. The chief of plant security Rieche (played by Heinz Schubert) has more proficiency in his job than his superiors permit. He needs to somehow demonstrate that his position is valuable. "The most dangerous opponents of a system are its protectors." The 2-disc DVD also offers short films, texts and short stories by Alexander Kluge.

Germany in Autumn: Germany in 1977, the Red Army Faction (RAF), Mogadishu, the prison in Stammheim, the murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer. A film collage capturing the emotions of these events. "The closer you look at a word, the further it looks back: Germany." The Patriot: The story of Gabi Teichert (played by Hannelore Hoger) who had already begun to dig around in search of the roots of German history in Germany in Autumn. In daily school life, at the party convention of the Social Democrats (SPD), on the Day of Penance and during Advent: She remains stalwart on her quest for a republic, for which the trouble is worth it. The 2-disc DVD also offers short films by Alexander Kluge and his book "The Patriot".

War and Peace: At the peak of the Cold War, the short-range missile crisis, neutron bombs could have potentially annihilated Central Europe. 300,000 protesters in Bonn. German Chancellor Schmidt resigns. Why make a film collage about war? "Nothing is more discouraging than not being able to see through a game on which your life hinges." The Candidate: Another film collage motivated by the election campaign for the German Bundestag in 1981, where Franz Josef Strauss sought the office of the chancellor. An institution in politics falters time and again because of the reality of the Federal Republic. "Getting to a place in the sun is not easy because once you are there, it has already set." The 2-disc DVD also offers two short films by Alexander Kluge, texts by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt and the unpublished screenplay "Eyes from a Different Country" which was never filmed.

The last films for cinema by Alexander Kluge. Both tell about a dozen stories which complement one another by creating a context. The Blind Director: A young doctor feels that she is redundant. People hurry around. A family sits in front of the computer as if it were a fire in the hearth. A kindergarten teacher is supposed to turn a child over to its legal guardians. The blind director. The present becomes inflammed. Without prior events, the future and particularly a sense of the possible, there is no reality. Miscellaneous News are on the last page of the newspapers. With little oversight from editorial offices but with great emotional fuel. The 2-disc DVD also offers a talk with Alexander Kluge and Jean-Luc Godard as well as new one-minute films by Alexander Kluge.

One of the best German film comedies from the 30s: Lord Cavershot is totally obsessed by the historic Napoleon. His wife feels neglegted. Cavershot's participation in an international congress about Napoleon becomes his personal Waterloo. The DVD offers the newly restored version of the directorial film debut of Curt Goetz as well as a TV feature about him and an interview with his wife Valerie von Martens.

In the face of two world wars, Professor Prätorius, a philanthropist and a surgeon, wants to exterminate the one danger to mankind, the microbe of stupidity, as he states in a spontaneous lecture to his male and female students. When he tries to help a pregnant girl he gets involved more and more in her life and is forced to marry her. The melodramatic comedy was the first film by Curt Goetz after his return from America and a top hit in post-war German cinema. The DVD presents the restored original version as well as a radio play by Curt Goetz from 1947 and an interview with Valerie von Martens, his wife who performed with him in all his films and radio plays.

The firmly rooted ethics of a very proper school "professor" are awfully tempted when his sister, the "black sheep" of the family, sends from her exile in Montevideo an offer for the oldest daughter, which is utterly immoral, thoroughly despicable, yet hard to refuse. Curt Goetz understood how to write comedy and how to play the parts to perfection. His film was the top hit of early post-war German cinema. The beautifully restored original version is added by an interview with Valerie von Martens, co-director, main actress and wife of Curt Goetz.

A highly amusing court-room play full of unexpected turns in the plot and brilliant dialogue, Hokuspokus is the last film written by and starring Curt Goetz. He plays a lawyer who defends a widow, who is suspected to have murdered her husband. The end is more than a surprise. Very well directed by the master of the light comedy Kurt Hoffmann, the stage play is turned into an entertaining film which is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Richard Angst. The DVD offers the restored original version as well as a radio plays by Curt Goetz, original trailers of the Curt Goetz post-war films, and interviews with Curt Goetz and Valerie von Martens.

Four documentary filmmaker, four talks, four key players of the German documentary film movement since the 60s: Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp, Peter Nestler und Klaus Wildenhahn. Each of them has developed an own approach and a personal style. Christoph Hübner, a documentary filmmaker himself, succeeds in portraying four very different personalities, their works and their theories. The intimate talks with the filmmakers are illustrated with clips of their films.

2-disc DVD about the origins of the cinema. Dogs playing the pianos, contortionists defying the pain limits, handcoloured serpentine dances: attractions and sensations characterize the travelling cinema of the fairgrounds in the beginning of the 20th century. Rarities from the trasure chests of the European film archives ranging from Danish anarchistic slapstick and Scottish X-ray films to French erotic piquancies and a wild chase through Brussels caused by a leopard. Local films from the region Luxembourg, Trier and Saarbrücken resent a forgotten genre which was, in its days, another crowd puller in travelling cinema: Filmed local events and scenes depicting the local people who would then pay to see themselves in "living photographs" on the big screen.

Vom Reiche der sechs Punkte is an unusual silent film, produced far away from the film studios in Berlin and Munich. The story deals with a steel worker who looses the sight of his eyes and has to accept his fate. The film shows in unique documentary pictures the work and life in the homes for the blind in Cologne, Neuwied and Düren. The Filmmuseum Muenchen has restored the only surviving tinted and toned print of the film which was found in the collection of the Finnish Film Archive.

In four episodes, we witness how Satan must walk the Earth and tempt men to do evil: Judas betrays Jesus, the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, an episode in the French Revolution and a family tragedy during the Finnish civil war in 1918. Carl Theodor Dreyer's lavish period piece is presented here in its most complete version, even with an alternative happy ending. For this DVD a HD transfer was done from a restored duplication negative.

Asta Nielsen, born in Denmark in 1881, was the first diva of European silent film. As early as 1913, in Die Filmprimadonna, Asta Nielsen acts the role of a star fighting for increased influence on the entire production process. To realize her artistic vision she founds her own company Art-Film in 1920. Hamlet, produced that same year, survived only in a b&w US export version. In 2005 a coloured vintage print of the lost German original version of 1921 was discovered. The restored film had its premiere at the Berlinale in 2007, with new musical accompaniment composed by Michael Riessler. The 2-disc DVD set also includes documentation of the production history of Hamlet, the restoration process and rare an Asta Nielsen home movie compilation.

15 unknown short non-fiction films from 1905-1926 preserved and digitalized by the Technical College for Technology and Economics in Berlin (Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft) in co-operation with the German Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin/Koblenz, the Cinema Museum in London, and the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The DVD offers different ways of access: a journey through time and travel destinations on a map of Europe provide a chronological and geographical orientation for the user. In addition three thematic essays Travel, Labour and Posing for the camera show the diversity of early nonfiction and suggest three of the many ways of looking at these films. A short videofilm How moving images survived gives an introduction to film preservation and restoration.

Fifteen 2-disc DVDs with about 200 films by Alexander Kluge (Edition Filmmuseum 20-34): All the films for cinema and a wide selection of the works for television. Also included as ROM features are short stories and texts (in German and English) as well as complete books from 1960-2009 by and about Alexander Kluge (only in German). Only this original edition includes exclusively 15 bilingual booklets with additional texts by Kluge in German and English. The complete Alexander Kluge is one of the most elaborated DVD edition of the comprehensive works of one of the most creative and influential author of the New German Cinema: The "German Godard". In the year of Alexander Kluge's 90th birthday, the exclusive box with a comprehensive register will be delivered for a reduced special price.

The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Woman: A typical magazine from the start-up period of the independent television window in private broadcast TV. All traditional possibilities for expression in film and many types of television are experimented with: Editing, collage, multiple exposure, narrative interlacing. Headless Man: Ballads and murder ballads are elemental narrative styles that are the precursor to the cinema. They relate destinies and emotion. But how do you tell about the construction work at dusk in the ruins of the Twin Towers or about Amok? Additional texts by Alexander Kluge about his work at television in the booklet and as ROM features.

A sanatory in the south of Germany, a room with a view to the Bavarian Alpes. Talking to the camera: Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, adventurer, Nazi hunter. He talks, tells stories, reflects, interrupts himself. An imaginated film: a trip through Moscow, a meeting with Hitler, " language as a cathedrale", West-Germany's rehabilitation of war criminals, protest actions, the conflicts with his father Veit Harlan, the director of the notorious antisemitic propaganda film Jud Suess. The 2-disc DVD offers the 96 minute documentary Thomas Harlan - Wandersplitter plus 160 minutes with additional interviews with Thomas Harlan and clips from his films.

The 2-disc DVD presents a new reconstruction of Frank Borzage's masterpiece from the last year of American silent cinema The River. For the first time Cinémathèque Suisse was able to include a recently discovered erotic sequence which were cut by the censors. Janet Bergstrom discusses in a visual essay the relationship between F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage at the end of the 20s at Fox. The DVD also includes the first three 1915/16 Western movies by and with Frank Borzage, a collection of production stills and texts by Borzage biographer Hervé Dumont.

High on Work: We have left a heroic and post-heroic industrial age behind us. Farewell to an era when work was still abundant. Yet the adage still holds: Only work makes life real (Marx). The turbulent zones of globalization, in the cafeteria of Brecht's Theater, Helge Schneider as an unemployed woman in Spain, "working to pieces" in the concentration camps. Farewell to the safe side of life: Experiences with core activities of our time, for example skyscrapers or Chernobyl. Experts from the fire department and paramedics, engineers, and scientists tell their stories. With Durs Grünbein, Peter Berling, Igor Kostin, Victor Popov, Nikolai Tarakanov, Igor Jassenjawski, Rosemarie Tietze, and Oxana Pentak.

"Love and hate, how easily they break". Love stories are fundamental stories. In this realm of experience, we can test our own power of judgment. It is possible to judge political matters, which are not similarly open to intimate examination, through our knowledge of love stories. The death of Lucretia toppled the Roman monarchy. When a father is unable to protect his daughter Virgilia from a corrupt judge, he kills her. The secretive kiss of death is an instrument of power, a means to an end, for every Eastern network of agents. To be a laborer of love is the concern of a "grunt", a skillful prostitute, who provides an orderly erotic system on the oil rigs in the North Sea.

War Is the End Of All Plans: War is characterized by the fact that it breaches all barriers. In his book, "On War", Carl von Clausewitz describes how war dreams of its own "omnipotence". Actually, it can never be omnipotent because it is full of all the probabilities we find in real life which continually disrupt its almighty power. In the end, it is just those probabilities which devour the power of war itself but which are as ill-suited to put an end to war as a peace agreement. Where We Come From, Where We Go To: Mankind has not been wiped out by wars and disasters ("against all odds") thanks to its ancient roots. It can be assumed that, without their knowing, human beings bear a treasure endowed upon them by evolution which protects them from demise (as a guardian angel would). Evolution, which begins in outer space, is too diverse to be sabotaged by the whims of the present.

Facts & fakes with Peter Berling, Erich Komrowksy, Hermes Phettberg, Helge Schneider, Georg Schramm and Lilo Wanders. Freedom for the Consonants! means a radical overhaul of the spelling reform. Borderline Cases of Damage Control deals with the insurance cover of at-risk aeroplanes. And from present-day practice: Car racing in the framework of the Olympics, the problems relating to the protection of US presidents, German troops in the Himalayas, security duties for the G8 summit, resistance work against the German occupiers in Poland and finally, Christoph Schlingensief's version of 'Hamlet' and Christian Stueckl's interpretation of 'Peer Gynt'. "It is a fact that fantasy exists. However, it is fantasy that pure facts exist."

There are 80,000 operas. All these operas constitue a single great score which has faithfully accompanied the errors and achievements of bourgeois society for 400 years. The consistent application of cinematic methods the "moving details" of opera leads to surprises. In the opera house, for example, no one sees the great finales of Verdi side-by-side in one evening. No one necessarily discovers that the Grand Inquisitor in "Don Carlos" is given the same music as the murderer in "Rigoletto". Is it possible that a new genre could be born out of the encounter of opera and film? A street map of music?

Die Parallelstraße is one of the most mysterious pioneer films of the New German Cinema. It was produced by GBF, a production company for innovative industrial and promotional films and received awards in inter national film festivals. French critic Robert Benayoun called it "a philosophical thriller, a western of meditation which compensates for a whole year of inevitable manifestations of stupidity," Jacques Rivette put it on his list of the most important films of 1968. The DVD presents for the very first time this "unjustly forgotten masterpiece of the New German Cinema" (Martin Brady) as well as several rare shorts by Ferdinand Khittl (1924-1976) which show his talent for innovative film experiments.

Over five decades, Jørgen Leth has created a cinematic oeuvre that is unique in all respects. In more than 40 films, Leth has maintained his experimental approach to the medium, exploring film as language, testing film's possibilities and limitations. Coming from a starting point in language-conscious modernist poetry, Leth has examined the world not only through language but through the film camera's lens, showing images combined with a singularly detached, descriptive tone all the while carried by an aesthetic and sensuous delight in images. The first volume of a DVD edition which covers all his films contains the anthropological films: The Perfect Human (1968), Life in Denmark (1972), Good and Evil(1975), Notes on Love (1989) and The Five Obstructions (2003). Also included in this DVD set is a booklet and extra notes on a new production entitled Tropical Mix.

Compilation of 17 short films made between 1905 and 1955, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements: newsreel-type documentaries, obscure Hollywood shorts, cartoons, promotional films and just plain odd bits of celluloid. Among others there are two films by the most famous female directors of the silent era Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blaché, slapstick comedies with Stan Laurel and James Parrott, cartoons by Ub Iwerks and by the Van Beuren Studio, one of the first French jazz films with Stéphane Grappelli, a hunting film from Africa by the Belgian cinematographer Alfred Machin and French commercials from the 30s and 50s. All films are with short introductions as extra features.

German silent cinema from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to the coming of the talkies is one of the most celebrated eras in film history. But the corpus of Weimar cinema, as generally viewed, consists only some "classic" directors and masterpieces which suit Kracauer's psycho-sociological perspective, and Eisner's essentially Romantic view of German art history. This collection presents newly rediscovered and meticulously restored films of less known German filmmakers such as Robert Reinert, Richard Oswald, Curt Goetz, Hanns Walter Kornblum, Fritz Freisler, Zoltan Korda, Hugo Rütters and Ella Bergmann-Michel. All films are meticulously restored from the best surviving material. Information about the films and the filmmakers are documented in the booklets, ROM features and film essays. Seven DVD's for a special price.

Walther Ruttmann is a pioneer of modern multimaedia art. His first short films are unique experiments with forms, rhythm and colors, his innovative commercials connected abstract animation art with concrete messages. The symphonic documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt is one of the most famous silent cassics, the travelogue Melodie der Welt became the first German sound feature film. With the radio play Weekend Ruttmann created the first "sound film without images" while his sound short In der Nacht transforms music to images and is a prototype of modern music videos. The 2-disc DVD combines for the first time all surviving works by Walther Ruttmann from 1920-1931 in newly restored and reconstructed versions, often with original scores. It also includes lobby cards, posters, programs and text documents as well as little known paintings and drawings by Ruttmann.

Wunder der Schöpfung is an extraordinary, fascinating Kulturfilm trying to explain the whole human knowledge of the 1920s about the world and the universe. 15 special effects experts and 9 cameramen were involved in the production of this film which combines documentary scenes, historical documents, fiction elements, animation scenes and educational impact. It its beautifully colored, using tinting and toning in a very elaborated way. Some visual ideas in the sequences with a space shuttle visiting different planets in the universe seem to have to be the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Journey to Justice tells the story of Howard Triest, a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 when he was 16-years old, returned as an American soldier and then served as an interpreter during the Nuremberg Trial. He came face-to-face with imprisoned Nazi leaders who were co-responsible for the death of six million Jews, including Howard's parents at Auschwitz. In 1947 he bought a 16mm camera and filmed the ruins of Munich. This unique document is as bonus material on the DVD in its complete version. Parts of it are embedded in the actual film which tells the story from the viewpoint of 83 year old Howard Triest who is returning to Germany with his son Brent to visit the places of his past.

MGM-tycoon Louis B. Mayer called Hedy Lamarr "the most beautiful girl of the century." A psychological portrait of glamour star Hedy Lamarr who became scandalously famous in 1933 as the first nude on the screen with her appearance in the Austrian/Czech film Ecstasy. She then had an extraordinary career in more than 25 Hollywood films. Don't forget her historic patent for a torpedo guided system from 1942 which serves today as the basis for mobile phones. The documentary contains interviews with Mickey Rooney, Lupita Kohner, Kenneth Anger and many other personal friends of Hedy. Besides, the 2-disc DVD offers Hedy Lamarr's legendary scandal film Ekstase in an uncut version.

The Poetic Power of Theory: Aristotle, Heidegger, Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Kant ("What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?"). Seven examples taken from 200 television reportage programmes. "One must take that which is of significance outside of television and introduce it into this medium without compromise." This is particularly true of the gentle violence of theory. The Gentle Cosmetics of Light: Eight one-minute films in large 65mm format. Somewhere between the 65mm film format and the tiny yet robust images of a laptop computer lies the future of film. In addition, a feature film from 2008, The Magic of the Darkened Soul, a film installation for 5 projectors and a documentary film about Alexander Kluge by Angelika Wittlich: All Emotions Believe in a Happy Ending.

In his pictures, films, collages and installations, the painter and filmmakerLutz Dammbeck seeks a synthesis of expressive means from the genres of film and fine art. His work to date identifies him as one of the key representatives of independent film and media art in the former GDR and as a unique, outstanding phenomenon within modern contemporary art. The 2-disc DVD presents for the first time all his animation films and media works, including an extensive booklet with essays about Lutz Dammbeck's filmic work and a lot of documents about his fight with state authorities as ROM features.

In Nerven, writer-director-producer Robert Reinert tried to capture the "nervous epidemic" caused by war and misery which "drives people mad". This unique portrait of the life in 1919 Germany, filmed on location in Munich, describes the cases of different people from all levels of society: Factory owner Roloff who looses his mind in view of catastrophies and social disturbances, teacher John who is the hero of the masses and Marja who turns into a radical revolutionary. Using different fragments the Munich Film Museum could reconstruct this forgotten German classic which is a historic document and anticipates already elements of the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

The second box of the series "Jørgen Leth Collection" contains Leth's sports films, primarily emphasising the cycle film classics Stars and Water Carriers (1974), The Impossible Hour(1975), and A Sunday in Hell (1976). The director was tired of clichéd sports journalism and found "the inner psychological drama of the battles between great cyclists" more absorbing. The set also contains a documentary about the unique Basque ball gamePelota (1983) and two experimental films about the phenomenon of movement and speed Motion Picture (1970) and Chinese Ping Pong (1972), a coversation with Jørgen Leth and a 40 page booklet about the films.

John Cook (1935-2001) was, in his own words, "Viennese by choice". Between 1972 and 1982 the Canadian photographer directed four films (three features and a documentary) which hold a unique position in Austrian Cinema: independently produced, featuring a cast and crew of friends and shot on modest budgets. This 2-disc set presents restored versions of Cooks three landmark films produced in the 1970s, as well as extra materials.

Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) is not only one of the most important films of the Weimar Republic, it is also one of the most spectacular censorship cases of the era. The story from the inflationary period in Vienna in the years immediately after World War I was considered too much of a provocation: nouveau riches currency and stock market speculators who wallow in Babylonian luxury, homeless and unemployed Lumpenproletariat living in barns, women who sell their souls for a bit of fresh meat at the butcher's, sexual orgies, bordellos and murders. This unique 2-disc DVD set offers the improved most complete restored version of the film as well as a lot of additional material including an excellent documentary about the life and work of G.W. Pabst.

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass muderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Russia. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a burocratic muderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film.

Cult actor from the 60s who aroused admiration by his choices and his intense acting, Pierre Clémenti left behind him a remarkable film work. As a genuine artist, rejecting both mainstream career and stardom that he could have entered owing to his filmstar looks, he preferred to get very much involved in working with demanding filmmakers like Buñuel, Bertolucci, Pasolini and Garrel as well as directing outstanding fringe films. The 2-disc DVD presents for the first time these very personal diary films, images of the 60s and 70s underground culture and sounds of psychedelic rock music.

The five-disc DVD set includes eleven of the joyul modern-dress comedies, westerns, satires, dream-fantasies and romances from 1916-1921 which made Douglas Fairbanks the tremendously popular hero of the American silent cinema. In addition to Fairbank's unique talent , these ebullient films showcase his gifted collaborators including writer Anita Loos and directors Allan Dwan, Victor Fleming , and John Emerson. All the films have been digitally mastered from 35mm or original-negative prints and feature new music scores.

The poetic travelogue A Sixth Part of the World and the "visual symphony" The Eleventh Year mark the beginning of Dziga Vertov's most creative period, which peaked in the canonical film Man with the Movie Camera. This 2-disc set presents the two rare masterpieces in a new transfer and with new soundtracks by British composer Michael Nyman. The bonus features offer materials on the methods of the filmmaker, as well as an introduction to the Vienna research project on Vertov, "Digital Formalism."

Werner Schroeter's unique melodramas about love and death are fascinating amalgamations of opera, theater and cinema elements. Art and kitsch, high and low brow, Maria Callas and Caterina Valente, myths and genre elements. The 2-disc DVD set presents the first two feature-length films by Schroeter in beautifully restored versions. Additionally it offers a new reconstruction of Schroeter's legendary two-screen projection Argila and excerpts of a talk with Werner Schroeter, lead by Dietrich Kuhlbrodt during the Werner Schroeter Tribute at the Viennale 2008.

In his travel films, the director is again an anthropologist observing the world with detached intensity and refraining from analysis. 66 Scenes from America (1981), the earliest film in the box set, shows snapshots of archetypical American locations motels, diners, highways, a lone cactus iconographic images of a mythological country presented in bright postcard colours, sanitized, like the myth of America. In the latest film, Aarhus (2005), Leth travels back to the city of his childhood, whose familiar locales are likewise captured in the director's trademark tableau style. In between, we find his films about Haiti and China. His film about Homo ludens, Moments of Play (1986), documents people at play around the globe, including the filmmaker's own game with reality.

Max Davidson (1875-1950) is one of the numerous forgotten Hollywood supporting actors who acted in innumerable movies. His heyday was in the late 1920s when he was engaged at the Hal Roach Studios for a series of Jewish comedies which belong to the best and funniest shorts the studio ever produced. The 2-disc DVD set presents all the existing comedies as well as Davidson's first sound film and documentation of the lost films with rare scripts and more than 300 unpublished stills. All films focus on Davidson as the henpecked Jewish family father who has to struggle with his good-for-nothing son(s) and a daughter who falls in love with a non-Jewish boy.

Though the element of fiction is far from dominant in Jørgen Leth's oeuvre, he has made two "fiction features," Interference (1983) and Traberg (1992). Both are set in Haïti and both revolve around a lost, searching male character. The protagonists vanish or are gradually ousted from the centre of the fiction, as the real world moves in with a violence and obsessive power that makes Haïti itself the true subject of both films. As an added bonus, this box set also contains Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby's 1979 TV-production of A Midsummer Night's Play (1979), an 1803 Danish Golden-Age classic by the Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger. Leth and Kirkeby present the play in tableau form, featuring the finest Danish actors of the day in a festive romp through Oehlenschläger's elaborate verse and metrics.

In this box set, we find Leth's ballet films about the dancer Peter Martins and the Bournonville steps and tradition alongside literary portraits of the Danish authors Klaus Rifbjerg and Søren Ulrik Thomsen, plus a many-headed portrait of illustrious Danish writers from H.A. Brorson to Michael Strunge, and, finally, his films about sports icons, the footballer Michael Laudrup and the boxer Ayub Kalule. Ballet, Danish literature and sports: In all three areas, the filmmaker strives to portray people and situations by zeroing in on the creative process itself. In the way he shapes his fascination through objective detachment and a formalist approach, we recognise the method of anthropological observation that is such a strong thread in Leth's works.

Today, more than 80% of silent cinema is considered lost forever. Some films were claimed by the flammable and unstable film stock of the day. Others were, once upon a time, thought to be worth less than the cost of keeping them. Yet, miraculously, unique copies of celebrated films previously thought lost are occasionally found and restored to delight a new generation. Bardelys the Magnificent joins Monte Cristo as two resurrected classics, both top-of-the-line productions starring John Gilbert, one of the most handsome, passionate and popular stars of the 1920s. Film historians Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta provide a full-length audio essay on Bardelys the Magnificent as well as an enclosed booklet and the thirty-minute documentary Rediscovering John Gilbert.

Discover a time when the truest adventure had the wind at your back and an infinite horizon all around. Under Full Sail: Silent Cinema on the High Seas proudly collects five breathtaking films that preserve the romance, grandeur and allure of windjammers sailing open waters, exquisitely photographed in the style of the time. The Yankee Clipper (1927), produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Rupert Julian, restored to the most complete version available since the film's release, is a feature-length melodrama recreating the real-life race from Foo Chow to Boston for the China tea trade. Around the Horn in a Square Rigger (1933) was filmed by noted sailor and author Alan Villiers documenting the record-breaking 83-day voyage of the 1902 barque Parma from Australia to England in the 1933 Grain Race.

The sixth and final box set in the Jørgen Leth Collection comprises his early experiments. Here we find Leth's first films from the 1960s and early 1970s, when the poet and director moved into the world of film, playing around with images and sound. His very first film, from 1963, is about the jazz pianist Bud Powell. Like so many of these films, it is the product of a close collaboration with the cinematographer Ole John. Leth and John continued their tight partnership over the following years, exploring and challenging cinematic language. Eventually, they expanded their collaborative form into the ABCinema movement, a film collective of artists from many different scenes, including among others Bjørn Nørgaard, Per Kirkeby, Ursula Reuter, Lene Adler Petersen and Erik Thygesen. The box set offers a portrait of "the artist as a young puppy," and supplements the early experiments with an array of bonus materials almost a full five hours chronicling the rise of ABCinema, describing the director's life in Haiti today and pointing ahead to two brand new films about Leth.

The 1927 silent film Der Bettler vom Kölner Dom (The Beggar from Cologne Cathedral), shot on location by Rolf Randolf, is a typical example of popular German mainstream cinema in the 1920: a detective film shot on location with humor and suspense. It is presented in a digitally restored version with two alternative soundtracks: a new orchestral score by Pierre Oser, produced and performed by the WDR-Rundfunkorchester, and a live improvisation by Günter A. Buchwald (piano & violin) recorded at the International Bonn Silent Film Festival 2010. The 2-disc DVD set also offers shorts, commercials and newsreel reports about Cologne which were shot in the silent era.

Georg Kaiser decribes in his Expressionist theater play the attempt of a bank cashier to escape his middle class daily life. Director Karlheinz Martin's adaptation transfers Kaiser's play into an Expressionist film of radical stylization. The German film industry was so irritated by the result that the film never found a distribution and was never shown in German cinemas. The only existing print of this classic survived in Japan where the film received a cinema release and was preserved by the National Film Center. The Munich Filmmuseum restored the film and added two scores transferring the visual avantgarde concept of the film into a musical structure: An improvised performance for three percussionists by the SchlagEnsemble H/F/M and a modern score for seven musicians composed and condacted by Yati Durant.

"Images from the late 1980s in East Germany to the immediate present, 2008, in Germany. What remains besieges my head. In it, all these images come together again as something different from what they were originally intended to be. They remain in motion. They become history. The material remains incomplete. It is what I picked up, what remained important to me. My picture." (Thomas Heise) The DVD set also offers rare early works by Thomas Heise, unique and authentic images of everyday's life in the GDR, immediately banned in the GDR.

Trying to find a counterpart to his very successful comedy team Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, producer Hal Roach made several attempts to combine two female comedians. The first team with Anita Garvin & Marion Byron did only three films before both actresses separated. Nevertheless, their A PAIR OF TIGHTS is today seen as one of the greatest silent two reel comedies ever done. At the beginning of the 1930s the teaming of platinum blonde Thelma Todd with shy ZaSu Pitts and later with clumsy Patsy Kelly was a more fruitful idea, resulting in a series of sound shorts which ran successfully for five year until Todd's mysterious death in 1935. This series produced some great films of timeless fun that can easily compete with the best comedies of Laurel & Hardy. The 2-disc DVD set will present a selection of the best shorts in restored versions, most of them have never been released on DVD before.

Two exceptional documentaries about Bernhard Kimmel, who was in the headline of German newspaper's in the 1950s because of spectacular robberies and burglaries. In 1961 he was sent to prison for 14 years, but released already in 1970. His attempt to live virtuously fails. During a burglary he kills a policeman and in 1982, he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Peter Fleischmann describes a life between Robin Hood fame and prison which also reflects a forgotten chapter of German postwar history.

"Film should not be misused for non-filmic messages": Wilhelm and Birgit Hein examine in their films theprocess of reproduction and the film material itself. Rohfilm shows the destruction of the common "film image" and was described by Stephen Dwoskin as a "visual bombing" of shreds, fragments, dirt and leftovers of film editing. Reproductions dissolves photos in greys, 625 films a negative "snow" TV image with different speeds, in Portraits photos are changed by the development and reproduction processes. Materialfilme consists of film starting and ending leaders, the elements of every film that normally are not seen on the screen. W+B Hein's underground film classics deal with the unexplored potentials of the film material which starts to disappear in the digital world.

Michael Pilz's Heaven and Earth is an epic documentary in two parts about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. The film is a documentary in the best sense of the word - a meditation on time, on nature and the struggles of man, as well as a record of a lifestyle ceasing to exist. "If you let it happen, the film will pull you into its cosmos; it is one of those works that teaches you to see and listen again." (Ulrich Gregor, 1983)

Like the musical Chicago that won the Best Picture Academy Award and five other Oscars in 2002, this original 1927 version descends from a 1926 hit Broadway play by Maurine Watkins. It's a terrifically entertaining mix of humor and melodrama as well as a pungent critique of trash journalism. Frank Urson signed Chicago as director, although it is substantially the work of Cecil B. DeMille and his A-list technical staff. (DeMille apparently judged it unseemly to take full credit for this cynical and secular story while his religious spectacle The King of Kings was still in theatres!) Chicago is silent filmmaking at its peak, with an outstanding score for this edition by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Lev Kuls̆ov's legendary "constructivist Western" (adapted from a story by Jack London) was a highlight of the Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and one of the most popular films of its time. Upon finding gold in the Yukon a group of prospectors descend into murder. The survivors are facing an existential choice. The DVD presents a new transfer of the film and a contemporary score by Austrian composer and musician Franz Reisecker. As an extra it includes the only surviving fragment of Kules̆ov's Vas̆a znakomaja, featuring sets by avantgarde artist Aleksandr Rodc̆enko.

The 2-disc DVD set presents new restored versions of two rare classics by Werner Schroeter: Willow Springs was shot in a village in the Moravi desert and describes a house run by three man-eaters. In Tag der Idioten a woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a mental institution. Rare short films by and about Werner Schroeter as well as stills from the shooting of Tag der Idioten are added as bonus features.

This double DVD holds two unusual films by Richard Blank. In Friedliche Tage, we enter a totalitarian and inhuman society, in which daily life is a series of nightmares and the protagonists search for a utopia of freedom and love. Prinzenbad gives us a microcosm of a society dominated by male power plays, wheeling and dealing, corruption, love, and eroticism. Both films dispense with established dramatic conventions, instead consolidating scenes, episodes, and stories into a grotesque roundelay of the decline of civil society.

Since the late 1970s, James Benning's films have been a regular fixture at festivals in Germany and Austria, while frequent television broadcasts have helped expose his work to an even larger audience here than perhaps at home. This 2-disc set presents the products of this intercontinental relationship: Ruhr, Benning's first foray into digital filmmaking, is a modern-day "city symphony" dedicated to Germany's industrial Ruhr district. His latest work, natural history, is an audiovisual portrait commissioned by Vienna's Natural History Museum. Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary James Benning: Circling the Image, produced for German television, rounds off the set.

This 2-disc DVD presents the reconstructed and restored version of The Student of Prague, one of the first German 'art films'. Based on an original script by popular writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, it tells the story of Balduin, a student who is destroyed when he sells himself to the devil. Mark Pogolski's piano recording is based on the original score by Joseph Weiss, a pupil of Franz Liszt. Daniel Grossmann conducts the Orchester Jakobsplatz playing Bernd Thewes's adaptation of the original score. Bonus features include the film's reconstructed English export version, plus The Ideal Wife, a short film also made by Ewers in 1913 which features Ernst Lubitsch.

This deluxe 2-disc DVD set presents Sergej Eisenstein's immortal screen classics Battleship Potemkin and October in previously unreleased and painstakingly restored versions featuring the original accompanying scores by Austrian-born composer Edmund Meisel. The ROM section includes a wide range of rare documents and detailed essays on the heavily influential creative partnership of "kindred spirits" Eisenstein and Meisel.

Next to the classic Man with a Movie Camera, his "film poem" to the founder of the Soviet Union, Three Songs of Lenin, is the most universally acclaimed and enduringly popular of all Dziga Vertov's films. This 2-disc set presents the earliest surviving versions of Three Songs of Lenin, the 1938 silent and sound reissues, previously unavailable on home video. Also included are the two Lenin-themed editions ofVertov's Kinopravda newsreel series as well as a feature-length TV documentary about Vertov by Austrian Film Museum co-founder Peter Konlechner.

The 2-disc DVD presents for the first time an unjustly forgotten classic epic of the German silent cinema in a newly reconstructed and meticulously restored version. Shooting in Munich and its surroundings with an international cast, director Manfred Noa told the story of Helen of Troy and the decade-long war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The additional features of this DVD include the contemporary souvenir programs and stills as well as alternate scenes, rushes, foreign intertitles and outtakes.

The construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, was a pivotal break in German history and had to be justified in movies produced by East Germany's DEFA studio. The 2-disc DVD set presents for the first time films by reknowned directors that tried to address topical events. Two of the films even include documentary footage shot in the summer of 1961.

With his "production films", from Ofenbauer, Stars, Der Sekretär and Ein Vertrauensmann to Wäscherinnen, Jürgen Böttcher emancipated himself from the conventions of Socialist Realism and placed the focus of his work inspired by Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema on pure observation. The commissioned short films Im Pergamonmuseum and Tierparkfilm subversively tested the censors' tight restrictions. In 1977, Böttcher began his long-term collaboration with cinematographer Thomas Plenert, resulting in Im Lohmgrund.

The 2-disc DVD set features all films by Katrin Seybold about the White Rose and the resistance against National Socialism in Munich: Unique documents about strong personalities.

With his debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul expertly blended cinematic fact and fiction in a manner that fifteen years later continues to defy both categorization and comparison. A low-fi "genre bender," independently produced on a shoestring and subsequently endangered by neglect, Mysterious Object at Noon has now been painstakingly restored by the Austrian Film Museum and the Film Foundation from the best surviving elements. This DVD release also includes three short works, selected by the director himself, plus the Austrian Film Museum's now out-of-print monograph on Apichatpong Weerasethakul from 2009 as an exclusive DVD-ROM feature.

With Jahrgang 45, Jürgen Böttcher wanted to establish a culture of film making within the DEFA which "developed authentically, straight from reality". Yet like his earlier works, Drei von vielen and Barfuß und ohne Hut, whose youthful, anti-dogmatic vitality and spirit was not 'representative' enough for the GDR culture functionaries, the film was banned. This double DVD traces its history from the censored version to its final restoration.

This adaptation of Günter Grass's novel "Cat and Mouse" was one of the first films of the "Young German Cinema" and subject of a controversial political debate. The DVD puts Katz und Maus in the historical context with rare documents in the booklet and in the ROM section. Also included are two short films by Hansjürgen Pohland and Michael Klier, a selection of photos from the set and the original recordings of Attila Zoller's famous score.

With films including the 'rubble woman' portrait Martha, the three-part experimental film cycle Potter's Stier, Venus nach Giorgione and Frau am Klavichord, the portrait of the artist Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, and also the documentaries Rangierer and Die Küche, noted for their outstanding sound and visuals, Jürgen Böttcher distances himself yet further from the didactic tone and abstract heroic representation of socialist films. In Georgien is the only full-length film that Böttcher was able to shoot on location outside of the GDR.

F.W. Murnau's Faust has a long history spanning from Berlin to Hollywood. In 1923, Ernst Lubitsch convinced Mary Pickford to let him make a film of the Faust story, but he only got as far as shooting screen tests for the role of Mephisto. When Ufa announced its own Faust film a year later, the only cast member in place was Emil Jannings as Mephisto. For the other parts, the company attempted unsuccessfully to secure American stars. Ufa succeeded in procuring Nobel Prize-winning author Gerhart Hauptmann to write the intertitles, only to discard them in the wake of protest from script writer Hans Kyser. Now, for the first time, the Munich Filmmuseum has reconstructed Faust with Hauptmann's titles, which alter the rhythm and character of the film significantly.

The mid-1970s saw James Benning's first feature films attract the attention of critics, establishing him as a representative of the »New Narrative Movement.« In films like 11╳14 and One Way Boogie Woogie, he combines the structural analysis of image, sound and narrative with auto-biographical traces, as well as with an almost »classical« interest in composition, color, light and landscape. This 2-disc set features 11╳14 (1977), one of the central U.S. avant-garde films of the 1970s, in a restored version. Also included is Benning's recurring view of his hometown Milwaukee at three different points in time: One Way Boogie Woogie (1978), 27 Years Later (2005) and One Way Boogie Woogie 2012. Documents of change and transience.

The beautiful restoration from the original camera negative of the earliest surviving film by F. W. Murnau gives an accurate representation of Murnau's innovative, highly expressive lighting techniques. The plotan eminent physician comes under the spell of an unscrupulous dancerfinds echoes in Murnau's later masterpiece Sunrise. Conrad Veidt appears in a supporting role as a sinister painter, whose entrance eerily presages Nosferatu. "The new restoration allows you to see everything in the frame, with a marvelous translucence and density of detail. Forget High Frame Rate: This is hypnotic, immersive cinema." (David Bordwell) Lupu Pick's Scherben, like Der Gang in die Nacht based on a screenplay by Carl Mayer, has been celebrated as a masterful piece of tension-filled film-making built up through purely cinematic means. The 2-disc DVD set offers exceptional scores for both films.

The 2-disc DVD presents the two most beautiful films shot in Germany by Max Ophüls in restored versions: The wonderful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's famous play Liebelei was the last film before Ophüls was forced to emigrate. The German version of the international co-production Lola Montez, shot in color and CinemaScope, remained his last movie. Additionally the DVD set features Martina Müller's highly praised documentary Max Ophüls - Den schönen guten Waren and never before published documents and out-of-print books in the extensive ROM section.

As reclusive, mountain-dwelling inventor "Mr. Radio," Italian-born silent film star Luciano Albertini wowed audiences with impressive stunts against the breathtaking backdrop of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. After rescuing a group of stranded mountain climbers, he must then confront civilization and his own past. The documentary Mit dem Motorrad über die Wolken (A Motorcycle Trip Among the Clouds) also features sensational mountain footage and audacious acrobatics on moving vehicles. It recounts the journey of a group of young daredevils who set off from Austria on their motorcycles to ascend the Tofane peaks in the Dolomites at an altitude of 3200 meters.

Before making (sound) film history with The Blue Angel, Viennese-born filmmaker Josef von Sternberg directed a series of thematically and stylistically daring silent films. This DVD presents the first and last of his surviving silents, digitally restored from archival 35mm elements and supplemented by a new video essay by film historian Janet Bergstrom. The Salvation Hunters, von Sternberg's self-financed, socially conscious directorial debut, won praise from Charles Chaplin, among others, and includes a new score by award-winning Austrian composer Siegfried Friedrich. The sole extant fragment of The Case of Lena Smith brings the director's youthful memories of fin de siècle Vienna vividly to life.

The 4-disc DVD presents for the first time the surviving films Kafka saw in his lifetime and mentioned in his writings: documentaries, early feature films, newsreels. All the films were restored by archives in the U.S., Germany, Czechia, France, Italy, Denmark, and Russia. New scores are performed by Günter A. Buchwald and Richard Siedhoff.

Heiner Carow's powerful film The Russians Are Coming, about the final days of World War II, was made in the GDR in 1968. However, it did not receive state authorization for release at the time and could only be painstakingly reconstructed in 1987. This double DVD presents a new, restored version of the film and allows viewers their first ever opportunity to compare it with Career (1971), in which Heiner Carow made use of parts of the unreleased material from The Russians Are Coming.

Betrayal is an everyday occurance, and it starts with the betrayal of one's own self. Sterling Hayden: round-the-world sailor, war hero, Hollywood star, author. "Hayden did more than just regret and seek the forgiveness of those whom he had harmed so much," as one of those whom Hayden had denounced to the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 later put it. "He did the most radical thing possible: He changed." (Abraham Polonsky) This 2-disc DVD set presents two films by Wolf-Eckart Bühler that deconstruct the Hayden myth. On the one hand: a chaotic yet tranquil documentary featuring Sterling Hayden himself. On the other: Hayden's self-analytical, autobiographical tale on the experience of fear, conformation and betrayal, condensed into contemporary images and sounds.

Rainer Simon's adaptation of Fritz Rudolf Fries' novel "The Airship" is one of the most unconventional feature films ever produced in East Germany. Featuring a complex flashback structure and animated dream sequences painted directly on the film by artist Lutz Dammbeck, Das Luftschiff tells the story of an inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new airship. When Civil War breaks out in Spain, the inventor refuses to allow his work to be abused for sinister political purposes. Unbändiges Spanien is an expanded version of Spanish Earth by Joris Ivens, who authorized Jeanne and Kurt Stern to update his work for a new audience.

Sein Lin, a drummer of a traditional Burmese theatre group, falls in love with the beautiful dancer, Khin San. When she leaves the theatre to pursue a career as a film actress, he gives her a small figure as a keepsake, a symbol of traditional theatre. They part ways and he watches her from a distance as she appears to lose her way in the ultra-glamourous world of commercial cinema. This black and white classic comes with an important message: true art is as private and as intense as the love between a drummer and his dancer. Based on meticulous research of Burmese travelling theatre groups, Tender are the Feet was made in 1972. It is one of the first films of Maung Wunna, a director who developed his artistic style during the golden age of Burmese cinema and continued to do so despite the oppressive policies of the military dic tatorship. An important reference point for contemporary filmmakers, it has now been restored from the only sur - viving source material, a DVCPro archive tape provided by Myanmar's national broadcaster MRTV.

"Related in theme and form, these three documentaries Germany Dada (1969), John Heartfield: Photomontage Artist (1977) and 1968: Art, Protest, Happening (1981) can be seen as a trilogy on the history of art in the 20th century. Art historians focus on those rare moments in our German history when radical aesthetics and radical politics briefly went hand in hand. Then the movement of authoritarian political sects on the one hand and the reaction of the authoritarian establishment combined with the voracity of the art market on the other put an end to this beautiful commonality." (Helmut Herbst) The 2-disc DVD set also offers unpublished audio documents of talks with artists like Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen.

COSMIC VOYAGE was the last Soviet silent film, made when talkies were already well established. In this elaborate science-fiction film equipped with impressive special effects, one sees the fictional Moscow of 1946, as it would have been if Stalin's plans had come to fruition. The film's highlight is an amazingly realistic voyage in a spaceship to the moon. The animation classic Interplanetary Revolution describes a journey to Mars. In the DVD booklet Alexander Schwarz examines the production history of both films and the development of the Soviet science-fiction film. Neil Brand, Masha Khotimski and Richard Siedhoff provide exceptional new music scores.

Two classics produced by the East-German DEFA in the early 1950s when the Berlin border between East and West was still permeable. Roman einer jungen Ehe reflects the contrasting cultural politics of the cold war in the two parts of Berlin in the love story of a young actor couple. Frauenschicksale, one of the first German post-war color films, applies the vibrant Agfacolor palette to portray the lives of different women in both parts of the divided city who hope to build a better future while balancing their personal and societal responsibilities. Two rare short films and the texts in the booklet explain the historical context.

Michael Verhoeven's controversial film o.k. unseen for decades, transfers an authentic incident from the Vietnam War to a Bavarian setting with stark realism. Five American soldiers are bored in their trench and rape a passing young Vietnamese woman. In an attempt to cover up the act, they kill her. Producer Rob Houwer and director Michael Verhoeven discuss in an additional feature how the film, as a competition entry at the 1970 Berlin Film Festival, caused a scandal and led to the festival's collapse. Stefan Drössler chronicles the historical events in the booklet.

The first major epic in the oeuvre of Lav Diaz (b. 1958) is a powerful contemporary portrait of the Filipino diaspora in New York and New Jersey: A Filipino-born detective investigates the murder of Hanzel Harana, a Filipino teenager, and must plod along with tenacity to break through the wall of silence surrounding the boy's death. The trail of the designer drug "shabu" runs through the film like a bloody trickle, but Diaz delegates the accounts of crime, domestic violence, and the discontent in the souls of his characters to the background for the most part, instead relying on the hypnotic portrait of a decaying life as a symbol of alienation from home. The more we learn about the protagonists, the more complex, intangible, and contradictory our image of them becomes.

Robert Reinert combines exotic thrills with erotic visuals in his film Opium, which accompanies an English doctor to China and India on his research into the effects of opium. The color tints and tones reinforce the psychedelic vibe of the frivolous dreams populated by elves and satyrs. The typography of the intertitles changes according to the location. Mutilated by censors and distributors, Reinert's classic has now been painstakingly recon- structed. This colour reconstruction was based on nitrate source elements from the film museums in Munich and Düsseldorf, and the Austrian Film Archive. At a length equivalent to 2,150 metres of celluloid, this is closer to the original release than any version known to have survived. In the DVD booklet, Stefan Drössler examines the unknown biography of Robert Reinert. As a special feature the DVD also offers a fragment of the legendary lost Reinert film Sterbende Völker.

Katja Raganelli portraits two forgotten women film pioneers: Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker and only female director of an American film studio, and Margery Wilson, leading actress in films by David Wark Griffith and William S. Hart, whose directorial efforts today are lost. This 2-disc DVD set presents rare documetary material and interviews, reenactment scenes and seven newly restored films by Alice Guy Blaché. It allows a new view on film history which usually marginalizes the work of women.

Wolf-Eckart Bühler (19452020) practiced a unique approach to the USA in his films and writings: on the one hand he focused on icons of the Left who stood up for a different America, were once vilified and are today vindicated by history; on the other hand he bore witness to the US-led Vietnam War's aftereffects in Asia. For , his final feature scored by Terry Allen and Surachai Jantimatorn, Bühler personally supervised the new digital restoration available for the first time in this edition. Rot weht der Wind ("Red Blows the Wind"), Bühler's rare radio feature tracing the history of the German periodical "Filmkritik", is just one of many supplements included here.