International cinema

For 40 years, James Benning has been a singular, defiant voice in the American independent film scene. This 2-disc set the first in a planned series devoted to the filmmaker's oeuvre features two of Benning's seminal works from the mid-1980s for the first time ever on DVD: American Dreams (lost and found) is the filmmaker's personal take on the history of the USA from 1954 to 1976, told through a complex and thought provoking amalgamation of image, text and sound. In Landscape Suicide, he effortlessly strides the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms as he recounts two infamous murder cases that took place almost 30 years apart.

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.

The 2-disc DVD set presents new restored versions of two rare classics by Werner Schroeter connecting private stories with history: Der Bomberpilot tells the story of three eccentric women in Germany during the Nazi period who try to become show stars in America after the war. Nel Regno di Napoli is a chronicle of post-war Italy told from the perspective of a Neapolitan family. Additional features are an interview with Werner Schroeter by Gérard Courant, a video showing Werner Schroeter in a talk with the audience at the Austrian Filmmuseum, and stills from the shooting of Nel Regno di Napoli by Digne M. Markovicz.

Produced at the junction of two millennia, the California Trilogy is James Benning's three-part topographical study of America's "Golden State". Looking to the past while investigating the present, the mathematician-turned-filmmaker condenses three distinct Californian landscapes into a total of 105 shots, each exactly 2½ minutes long. Formal restraint and compositional precision combine with ambient sound and an unheard social commentary to create a hypnotic journey across the 31st US State; from the Great Central Valley (El Valley Centro) through greater Los Angeles (Los) to the Californian wilderness (Sogobi). This 2-disc set presents the complete California Trilogy for the first time ever on DVD.

In casting a glance one artist pays tribute to another as James Benning offers his filmic paean to Robert Smithson's legendary "earthwork" sculpture, the Spiral Jetty. With RR, his homage to the American railroad, the filmmaker brings an era to its close by going back to cinema's roots. Shot back-to-back over a period of two years, these works marked James Benning's farewell to analogue filmmaking and together constitute the profound "last words" on the film medium by one of its most singular innovators. This 2-disc set presents both films together with rare audio interviews in which Benning recounts the experience of making his "last" films and gives unique insight into his creative methods.

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.

The Georgian-born filmmaker Michail Kalatozov (19031973) is best remembered for directing some of the most innovative and successful Soviet films of the 1950s and 1960s. This DVD presents digitally restored versions of two of his lesser-known, early works, which were highly controversial in their time but now rank among the finest achievements in Soviet silent cinema. SALT FOR SVANETIA is an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucasus Mountains. NAIL IN THE BOOT, a biting parable of wartime irresponsibility, chillingly prefigures the later Stalinist purge trials. Günter Buchwald's and Stephen Horne's prize-winning scores and the experimental accompaniment by Masha Khotimshi underline the poetic and expressive visual style of these exceptional masterpieces.

Chittagong in Southern Bangladesh a graveyard for the West's run-down or obsolete ships, massive vessels driven onto the beaches and left to be taken apart by hand using only the most basic tools. Poor farmers escaping the regular famine in the north of the country travel south to get work. Barefoot and with no masks or safety equipment, they work in the yards under incredibly dangerous conditions. The award-winning documentary features beautiful footage of the monolithic ship-yards and describes a systematic exploitation, which only very few of the workers can escape.

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.

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.

This epic documentary subtly introduces the complex world view of iconic filmmaker and theoretician Peter Kubelka (born 1934, Vienna). While Kubelka's radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of about an hour focussing on the essence of cinema, his legendary lectures often unfold over many hours. These lectures on "what is cinema" and "cooking as an art form" are frequently illuminated by the presentation of archaeological objects from Kubelka's eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice which explores the evolution of humanity. Martina Kudláček has carefully woven an open-ended portrait which goes beyond the biographical to reveal fresh insights into the phenomenon of film.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This beautiful 2-disc DVD set illustrates in seven chapters how the Social Question was negotiated in magic lantern slide sets and early films. The forgotten medium of the magic lantern arises anew on the electronic screen: the "ensemble illuminago" presents Victorian magic lantern shows in live musical performance. As was customary a century ago, the films are accompanied with music: piano and violin underscore the moods that find visual expression in the films.

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."

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.

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 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.

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.