Short film collections

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comedies as well as Davidson's first sound film and documentation of the lost films with rare scripts and more than 300 unpublished stills.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.

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.

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.

Compilation of 16 short films made between 1896 and 1948, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements. Among others there are the first screen appearance of Charles Chaplin, a documentary about the original Titanic, a Russian slapstick comedy about chess players in Moscow, a parade of Hollywood stars in a short film of 1931, one of the best comedies with Charley Chase and a film with the legendary dancer Josephine Baker.

Compilation of 17 short films made between 1906 and 1941, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements. Among others there are an educational film by D.W. Griffith about women and cinema, a strange comedy with Douglas Faurbands as drug addicted detective, Stan Laurel in a parody on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Duke Ellington in a famous early soundie filmed by Dudley Murphy, hand colored silents from France and Porky Pig presenting his own newsreel.

Compilation of 19 short films made between 1900 and 1941, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements. Among others there are slapstick comedies with Snub Pollard, Harold Lloyd and Charley Chase, documentary footage of the original Titanic and its captain, a dancing pig, commercials made by the cartoonist Robert Lotrac, the first great western in film history THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY in a hand colored version and the only known film with legendary Django Reinhardt.

Compilation of 15 short films made between 1906 and 1944, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements: newsreel-type footage, obscure Hollywood shorts, cartoons, promotional films and just plain odd bits of celluloid. Among others there are a preview trailer with the Marx Brothers, an early tinted adaption of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a strange French animation film in Art Deco style, Laurel & Hardy presenting the MGM production for 1936, one of the best slapstick comedies of Mack Sennett and a Technicolor puppet animation by George Pal.

Compilation of 16 short films made between 1900 and 1950, 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 a censored Bugs Bunny cartoon by Tex Avery, a fragment of a lost John Ford silent western movie, a 1900 colored adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac with soundtrack, French commercial from the 30s and 50s with Jacques Tati and Laurel & Hardy imitators, a recently rediscovered comedy with Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, and a Screen Song Cartoon with Lilian Roth and the famous bouncing ball by Dave and Max Fleischer.

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.

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.