German films

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.

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.

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."

Release date: November 2008

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.