German films

"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.

The 2-disc DVD presents newly restored footage which was shot in Munich just a few weeks after it was taken by the American troops on April 30, 1945. We see the enormous damage of the bombings which destroyed about 90% of the center of the city. Harald Braun's Zwischen gestern und morgen was the first post-war film shot in Munich. Love, betrayal and tragedy occur one night in a luxury hotel. Years later the protagonists are united again and face a decade of regrets, hate and unanswered questions caused by the war. Their lives are in ruins, just like the bombed hotel. The film features many former UFA stars, as well as Hildegard Knef who became the first new star of the German post-war cinema.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.