Films about film

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Release date: December 2008

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.

The story of the history of sound and color on the screen is told in two magnificent documentaries: A la recherche du son / In Search of Sound and Un rêve en couleurs / A Dream in Colors. It's a long and adventurous story whose origins go back way beyond the birth of cinema. We learn about films rented with a singer, films colored by handpainting, strange sound effect machines and bizarre color systems. Crazy inventors as well as uncanny personalities contributed in their own way to the history of film. Beside the two documentaries the 2-disc DVD offers 35 supplemental features with incredible and unknown images and sounds.