Documentaries

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.

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 After decades of a nomadic life between America and Europe he has lived withdrawn for 30 years on the Greek island of Patmos.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.

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.

Over five decades, Jørgen Leth has created a cinematic oeuvre that is unique in all respects. In more than 40 films, Leth has maintained his experimental approach to the medium, exploring film as language, testing film's possibilities and limitations. Coming from a starting point in language-conscious modernist poetry, Leth has examined the world not only through language but through the film camera's lens, showing images combined with a singularly detached, descriptive tone all the while carried by an aesthetic and sensuous delight in images. The first volume of a DVD edition which covers all his films contains the anthropological films: The Perfect Human (1968), Life in Denmark (1972), Good and Evil(1975), Notes on Love (1989) and The Five Obstructions (2003). Also included in this DVD set is a booklet and extra notes on a new production entitled Tropical Mix.

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.

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.