Edition Filmmuseum

Projects which are in preparation. Since each project released by Edition Filmmuseum includes meticulous restoration of the film, long time researches for the bonus material and often complex rights clearances, there are still no concretes release dates for these DVD's.

In 1962, the proclamation of the Oberhausen Manifesto marked the beginning of the New German Film. This 2-dsc DVD set presents 19 short films from 1958-1964 produced, directed, photographed or edited by one or more of the filmmakers who signed the manifesto. It also includes a booklet and ROM features with essays and documents.

For 40 years, James Benning has been a singular, defiant voice in the American independent film scene. This 2-disc set the first in a planned series devoted to the filmmaker's oeuvre features two of Benning's seminal works from the mid-1980s for the first time ever on DVD: American Dreams (lost and found) is the filmmaker's personal take on the history of the USA from 1954 to 1976, told through a complex and thought provoking amalgamation of image, text and sound. In Landscape Suicide, he effortlessly strides the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms as he recounts two infamous murder cases that took place almost 30 years apart.

This 2-disc DVD set shows the versatility of silent diva Asta Nielsen: She fights for Women's rights in DIE SUFFRAGETTE, speculates successfully at the stock market in DIE BÖRSENKÖNIGIN, and shows off as an adolescant woman in male attire and as an Eskimo woman in the comedies DAS LIEBES-ABC and DAS ESKIMOBABY. Four rare films in newly restored and reconstructed versions for the first time available on DVD.

Release date: May 2012

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.

Lev Kuls̆ov's legendary "constructivist Western" (adapted from a story by Jack London) was a highlight of the Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and one of the most popular films of its time. Upon finding gold in the Yukon a group of prospectors descend into murder. The survivors are facing an existential choice. The DVD presents a new transfer of the film and a contemporary score by Austrian composer and musician Franz Reisecker. As an extra it includes the only surviving fragment of Kules̆ov's Vas̆a znakomaja, featuring sets by avantgarde artist Aleksandr Rodc̆enko.

Michael Pilz's Heaven and Earth is an epic documentary in two parts about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. The film is a documentary in the best sense of the word - a meditation on time, on nature and the struggles of man, as well as a record of a lifestyle ceasing to exist. "If you let it happen, the film will pull you into its cosmos; it is one of those works that teaches you to see and listen again." (Ulrich Gregor, 1983)

Chittagong in Southern Bangladesh a graveyard for the West's run-down or obsolete ships, massive vessels driven onto the beaches and left to be taken apart by hand using only the most basic tools. Poor farmers escaping the regular famine in the north of the country travel south to get work. Barefoot and with no masks or safety equipment, they work in the yards under incredibly dangerous conditions. The award-winning documentary features beautiful footage of the monolithic ship-yards and describes a systematic exploitation, which only very few of the workers can escape.

Two exceptional documentaries about Bernhard Kimmel, who was in the headline of German newspaper's in the 1950s because of spectacular robberies and burglaries. In 1961 he was sent to prison for 14 years, but released already in 1970. His attempt to live virtuously fails. During a burglary he kills a policeman and in 1982, he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Peter Fleischmann describes a life between Robin Hood fame and prison which also reflects a forgotten chapter of German postwar history.