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.

Max Davidson (1875-1950) is one of the numerous forgotten Hollywood supporting actors who acted in innumerable movies. His great time was in the late 1920s when he was engaged at the Hal Roach Studios for a series of 17 Jewish comedies which belong to the best and most funny shorts the studio has ever produced. The 2-disc DVD set presents all the existing comedies as well as Davidson's first sound film and a documentation about the lost films. All films are centered around Davidson as henpecked Jewish family father who has to struggle with his good for nothing son(s) and a daughter who falls in love with a non-jewish boy.

Release date: Autumn 2010

Trying to find a counterpart to his very successful comedy team Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, producer Hal Roach made several attempts to combine two female comedians. The first team with Anita Garvin & Marion Byron did only three films before both actresses separated. Nevertheless, their A PAIR OF TIGHTS is today seen as one of the greatest silent two reel comedies ever done. At the beginning of the 1930s the teaming of platinum blonde Thelma Todd with shy Zasu Pitts and later with clumsy Patsy Kelly was a more fruitful idea, resulting in a series of sound shorts which ran successfully for five year until Todd's mysterious death in 1935. This series produced some great films of timeless fun that can easily compete with the best comedies of Laurel & Hardy. The 2-disc DVD set will present a selection of the best shorts in restored versions, most of them have never been released on DVD before.

Release date: October 2010

Georg Kaiser decribes in his Expressionist theater play the attempt of a bank cashier to escape his middle class daily life. Director Karlheinz Martin's adaptation transfers Kaiser's play into an Expressionist film of radical stylization. The German film industry was so irritated by the result that the film never found a distribution and was never shown in German cinemas. The only existing print of this classic survived in Japan where the film received a cinema release and was preserved by the National Film Center. The Munich Filmmuseum restored the film and added two scores transferring the visual avantgarde concept of the film into a musical structure: An improvised performance for three percussionists by the SchlagEnsemble H/F/M and a modern score for seven musicians composed and condacted by Yati Durant.

The poetic travelogue A Sixth Part of the World and the "visual symphony" The Eleventh Year mark the beginning of Dziga Vertov's most creative period, which peaked in the canonical film Man with the Movie Camera. This 2-disc set presents the two rare masterpieces in a new transfer and with new soundtracks by British composer Michael Nyman. The bonus features offer materials on the methods of the filmmaker, as well as an introduction to the Vienna research project on Vertov, "Digital Formalism."

A digitally restoration of the 1927 silent film der Bettler vom Kölner Dom (The Beggar from the Dome of Cologne), shot on location by Rolf Randolf, with a new orchestral soundtrack by Pierre Oser. The DVD also offers all the existing shorts, commercials and newsreel reports about Cologne which were shot in the silent era.

Release date: Summer 2010

Werner Schroeter's unique melodramas about love and death are fascinating amalgamations of opera, theater and cinema elements. Art and kitsch, high and low brow, Maria Callas and Caterina Valente, myths and genre elements. The 2-disc DVD set presents the first two feature-length films by Schroeter in beautifully restored versions. Additionally it offers a new reconstruction of Schroeter's legendary two-screen projection Argila and excerpts of a talk with Werner Schroeter, lead by Dietrich Kuhlbrodt during the Werner Schroeter Tribute at the Viennale 2008.

Release date: Summer 2010

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass muderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Russia. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a burocratic muderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film.

Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) is not only one of the most important films of the Weimar Republic, it is also one of the most spectacular censorship cases of the era. The story from the inflationary period in Vienna in the years immediately after World War I was considered too much of a provocation: nouveau riches currency and stock market speculators who wallow in Babylonian luxury, homeless and unemployed Lumpenproletariat living in barns, women who sell their souls for a bit of fresh meat at the butcher's, sexual orgies, bordellos and murders. This unique 2-disc DVD set offers the improved most complete restored version of the film as well as a lot of additional material including an excellent documentary about the life and work of G.W. Pabst.