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.

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 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.

Max Davidson (1875-1950) is one of the numerous forgotten Hollywood supporting actors who acted in innumerable movies. His heyday was in the late 1920s when he was engaged at the Hal Roach Studios for a series of Jewish comedies which belong to the best and funniest shorts the studio ever produced. The 2-disc DVD set presents all the existing comedies as well as Davidson's first sound film and documentation of the lost films with rare scripts and more than 300 unpublished stills. All films focus on Davidson as the 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.

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.