German films

The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Woman: A typical magazine from the start-up period of the independent television window in private broadcast TV. All traditional possibilities for expression in film and many types of television are experimented with: Editing, collage, multiple exposure, narrative interlacing. Headless Man: Ballads and murder ballads are elemental narrative styles that are the precursor to the cinema. They relate destinies and emotion. But how do you tell about the construction work at dusk in the ruins of the Twin Towers or about Amok? Additional texts by Alexander Kluge about his work at television in the booklet and as ROM features.

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.

Two German silent classics dealing with soccer: Die elf Teufel (The Eleven Devils) starring Gustav Fröhlich (Metropolis) and König der Mittelstürmer (King of the Centre Forwards) starring Paul Richter (Die Nibelungen) which survived only in one print with some severe nitrate deteriotation. Both films are supplied with new music accompaniments and with subtitles in different languages. An early film document showing the 1924 soccer game Germany-Italy is added as a special feature to this 2-disc edition.

Since 1920 artist, photographer, and filmmaker Ella Bergmann-Michel lived and worked at the "Schmelz", an old paint mill near Frankfurt on Main. With guests such as Kurt Schwitters and László Moholy-Nagy the house became an important locale for modern artists. Between 1931 and 1933 she made five documentary films that constitute a rare example of socially involved and equally artistic film. The DVD contains these five films, a documentary film about the artist and a comprehensive booklet with essays on Ella Bergmann-Michel's films.

In the face of two world wars, Professor Prätorius, a philanthropist and a surgeon, wants to exterminate the one danger to mankind, the microbe of stupidity, as he states in a spontaneous lecture to his male and female students. When he tries to help a pregnant girl he gets involved more and more in her life and is forced to marry her. The melodramatic comedy was the first film by Curt Goetz after his return from America and a top hit in post-war German cinema. The DVD presents the restored original version as well as a radio play by Curt Goetz from 1947 and an interview with Valerie von Martens, his wife who performed with him in all his films and radio plays.

With films including the 'rubble woman' portrait Martha, the three-part experimental film cycle Potter's Stier, Venus nach Giorgione and Frau am Klavichord, the portrait of the artist Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, and also the documentaries Rangierer and Die Küche, noted for their outstanding sound and visuals, Jürgen Böttcher distances himself yet further from the didactic tone and abstract heroic representation of socialist films. In Georgien is the only full-length film that Böttcher was able to shoot on location outside of the GDR.

Facts & fakes with Peter Berling, Erich Komrowksy, Hermes Phettberg, Helge Schneider, Georg Schramm and Lilo Wanders. Freedom for the Consonants! means a radical overhaul of the spelling reform. Borderline Cases of Damage Control deals with the insurance cover of at-risk aeroplanes. And from present-day practice: Car racing in the framework of the Olympics, the problems relating to the protection of US presidents, German troops in the Himalayas, security duties for the G8 summit, resistance work against the German occupiers in Poland and finally, Christoph Schlingensief's version of 'Hamlet' and Christian Stueckl's interpretation of 'Peer Gynt'. "It is a fact that fantasy exists. However, it is fantasy that pure facts exist."

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.

A silent film about the youth of the leading German 18th century dramatist, poet, and literary theorist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). In 1773 he had to leave home and spent miserable years under strict discipline at the military academy of The Duke Karl Eugen, which only strengthened his longing for freedom. His first play "The Robbers" (1781) spoke of the ideas of liberty and became a landmark in German theatrical. The Filmmuseum München has now carefully restored a film that for a long time was believed to be lost. Following the conventions of the silent movie era, the positive was tinted and furnished with two new piano scores.

This double DVD holds two unusual films by Richard Blank. In Friedliche Tage, we enter a totalitarian and inhuman society, in which daily life is a series of nightmares and the protagonists search for a utopia of freedom and love. Prinzenbad gives us a microcosm of a society dominated by male power plays, wheeling and dealing, corruption, love, and eroticism. Both films dispense with established dramatic conventions, instead consolidating scenes, episodes, and stories into a grotesque roundelay of the decline of civil society.