Silent movies

The 2-disc DVD presents for the first time an unjustly forgotten classic epic of the German silent cinema in a newly reconstructed and meticulously restored version. Shooting in Munich and its surroundings with an international cast, director Manfred Noa told the story of Helen of Troy and the decade-long war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The additional features of this DVD include the contemporary souvenir programs and stills as well as alternate scenes, rushes, foreign intertitles and outtakes.

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comedies as well as Davidson's first sound film and documentation of the lost films with rare scripts and more than 300 unpublished stills.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.

This double-DVD presents two films by Gerhard Lamprecht, sketching social panoramas of late 1920s Berlin. Menschen untereinander delineates the social microcosm of a tenement building; the tenants represent a cross-section of poverty, corruption and compassion. In Unter der Laterne, the girl Else begins to follow the wrong path after an altercation with her father. The high life turns out to be the first step in a downward spiral.

Manfred Noa's adaptation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's stage play is one of the completely forgotten classics of German silent cinema. It is an appeal to peace and tolerance that was violently attacked by the Nazis. The story which takes place againsr the backdrop of religious wars between Christians, Islamists and Jews in 12th-century Jerusalem shows Werner Krauss (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) in one of his best roles. The Filmmuseum München has restored the only surviving elements of this silent masterpiece and researched the film's production and reception.

In Nerven, writer-director-producer Robert Reinert tried to capture the "nervous epidemic" caused by war and misery which "drives people mad". This unique portrait of the life in 1919 Germany, filmed on location in Munich, describes the cases of different people from all levels of society: Factory owner Roloff who looses his mind in view of catastrophies and social disturbances, teacher John who is the hero of the masses and Marja who turns into a radical revolutionary. Using different fragments the Munich Film Museum could reconstruct this forgotten German classic which is a historic document and anticipates already elements of the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

This deluxe 2-disc DVD set presents Sergej Eisenstein's immortal screen classics Battleship Potemkin and October in previously unreleased and painstakingly restored versions featuring the original accompanying scores by Austrian-born composer Edmund Meisel. The ROM section includes a wide range of rare documents and detailed essays on the heavily influential creative partnership of "kindred spirits" Eisenstein and Meisel.

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.

The 2-disc DVD presents a new reconstruction of Frank Borzage's masterpiece from the last year of American silent cinema The River. For the first time Cinémathèque Suisse was able to include a recently discovered erotic sequence which were cut by the censors. Janet Bergstrom discusses in a visual essay the relationship between F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage at the end of the 20s at Fox. The DVD also includes the first three 1915/16 Western movies by and with Frank Borzage, a collection of production stills and texts by Borzage biographer Hervé Dumont.

Before making (sound) film history with The Blue Angel, Viennese-born filmmaker Josef von Sternberg directed a series of thematically and stylistically daring silent films. This DVD presents the first and last of his surviving silents, digitally restored from archival 35mm elements and supplemented by a new video essay by film historian Janet Bergstrom. The Salvation Hunters, von Sternberg's self-financed, socially conscious directorial debut, won praise from Charles Chaplin, among others, and includes a new score by award-winning Austrian composer Siegfried Friedrich. The sole extant fragment of The Case of Lena Smith brings the director's youthful memories of fin de siècle Vienna vividly to life.

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.