Silent movies

One of the first gay-themed films in the history of cinema, Anders als die Andern / Different from the Others (1919) was banned at the time of its release and was believed lost. Using recently discovered film segments, still photos and censorship documents from different archives, Filmmuseum München has resurrected this truly groundbreaking silent film. The 2-disc DVD also offers a new restoration of the anthology Gefahren der Liebe / Laws of Love (1927) for which Hirschfeld himself re-edited a short version of Anders als die Andern, as well as Geschlecht in Fesseln / Sex in Chains (1928), a feature film about the sexual hardships of prisoners which was promoted by Hirschfeld.

Walther Ruttmann is a pioneer of modern multimaedia art. His first short films are unique experiments with forms, rhythm and colors, his innovative commercials connected abstract animation art with concrete messages. The symphonic documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt is one of the most famous silent cassics, the travelogue Melodie der Welt became the first German sound feature film. With the radio play Weekend Ruttmann created the first "sound film without images" while his sound short In der Nacht transforms music to images and is a prototype of modern music videos. The 2-disc DVD combines for the first time all surviving works by Walther Ruttmann from 1920-1931 in newly restored and reconstructed versions, often with original scores. It also includes lobby cards, posters, programs and text documents as well as little known paintings and drawings by Ruttmann.

Erich von Stroheim's directorial debut is set in the alpine scenery of South Tyrol. It still baffles its audiences through its precise visual language and its moral ambiguity. This edition presents the film in its gorgeous tinted Austrian release version, Die Rache der Berge (Blinde Ehemänner) / The Revenge of the Mountains (Blind Husbands), featuring German language intertitles. This print of the film is the longest and oldest version available today. Extras include additional materials from the Austrian Film Museum's Stroheim collection.

2-disc DVD about the origins of the cinema. Dogs playing the pianos, contortionists defying the pain limits, handcoloured serpentine dances: attractions and sensations characterize the travelling cinema of the fairgrounds in the beginning of the 20th century. Rarities from the trasure chests of the European film archives ranging from Danish anarchistic slapstick and Scottish X-ray films to French erotic piquancies and a wild chase through Brussels caused by a leopard. Local films from the region Luxembourg, Trier and Saarbrücken resent a forgotten genre which was, in its days, another crowd puller in travelling cinema: Filmed local events and scenes depicting the local people who would then pay to see themselves in "living photographs" on the big screen.

The Georgian-born filmmaker Michail Kalatozov (19031973) is best remembered for directing some of the most innovative and successful Soviet films of the 1950s and 1960s. This DVD presents digitally restored versions of two of his lesser-known, early works, which were highly controversial in their time but now rank among the finest achievements in Soviet silent cinema. SALT FOR SVANETIA is an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucasus Mountains. NAIL IN THE BOOT, a biting parable of wartime irresponsibility, chillingly prefigures the later Stalinist purge trials. Günter Buchwald's and Stephen Horne's prize-winning scores and the experimental accompaniment by Masha Khotimshi underline the poetic and expressive visual style of these exceptional masterpieces.

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.

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.

Asta Nielsen, born in Denmark in 1881, was the first diva of European silent film. As early as 1913, in Die Filmprimadonna, Asta Nielsen acts the role of a star fighting for increased influence on the entire production process. To realize her artistic vision she founds her own company Art-Film in 1920. Hamlet, produced that same year, survived only in a b&w US export version. In 2005 a coloured vintage print of the lost German original version of 1921 was discovered. The restored film had its premiere at the Berlinale in 2007, with new musical accompaniment composed by Michael Riessler. The 2-disc DVD set also includes documentation of the production history of Hamlet, the restoration process and rare an Asta Nielsen home movie compilation.

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.

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."

This 2-disc DVD presents the reconstructed and restored version of The Student of Prague, one of the first German 'art films'. Based on an original script by popular writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, it tells the story of Balduin, a student who is destroyed when he sells himself to the devil. Mark Pogolski's piano recording is based on the original score by Joseph Weiss, a pupil of Franz Liszt. Daniel Grossmann conducts the Orchester Jakobsplatz playing Bernd Thewes's adaptation of the original score. Bonus features include the film's reconstructed English export version, plus The Ideal Wife, a short film also made by Ewers in 1913 which features Ernst Lubitsch.

Next to the classic Man with a Movie Camera, his "film poem" to the founder of the Soviet Union, Three Songs of Lenin, is the most universally acclaimed and enduringly popular of all Dziga Vertov's films. This 2-disc set presents the earliest surviving versions of Three Songs of Lenin, the 1938 silent and sound reissues, previously unavailable on home video. Also included are the two Lenin-themed editions ofVertov's Kinopravda newsreel series as well as a feature-length TV documentary about Vertov by Austrian Film Museum co-founder Peter Konlechner.

This double-DVD presents two feature films by Gerhard Lamprecht which reproduce Heinrich Zille's view of the Berlin milieu ("Milljöh"). In Die Verrufenen (1925) the engineer Robert Kramer, released from prison, cannot find his way back to civilian life. He wants to end his life, but is held back by the streetwalker Emma. In Die Unehelichen (1926) three working-class children suffer under their violent foster parents, till a dramatic incident changes their lives.

Vom Reiche der sechs Punkte is an unusual silent film, produced far away from the film studios in Berlin and Munich. The story deals with a steel worker who looses the sight of his eyes and has to accept his fate. The film shows in unique documentary pictures the work and life in the homes for the blind in Cologne, Neuwied and Düren. The Filmmuseum Muenchen has restored the only surviving tinted and toned print of the film which was found in the collection of the Finnish Film Archive.

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.

Wunder der Schöpfung is an extraordinary, fascinating Kulturfilm trying to explain the whole human knowledge of the 1920s about the world and the universe. 15 special effects experts and 9 cameramen were involved in the production of this film which combines documentary scenes, historical documents, fiction elements, animation scenes and educational impact. It its beautifully colored, using tinting and toning in a very elaborated way. Some visual ideas in the sequences with a space shuttle visiting different planets in the universe seem to have to be the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Benjamin Christensen (1879-1959) is probably the most innovative director of Danish silent cinema. He had full control over the creation of his films, not only as a director, but also in many cases by being producer, author and protagonist. Christensen's first films clearly show his mastery of cinematic expression as well as his charismatic screen appearance.

In four episodes, we witness how Satan must walk the Earth and tempt men to do evil: Judas betrays Jesus, the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, an episode in the French Revolution and a family tragedy during the Finnish civil war in 1918. Carl Theodor Dreyer's lavish period piece is presented here in its most complete version, even with an alternative happy ending. For this DVD a HD transfer was done from a restored duplication negative.

This DVD edition is a new restoration of Carl Theodor Dreyer's adaptation of Holger Drachmann's popular nationalistic play from 1883 is based on Hans Christian Andersen's Svinedrengen and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the loss of approximately half of the moving picture content, the surviving scenes can now be seen in a complete narrative supported by still photos and new intertitles based primarily on original sources.

This DVD edition is a restoration of Carl Th. Dreyer's first feature film as director. Already in his debut we are witnesses to the thematic mainstay of most of his later films; the mother left to her own destiny with her illigitimate child. In this film the man is haunted by guilt, which he is not allowed to repent. Besides this DVD presents the one minute fragment of a Zola film adaptation written by Dreyer.

Both films display the high production value Nordisk Film Co. had attained after almost a decade as one of the leading film production companies in the world. In The End of the World (1916) the rumour spreads that a comet is on a collision course with Earth. Inspired by the fear evoked by Halley's Comet in 1910, this film was clearly addressed to a public in an age of war. A Trip to Mars (1918) is a lavishly produced space-travel picture and a milestone in the science fiction genre. The contemporary fascination with aviation is evident: the space-ship has wings and a propeller, and the crew is clad in leather aviator outfits.

In celebration of the 60th Anniversary of The Danish Film Institute / Archive & Cinematheque the first films donated to the Danish State are published on this DVD. The first film archive contains a total of seventy films showing Danish events and people of the period 1899-1913.

Valdemar Psilander (1884-1917) was probably the greatest male star of Danish silent cinema. He died in 1917, only 32 years old. Despite his early death, he nevertheless acted in 83 films during his 6 years with the Nordisk Films Kompagni. The three films on this DVD are not only representative of Valdemar Psilander's qualities as an actor, but also the production of Nordisk Films Kompagni during the most productive and successful years of Danish cinema.

Compilation of 17 short films made between 1905 and 1955, in black and white and in colored versions, restored from original elements: newsreel-type documentaries, obscure Hollywood shorts, cartoons, promotional films and just plain odd bits of celluloid. Among others there are two films by the most famous female directors of the silent era Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blaché, slapstick comedies with Stan Laurel and James Parrott, cartoons by Ub Iwerks and by the Van Beuren Studio, one of the first French jazz films with Stéphane Grappelli, a hunting film from Africa by the Belgian cinematographer Alfred Machin and French commercials from the 30s and 50s. All films are with short introductions as extra features.

The five-disc DVD set includes eleven of the joyul modern-dress comedies, westerns, satires, dream-fantasies and romances from 1916-1921 which made Douglas Fairbanks the tremendously popular hero of the American silent cinema. In addition to Fairbank's unique talent , these ebullient films showcase his gifted collaborators including writer Anita Loos and directors Allan Dwan, Victor Fleming , and John Emerson. All the films have been digitally mastered from 35mm or original-negative prints and feature new music scores.