Short film collections

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 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.

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.

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.

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."

High on Work: We have left a heroic and post-heroic industrial age behind us. Farewell to an era when work was still abundant. Yet the adage still holds: Only work makes life real (Marx). The turbulent zones of globalization, in the cafeteria of Brecht's Theater, Helge Schneider as an unemployed woman in Spain, "working to pieces" in the concentration camps. Farewell to the safe side of life: Experiences with core activities of our time, for example skyscrapers or Chernobyl. Experts from the fire department and paramedics, engineers, and scientists tell their stories. With Durs Grünbein, Peter Berling, Igor Kostin, Victor Popov, Nikolai Tarakanov, Igor Jassenjawski, Rosemarie Tietze, and Oxana Pentak.

War Is the End Of All Plans: War is characterized by the fact that it breaches all barriers. In his book, "On War", Carl von Clausewitz describes how war dreams of its own "omnipotence". Actually, it can never be omnipotent because it is full of all the probabilities we find in real life which continually disrupt its almighty power. In the end, it is just those probabilities which devour the power of war itself but which are as ill-suited to put an end to war as a peace agreement. Where We Come From, Where We Go To: Mankind has not been wiped out by wars and disasters ("against all odds") thanks to its ancient roots. It can be assumed that, without their knowing, human beings bear a treasure endowed upon them by evolution which protects them from demise (as a guardian angel would). Evolution, which begins in outer space, is too diverse to be sabotaged by the whims of the present.

"Love and hate, how easily they break". Love stories are fundamental stories. In this realm of experience, we can test our own power of judgment. It is possible to judge political matters, which are not similarly open to intimate examination, through our knowledge of love stories. The death of Lucretia toppled the Roman monarchy. When a father is unable to protect his daughter Virgilia from a corrupt judge, he kills her. The secretive kiss of death is an instrument of power, a means to an end, for every Eastern network of agents. To be a laborer of love is the concern of a "grunt", a skillful prostitute, who provides an orderly erotic system on the oil rigs in the North Sea.

In his pictures, films, collages and installations, the painter and filmmakerLutz Dammbeck seeks a synthesis of expressive means from the genres of film and fine art. His work to date identifies him as one of the key representatives of independent film and media art in the former GDR and as a unique, outstanding phenomenon within modern contemporary art. The 2-disc DVD presents for the first time all his animation films and media works, including an extensive booklet with essays about Lutz Dammbeck's filmic work and a lot of documents about his fight with state authorities as ROM features.