Documentaries

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.

A film editor's work is as essential as it is invisible. Its outcome, the finished film, is the result of weeks of concentrated labor. Frequently, in documentary filmmaking, the work's narrative structure is mainly shaped in the editing process. The editor functions as co-author, juggling and organizing the raw material at hand, and structuring the material according to principles of space and time, rhythm and composition. This extensively supplemented 2-disc DVD explores this process in a documentary feature by filmmaker Gabriele Voss, a film editor in her own right. Renowned editors, a brain researcher, as well as writer-director Alexander Kluge, talk about their work, oscillating between craft and art. Selected film clips illustrate the techniques and tricks that make up the magic of film montage.

With his "production films", from Ofenbauer, Stars, Der Sekretär and Ein Vertrauensmann to Wäscherinnen, Jürgen Böttcher emancipated himself from the conventions of Socialist Realism and placed the focus of his work inspired by Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema on pure observation. The commissioned short films Im Pergamonmuseum and Tierparkfilm subversively tested the censors' tight restrictions. In 1977, Böttcher began his long-term collaboration with cinematographer Thomas Plenert, resulting in Im Lohmgrund.

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."

A sanatory in the south of Germany, a room with a view to the Bavarian Alpes. Talking to the camera: Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, adventurer, Nazi hunter. He talks, tells stories, reflects, interrupts himself. An imaginated film: a trip through Moscow, a meeting with Hitler, " language as a cathedrale", West-Germany's rehabilitation of war criminals, protest actions, the conflicts with his father Veit Harlan, the director of the notorious antisemitic propaganda film Jud Suess. The 2-disc DVD offers the 96 minute documentary Thomas Harlan - Wandersplitter plus 160 minutes with additional interviews with Thomas Harlan and clips from his films.

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.

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.

The American minimalist poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) was a companion of the painter Ad Reinhardt and the religious philosopher and monk Thomas Merton, who had a strong influence on the poets of the beat generation. After decades of a nomadic life between America and Europe he has lived withdrawn for 30 years on the Greek island of Patmos. The present film published on this DVD is the outcome of a long-standing friendship between Robert Lax and the filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel: A visual poem with beautiful black-and-white photography, added by a short film showing Lax reading his poems and by photos shot by Nicolas Humbert in 1993-1999.

The 2-disc DVD set features all films by Katrin Seybold about the White Rose and the resistance against National Socialism in Munich: Unique documents about strong personalities.

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass muderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Russia. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a burocratic muderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film.