Edition Filmmuseum

The beautiful restoration from the original camera negative of the earliest surviving film by F. W. Murnau gives an accurate representation of Murnau's innovative, highly expressive lighting techniques. The plotan eminent physician comes under the spell of an unscrupulous dancerfinds echoes in Murnau's later masterpiece Sunrise. Conrad Veidt appears in a supporting role as a sinister painter, whose entrance eerily presages Nosferatu. "The new restoration allows you to see everything in the frame, with a marvelous translucence and density of detail. Forget High Frame Rate: This is hypnotic, immersive cinema." (David Bordwell) Lupu Pick's Scherben, like Der Gang in die Nacht based on a screenplay by Carl Mayer, has been celebrated as a masterful piece of tension-filled film-making built up through purely cinematic means. The 2-disc DVD set offers exceptional scores for both films.

This adaptation of Günter Grass's novel "Cat and Mouse" was one of the first films of the "Young German Cinema" and subject of a controversial political debate. The DVD puts Katz und Maus in the historical context with rare documents in the booklet and in the ROM section. Also included are two short films by Hansjürgen Pohland and Michael Klier, a selection of photos from the set and the original recordings of Attila Zoller's famous score.

The 4-disc DVD presents for the first time the surviving films Kafka saw in his lifetime and mentioned in his writings: documentaries, early feature films, newsreels. All the films were restored by archives in the U.S., Germany, Czechia, France, Italy, Denmark, and Russia. New scores are performed by Günter A. Buchwald and Richard Siedhoff.

This double DVD comprises all three of Antonio Skármeta's films shot during his exile in Berlin in the 1980s: His award-winning story about Pablo Neruda and a simple postman, which was also published as a novel and later famously re-filmed as Il Postino; the portrait of a three-generation Chilean family living in a Berlin apartment; and a cinematic dairy, in which Skármeta visits other Chilean artists in exile. These films cast light on the everyday occurrences in a life shaped by politics the hope, the joy and the humour.

The construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, was a pivotal break in German history and had to be justified in movies produced by East Germany's DEFA studio. The 2-disc DVD set presents for the first time films by reknowned directors that tried to address topical events. Two of the films even include documentary footage shot in the summer of 1961.

Since the late 1970s, James Benning's films have been a regular fixture at festivals in Germany and Austria, while frequent television broadcasts have helped expose his work to an even larger audience here than perhaps at home. This 2-disc set presents the products of this intercontinental relationship: Ruhr, Benning's first foray into digital filmmaking, is a modern-day "city symphony" dedicated to Germany's industrial Ruhr district. His latest work, natural history, is an audiovisual portrait commissioned by Vienna's Natural History Museum. Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary James Benning: Circling the Image, produced for German television, rounds off the set.

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.

A unique collection of film documents about the Munich Oktoberfest: early silent footage and amateur films, newsreel clips and TV shows, experiments with color, 3-D, CinemaScope, and multi-channel sound - and works of New German Cinema directors like Ferdinand Khittl, Herbert Achternbusch and Percy Adlon. We see how the most popular fairground attractions and the media have changed with the fashion of the times. The fascinating 2-disc DVD includes a booklet with an illustrated essay by Elisabeth Angermair about the history of the Oktoberfest.

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.

In the 1990s, James Benning's films were characterized primarily by an ongoing investigation of the relationship between the image and the (spoken or written) word. This 2-disc set features the two key works representing the peak of this "text-image film" period. In Deseret Benning (by way of the New York Times) retells the history of America's Mormon State Utah through spectacular black & white and color images. Art and landscape join as one in Benning's following film Four Corners, which serves as both a tribute to the famous region in the USA where four states converge and a portrait of four very different artists.