Edition Filmmuseum

Katja Raganelli portraits two forgotten women film pioneers: Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker and only female director of an American film studio, and Margery Wilson, leading actress in films by David Wark Griffith and William S. Hart, whose directorial efforts today are lost. This 2-disc DVD set presents rare documetary material and interviews, reenactment scenes and seven newly restored films by Alice Guy Blaché. It allows a new view on film history which usually marginalizes the work of women.

Elisabeth, a young historian, travels to Lyon, where socialist and feminist Flora Tristan had been active in the 19th century. In her footsteps, Elisabeth roams the old town, trying to reconstruct with a little cassette- recorder the sounds which Flora must have perceived, thus revealing the layers of history in sounds and noises, in faces and facades. A professor of history tries to lead her back to the paths of academic study, but she remains determined to break free of all scientific rigidity, and, in search of lost time, she discovers her own present day reality and the reality of today's city of Lyon. The DVD includes the German and the French version of the restored film classicDie Reise nach Lyon by Claudia von Alemann as well as a trilingual booklet.

Michael Verhoeven's controversial film o.k. unseen for decades, transfers an authentic incident from the Vietnam War to a Bavarian setting with stark realism. Five American soldiers are bored in their trench and rape a passing young Vietnamese woman. In an attempt to cover up the act, they kill her. Producer Rob Houwer and director Michael Verhoeven discuss in an additional feature how the film, as a competition entry at the 1970 Berlin Film Festival, caused a scandal and led to the festival's collapse. Stefan Drössler chronicles the historical events in the booklet.

Robert Reinert combines exotic thrills with erotic visuals in his film Opium, which accompanies an English doctor to China and India on his research into the effects of opium. The color tints and tones reinforce the psychedelic vibe of the frivolous dreams populated by elves and satyrs. The typography of the intertitles changes according to the location. Mutilated by censors and distributors, Reinert's classic has now been painstakingly recon- structed. This colour reconstruction was based on nitrate source elements from the film museums in Munich and Düsseldorf, and the Austrian Film Archive. At a length equivalent to 2,150 metres of celluloid, this is closer to the original release than any version known to have survived. In the DVD booklet, Stefan Drössler examines the unknown biography of Robert Reinert. As a special feature the DVD also offers a fragment of the legendary lost Reinert film Sterbende Völker.

Two classics produced by the East-German DEFA in the early 1950s when the Berlin border between East and West was still permeable. Roman einer jungen Ehe reflects the contrasting cultural politics of the cold war in the two parts of Berlin in the love story of a young actor couple. Frauenschicksale, one of the first German post-war color films, applies the vibrant Agfacolor palette to portray the lives of different women in both parts of the divided city who hope to build a better future while balancing their personal and societal responsibilities. Two rare short films and the texts in the booklet explain the historical context.