Edition Filmmuseum

In the face of two world wars, Professor Prätorius, a philanthropist and a surgeon, wants to exterminate the one danger to mankind, the microbe of stupidity, as he states in a spontaneous lecture to his male and female students. When he tries to help a pregnant girl he gets involved more and more in her life and is forced to marry her. The melodramatic comedy was the first film by Curt Goetz after his return from America and a top hit in post-war German cinema. The DVD presents the restored original version as well as a radio play by Curt Goetz from 1947 and an interview with Valerie von Martens, his wife who performed with him in all his films and radio plays.

One of the best German film comedies from the 30s: Lord Cavershot is totally obsessed by the historic Napoleon. His wife feels neglegted. Cavershot's participation in an international congress about Napoleon becomes his personal Waterloo. The DVD offers the newly restored version of the directorial film debut of Curt Goetz as well as a TV feature about him and an interview with his wife Valerie von Martens.

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.

The film is based on Kafka's unfinished novel "Der Verschollene". It doesn't deal with the real United States but it is rather a kind of allegory taking place at no specific time in history. Straub and Huillet's version is about class relations and about the society that is created by capitalism, which is utterly cruel, capricious and ludicrous. This 2-disc DVD offers a film transfer supervised by the filmmakers themselves as well as two rare documentaries about the shooting, different versions of the screenplay by Straub and Huillet, unpublished rushes and photos from the shooting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the grand tradition of great comedians such as Chaplin or Keaton, German directors Markus Mischkowski and Kai Maria Steinkühler are also sharing the major roles in their feature film debut Westend, a laconic comedy about two unemployed friends and their unsuccessful attempts to set foot in the modern working world. The film is an inventive black and white comedy, independently produced and filmed in a suburb of Cologne. The DVD offers two more adventures of Mike and Alfred in the short films Westend (1997) and Wolga (2003).

It was Veit Harlan, the protégé of Joseph Goebbels and the director of the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jew Suess, who dared to do a film about a controversial taboo in 1957: the German penal code's Paragraph 175 which sentenced German homosexual men to jail terms for "unnatural vice between men." Anders als du und ich (Different from You and Me) is not only a film about homosexuality, it also deals with the rebellion of young people against the restorative Germany after the Second World War and with the problems of a mother who broke the law to do "the right thing". The DVD contains the censored version as well as a comparison with the original version Das dritte Geschlecht (The Third Sex), a cut scene and production stills.