Edition Filmmuseum

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.

Four documentary filmmaker, four talks, four key players of the German documentary film movement since the 60s: Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp, Peter Nestler und Klaus Wildenhahn. Each of them has developed an own approach and a personal style. Christoph Hübner, a documentary filmmaker himself, succeeds in portraying four very different personalities, their works and their theories. The intimate talks with the filmmakers are illustrated with clips of their films.

A highly amusing court-room play full of unexpected turns in the plot and brilliant dialogue, Hokuspokus is the last film written by and starring Curt Goetz. He plays a lawyer who defends a widow, who is suspected to have murdered her husband. The end is more than a surprise. Very well directed by the master of the light comedy Kurt Hoffmann, the stage play is turned into an entertaining film which is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Richard Angst. The DVD offers the restored original version as well as a radio plays by Curt Goetz, original trailers of the Curt Goetz post-war films, and interviews with Curt Goetz and Valerie von Martens.

The firmly rooted ethics of a very proper school "professor" are awfully tempted when his sister, the "black sheep" of the family, sends from her exile in Montevideo an offer for the oldest daughter, which is utterly immoral, thoroughly despicable, yet hard to refuse. Curt Goetz understood how to write comedy and how to play the parts to perfection. His film was the top hit of early post-war German cinema. The beautifully restored original version is added by an interview with Valerie von Martens, co-director, main actress and wife of Curt Goetz.

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.