Edition Filmmuseum

F.W. Murnau's Faust has a long history spanning from Berlin to Hollywood. In 1923, Ernst Lubitsch convinced Mary Pickford to let him make a film of the Faust story, but he only got as far as shooting screen tests for the role of Mephisto. When Ufa announced its own Faust film a year later, the only cast member in place was Emil Jannings as Mephisto. For the other parts, the company attempted unsuccessfully to secure American stars. Ufa succeeded in procuring Nobel Prize-winning author Gerhart Hauptmann to write the intertitles, only to discard them in the wake of protest from script writer Hans Kyser. Now, for the first time, the Munich Filmmuseum has reconstructed Faust with Hauptmann's titles, which alter the rhythm and character of the film significantly.

Betrayal is an everyday occurance, and it starts with the betrayal of one's own self. Sterling Hayden: round-the-world sailor, war hero, Hollywood star, author. "Hayden did more than just regret and seek the forgiveness of those whom he had harmed so much," as one of those whom Hayden had denounced to the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 later put it. "He did the most radical thing possible: He changed." (Abraham Polonsky) This 2-disc DVD set presents two films by Wolf-Eckart Bühler that deconstruct the Hayden myth. On the one hand: a chaotic yet tranquil documentary featuring Sterling Hayden himself. On the other: Hayden's self-analytical, autobiographical tale on the experience of fear, conformation and betrayal, condensed into contemporary images and sounds.

The mid-1970s saw James Benning's first feature films attract the attention of critics, establishing him as a representative of the »New Narrative Movement.« In films like 11╳14 and One Way Boogie Woogie, he combines the structural analysis of image, sound and narrative with auto-biographical traces, as well as with an almost »classical« interest in composition, color, light and landscape. This 2-disc set features 11╳14 (1977), one of the central U.S. avant-garde films of the 1970s, in a restored version. Also included is Benning's recurring view of his hometown Milwaukee at three different points in time: One Way Boogie Woogie (1978), 27 Years Later (2005) and One Way Boogie Woogie 2012. Documents of change and transience.

Rainer Simon's adaptation of Fritz Rudolf Fries' novel "The Airship" is one of the most unconventional feature films ever produced in East Germany. Featuring a complex flashback structure and animated dream sequences painted directly on the film by artist Lutz Dammbeck, Das Luftschiff tells the story of an inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new airship. When Civil War breaks out in Spain, the inventor refuses to allow his work to be abused for sinister political purposes. Unbändiges Spanien is an expanded version of Spanish Earth by Joris Ivens, who authorized Jeanne and Kurt Stern to update his work for a new audience.

COSMIC VOYAGE was the last Soviet silent film, made when talkies were already well established. In this elaborate science-fiction film equipped with impressive special effects, one sees the fictional Moscow of 1946, as it would have been if Stalin's plans had come to fruition. The film's highlight is an amazingly realistic voyage in a spaceship to the moon. The animation classic Interplanetary Revolution describes a journey to Mars. In the DVD booklet Alexander Schwarz examines the production history of both films and the development of the Soviet science-fiction film. Neil Brand, Masha Khotimski and Richard Siedhoff provide exceptional new music scores.

"Related in theme and form, these three documentaries Germany Dada (1969), John Heartfield: Photomontage Artist (1977) and 1968: Art, Protest, Happening (1981) can be seen as a trilogy on the history of art in the 20th century. Art historians focus on those rare moments in our German history when radical aesthetics and radical politics briefly went hand in hand. Then the movement of authoritarian political sects on the one hand and the reaction of the authoritarian establishment combined with the voracity of the art market on the other put an end to this beautiful commonality." (Helmut Herbst) The 2-disc DVD set also offers unpublished audio documents of talks with artists like Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen.

Heiner Carow's powerful film The Russians Are Coming, about the final days of World War II, was made in the GDR in 1968. However, it did not receive state authorization for release at the time and could only be painstakingly reconstructed in 1987. This double DVD presents a new, restored version of the film and allows viewers their first ever opportunity to compare it with Career (1971), in which Heiner Carow made use of parts of the unreleased material from The Russians Are Coming.

Sein Lin, a drummer of a traditional Burmese theatre group, falls in love with the beautiful dancer, Khin San. When she leaves the theatre to pursue a career as a film actress, he gives her a small figure as a keepsake, a symbol of traditional theatre. They part ways and he watches her from a distance as she appears to lose her way in the ultra-glamourous world of commercial cinema. This black and white classic comes with an important message: true art is as private and as intense as the love between a drummer and his dancer. Based on meticulous research of Burmese travelling theatre groups, Tender are the Feet was made in 1972. It is one of the first films of Maung Wunna, a director who developed his artistic style during the golden age of Burmese cinema and continued to do so despite the oppressive policies of the military dic tatorship. An important reference point for contemporary filmmakers, it has now been restored from the only sur - viving source material, a DVCPro archive tape provided by Myanmar's national broadcaster MRTV.

Before making (sound) film history with The Blue Angel, Viennese-born filmmaker Josef von Sternberg directed a series of thematically and stylistically daring silent films. This DVD presents the first and last of his surviving silents, digitally restored from archival 35mm elements and supplemented by a new video essay by film historian Janet Bergstrom. The Salvation Hunters, von Sternberg's self-financed, socially conscious directorial debut, won praise from Charles Chaplin, among others, and includes a new score by award-winning Austrian composer Siegfried Friedrich. The sole extant fragment of The Case of Lena Smith brings the director's youthful memories of fin de siècle Vienna vividly to life.

With films including the 'rubble woman' portrait Martha, the three-part experimental film cycle Potter's Stier, Venus nach Giorgione and Frau am Klavichord, the portrait of the artist Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, and also the documentaries Rangierer and Die Küche, noted for their outstanding sound and visuals, Jürgen Böttcher distances himself yet further from the didactic tone and abstract heroic representation of socialist films. In Georgien is the only full-length film that Böttcher was able to shoot on location outside of the GDR.