Edition Filmmuseum

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.

Next to the classic Man with a Movie Camera, his "film poem" to the founder of the Soviet Union, Three Songs of Lenin, is the most universally acclaimed and enduringly popular of all Dziga Vertov's films. This 2-disc set presents the earliest surviving versions of Three Songs of Lenin, the 1938 silent and sound reissues, previously unavailable on home video. Also included are the two Lenin-themed editions ofVertov's Kinopravda newsreel series as well as a feature-length TV documentary about Vertov by Austrian Film Museum co-founder Peter Konlechner.

This epic documentary subtly introduces the complex world view of iconic filmmaker and theoretician Peter Kubelka (born 1934, Vienna). While Kubelka's radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of about an hour focussing on the essence of cinema, his legendary lectures often unfold over many hours. These lectures on "what is cinema" and "cooking as an art form" are frequently illuminated by the presentation of archaeological objects from Kubelka's eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice which explores the evolution of humanity. Martina Kudláček has carefully woven an open-ended portrait which goes beyond the biographical to reveal fresh insights into the phenomenon of film.

The Georgian-born filmmaker Michail Kalatozov (19031973) is best remembered for directing some of the most innovative and successful Soviet films of the 1950s and 1960s. This DVD presents digitally restored versions of two of his lesser-known, early works, which were highly controversial in their time but now rank among the finest achievements in Soviet silent cinema. SALT FOR SVANETIA is an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucasus Mountains. NAIL IN THE BOOT, a biting parable of wartime irresponsibility, chillingly prefigures the later Stalinist purge trials. Günter Buchwald's and Stephen Horne's prize-winning scores and the experimental accompaniment by Masha Khotimshi underline the poetic and expressive visual style of these exceptional masterpieces.

This double-DVD presents two films by Gerhard Lamprecht, sketching social panoramas of late 1920s Berlin. Menschen untereinander delineates the social microcosm of a tenement building; the tenants represent a cross-section of poverty, corruption and compassion. In Unter der Laterne, the girl Else begins to follow the wrong path after an altercation with her father. The high life turns out to be the first step in a downward spiral.

This deluxe 2-disc DVD set presents Sergej Eisenstein's immortal screen classics Battleship Potemkin and October in previously unreleased and painstakingly restored versions featuring the original accompanying scores by Austrian-born composer Edmund Meisel. The ROM section includes a wide range of rare documents and detailed essays on the heavily influential creative partnership of "kindred spirits" Eisenstein and Meisel.