It's difficult to know what to make of Michael Pilz's Himmel und Erde, a nearly five-hour unconventional ethnography of the Austrian alpine village of St. Anna. Though more than an hour and a half longer than Frederick Wiseman's Belfast, Maine, it isn't nearly as finely detailed or as expansive. Instead of showing many aspects of community life in great detail as Wiseman does, Pilz shows the same handful of activities repeatedly, inviting an ever deeper reconsideration of their meaning.

Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social t...Read the entire review

For anyone that's seen a truncated version of Georg Wilhelm Pabst's The Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse, 1925) on TV or from one of the home video labels that trawl the public domain for films by the bundle, the impressive new 151-minute restoration from Edition Filmmuseum with be a revelation.

A seminal film in Weimar cinema, The Joyless Street marked the transition from expressionism to the post-expressionism of the "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit). Where expressionism sought to make the psychological tangibly manifest, New Objectivity was concerned with realistic portrayals of its characters and their concerns in pseudo-documentary fashion. Based on a controversial novel by outspoken Austrian social critic Hugo Bettauer (later gunned d...Read the entire review

Essentially an illustrated astronomy lecture in the form of a special effects-filled German silent film, Hanns Walter Kornblum's Wunder der Schöpfung ("Our Heavenly Bodies," 1925) is a feast for the eyes. It covers a wide range of topics over the course of its 92 minutes, from the history of astronomy to an imaginary exploration of the solar system and beyond by spaceship, from faster-than-light travel to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Though science has made innumerable new discoveries and disproved faulty theories the film is, even now, surprisingly relevant, entertaining, and informative. Using all manner of special effects, especially myriad forms of animation, Wunder der Schöpfung is an amazing cinematic accomplishment, comparing favorably to contemporary fiction films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Harry Hoyt/Willis O'Brien's The Lost World.

The region-free PA...Read the entire review

There are many fields of cultural achievement for which Germans are renowned including philosophy, architecture, music, theater, and silent cinema, but improvisational comedy is not one of them. The 2-disc collection of Alexander Kluge's recent television projects released by Edition Filmmuseum entitled Freiheit für die Konsonanten! & Grenzfälle der Schadensregulierung does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Germans are a rather humorless lot. Freiheit für die Konsonanten! & Grenzfälle der Schadensregulierung takes its name from two of the improv comedy skits included in the set. It could be translated as Freedom for the Consonants! & Borderline Cases of Damage Control. Though this is a decidedly long and unfunny title, it's perfectly apt for the long and mirthless content on offer in this 270-minute collection.

Alexander Kluge, a prolific West German fi...Read the entire review

It takes a brave distributor to release an incomplete film as the title feature on a 2-disc DVD set, but that's exactly what Edition Filmmuseum has done with Frank Borzage's 1929 pre-Code, erotic-melodrama, The River. The original 84-minute, 35mm film is lost. What remains is 43 minutes of a 16mm copy, a snippet of 35mm retrieved from Swedish censors, and 12 minutes of reconstruction provided through production stills and new, explanatory intertitles. Lost are the opening and closing acts and two scenes from the middle, leaving only an awkward, sexual-negotiation-cum-romance between a virginal man-child and a sultry, sophisticated, older woman.

The lost opening scenes establish the characters. Allen John (Charles Far...Read the entire review

Anders als du und ich (Different from You and Me) is a German-language exploitation film released in 1957, capitalizing on homophobic hysteria. Directed by the discredited ex-Nazi Veit Harlan, infamous for the vile anti-semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (1940), Anders als du und ich is the story of a bourgeoisie couple trying to save their adolescent son from homosexuality.

Bank Manager Werner Teichmann (Paul Dahlke) and his wife Christa (Paula Wessely) are concerned about their seventeen-year-old son Klaus (Christian Wolff), a bright boy interested in modern painting. Klaus's affection for effete classmate Manfred Glatz (Guenther Theil) disturbs his parents, but things come to a head when they learn that Klaus has been targeted for despoiling by t...Read the entire review

Though badly dated as melodrama by its stylized script and acting, the recent restoration of Robert Reinert's silent feature Nerven (Nerves, 1919) offers modern viewers an opportunity to see a remarkable piece of agitprop made during the German Revolution of 1918-1919. Begun about the time of the Armistice memorializing Germany's defeat in World War I, filming for Nerven continued through the tumultuous street battles that brought down the German Empire, leading to the establishment of the ill-fated Weimar Republic.

Nerven was a modest critical success but a major box-office failure when it opened in Munich in December, 1919. The film was censored the following year, and a further truncated version was distributed internationally. Though a third of the footage of the original has never been recovered, this DVD release from the prestigious Edition Filmmuseum includes a 2...Read the entire review

If film buffs in North America know of Lutz Dammbeck at all it is probably for his 2003 documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet (Das Netz), a flawed but engaging exploration of Ted Kaczynski's seventeen-year letter-bomb campaign against scientists and industrialists, released on DVD by Other Cinema Digital. Now thanks to the new two-disc release from the prestigious German label Edition Filmmuseum entitled Lutz Dammbeck: Filme und Mediencollagen 1975-1986, we have the opportunity to consider his early work through 1993 (yeah, the title isn't accurate).

Dammbeck, now age 60, was among the first generation born in communist East Germany. After graduating from a graphic design college, he eventually found employment at the state-run DEFA film studio. At DEFA, Dammbeck completed a half-dozen animated shorts ...Read the entire review

Though encumbered with the inadequate, yet lengthy title Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt & Melodie der Welt, the new two-disc set from Edition Filmmuseum actually includes the entire surviving oeuvre of German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann through 1931.

Ruttmann, who spelled his given name variously as Walter and Walther, was born in Frankfurt in 1887 and died in Berlin in 1941. Academically trained as a mathematician, musician, and painter, he entered the world of filmmaking by creating a series of animated shorts featuring an interplay of abstract form, color and music. Some of these animations were commercial commissions, others were purely experimental.

The surviving commercial animations included in this set soft sell tires (Der Sieger, 1922, 3:01), liquor (Das Wunder, 1922, 2:45), a florist (Das widergefundene Paradies, 1925, 5:26), health tonic (Der Au...Read the entire review

Told through interviews with film historians and people who knew her, Hedy Lamarr: Secrets of a Hollywood Star (2006) offers a workmanlike biography of the rise and fall of a leading lady of Hollywood's Golden Age.

Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1914, she achieved international notoriety for appearing nude and simulating an orgasm in the Austrian-Czech production Ekstase (Ecstasy, 1933), following which she married the first of her six husbands, Fritz Mandl, a prominent Austro-fascist arms dealer.

With the collapse of her first marriage, Kiesler signed a contract with MGM, changed her name to Hedy Lemarr, and immigrated to Hollywood. Beginning with Algiers in 1938, she made a dozen films for MGM working opposite the likes ...Read the entire review