Oct 2009
Fritz Lang's three Dr. Mabuse films
Out now on DVD, assembled together for the first time by a single label, and in one boxset — Fritz Lang’s legendary trilogy of films on the machinations of arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse. These landmark works — presented here in their fully restored forms — trace not only the death-cycle of Mabuse’s conspiratorial network, but also the arc of cinema history in the first half of the twentieth century through the evolution of film master Lang’s iconoclastic style.
The trail of clues: 1: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler.] (1922) — Lang’s two-part, nearly 5-hour silent epic detailing the rise and fall of Dr. Mabuse in Weimar-era Berlin. 2: Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse] (1933) — a tour-de-force thriller rife with supernatural elements, all converging around an attempt by the now-institutionalised Mabuse (or someone acting under his name, and possibly will) to organise an “Empire of Crime”. 3: Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse] (1960) — Fritz Lang’s final film, in which hypnosis, clairvoyance, surveillance, and machine-guns come together for a whiplash climax that answers the question: Who’s channeling Mabuse’s methods in the Cold War era?
Film scholar David Kalat provides new and exclusive feature-length audio commentaries for each of the entries in the trilogy. Additionally, three heavily illustrated booklets accompany the films, presenting writing by Lang, Michel Chion, and David Cairns, along with passages of interviews conducted with Lang in the years after he finished filmmaking. The long-gestating release of The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Boxset is a DVD event that no cinephiile will want to miss.
Oct 2009
The world's first silent feature on Blu-ray
Out now — on both Blu-ray and DVD, one of F. W. Murnau’s final and greatest achievements, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans [1927] along with Georges Franju’s feature debut, La Tête contre les murs [Head Against the Wall, 1959].
F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is considered by many to be not only the greatest silent film ever made, but also among the very greatest of all films, a work that pushed the ingenuity of image-building into an entirely new realm and stripped back the notion of plot to its barest essence in order to clearly articulate the universal fundamentals of love and compassion in all mankind. This new MoC release of Sunrise marks the first-ever global release of a silent film on Blu-ray, and both the high-defintion and standard-def DVD versions include the complete film with its Movietone soundtrack, and the lustrous HD restoration of the slightly shorter Czech print of the movie. Sunrise is one of the few works about which it feels like neither hyperbole nor cliché to assert: “This is truly the most beautiful of films.”
Pierre Brasseur, Anouk Aimée, Charles Azanavour, Paul Meurisse, and future director Jean-Pierre Mocky (who also wrote the film’s scenario) come together for Georges Franju’s elegant and poetic-realistic exposé of a psychiatric institution in La Tête contre les murs. Said Franju about his subject: “Mental illness is contagious. I’m not able to stay alone with the mentally ill. They are many and I am one. It’s not mental force that prevails — it’s the numbers. I feel hopeless next to them — so subtle are they, so mysterious are they, so full of poetry…” Upon the release of the film, Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed: “In the incomparable Orphée, Jean Marais, being pelted with stones by the false poets, shouts at Heurtebise: ‘What says the marble in which a masterpiece is sculpted?’ He responds: ‘I am insulted; I am stricken.’ — but he knows he’s wrong. The same goes for the celluloid ribbon upon which Georges Franju imprinted La Tête contre les murs.”