German Filmmuseum Edition

[beamish14]

I cannot recommend Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side highly enough. I don’t know how he has the stamina and creative energy to keep making these epics, and this is among the very best

[DeprongMori]

AFAIK, it’s still the only place to get Josef von Sternberg’s debut film The Salvation Hunters

I second the recommendation for the Ruttman.

It’s a good reminder that I need to finally get around to Ophüls, Stroheim, and Pabst titles I previously picked up. Any thoughts about Borzage’s The River, or their Murnau releases?

[DeprongMori]

The Murnau disc also includes Lupu Pick’s Scherben. I’m hoping Filmmuseum Edition or someone else will release the recent restoration of Pick’s Sylvester, which I saw screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

[JAP]

New title available, Fluchtweg nach Marseille (Edition Filmmuseum 123)
Perhaps a double-bill with Christian Petzold's Transit is in order?...

[hearthesilence]

I cannot recommend Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side highly enough. I don’t know how he has the stamina and creative energy to keep making these epics, and this is among the very best

I'll have to check it out. I was able to catch a couple of his epics when he visited MoMA in 2017, and he was one of the few people who genuinely gave me some real hope when he discussed Trump in the context of surviving Marcos.

[Cipater]

New title available, Fluchtweg nach Marseille (Edition Filmmuseum 123)
Perhaps a double-bill with Christian Petzold's Transit is in order?...

Spoke with Ingemo last week after a screening of her films. She said Filmmuseum will be putting out her entire filmography on DVD. Next up is a double DVD with Dark Spring and Kampf um ein Kind. I have not seen the latter, but Dark Spring was quite good, and featured a very good Neil Young needle-drop!

Will attend a screening of Fluchtweg nach Marseille later this month. Revisited Transit in preparation (a masterpiece). Interested to see how this one compares – not least of all since they both collaborated closely with Harun Farocki.

[hearthesilence]

Earlier (years ago) in this thread it was mentioned that James Benning doesn't really care all that much about preserving/archiving his films or presenting them on video, but I just stumbled on to this 2018 interview that shows that's not quite true even though he prioritizes new work:

I realised I had 30 years’ worth of work that needed proper storage and archiving. And to be fair to the work it should be properly done: I just didn’t have the time or money to properly archive it. If I tried it would have pretty much consumed the rest of my life, and I’d stop making work and be a slave to what I had already done.

The Film Museum had always been a great supporter of my work. It’s a perfect place for me because I’ve never been categorised properly – I don’t know if I fit into categorising. I found an institution that loves film and doesn’t have a narrow vision of it; they care about what they think are good films. And luckily they think my films are good.

When Alex [Horwath, the museum’s director] offered to store it I said he could just have it all, with the idea that they would properly archive it over the years, because I knew it was a huge job. As part of that archiving process, they thought they should also make DVDs to make the films available. And at that point I thought it was a great idea, mainly because there seemed to be a demand to see those early films, and I couldn’t provide a solution by renting prints any more. The internet’s made my work talked about more; it’s actually found its place in the world, where before it was in little corners. I’ve been holding out for years not to make DVDs, but now the writing’s on the wall. And you get a sense of the films, anyways.

FWIW, Benning once lamented that while his films do tend to pay for themselves (noting that they usually cost less than $20,000 to make), his works eventually screen at a deficit, noting that 13 Lakes, Ten Skies, and One Way Boogie Woogie all ran for a week at Anthology Film Archives and didn’t make enough money to cover the costs of wear and tear on the prints. He's basically alluding to this in the above quote.

[hearthesilence]

I splurged on one of the Benning DVDs. It looks okay on a HD TV set (haven't tried it on a 4K), but it's clearly a step down in detail. It's a shame the Film Museum won't make an HD version available. If not a Blu-ray, I'd even settle for an HD download or a lifetime HD stream, at least that could save on manufacturing costs.

[JAP]

A new title, once again only showing up at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum shop:
Mister Radio / Mit dem Motorrad über die Wolken (Edition Filmmuseum 124)

[JAP]

Mister Radio now available at the Filmmuseum site.
And the first title in a new collection, Edition Buch und Film: Baron Flo's Welt