Paul Rehkopf
Country Dr. Robert Koch is desperate: a tuberculosis epidemic is decimating the children in his district and no one is able to do anything about it. Every fourth child is already sick and the parents must helplessly watch as their young ones die. Now Koch is undertaking to find the cause of the tuberculosis --- something he has already been working on for years --- which has been causing this plague of illness. His work is made more difficult by envy; for example, that of his teacher, who was wounded defending his honor. But his greatest obstacle is the famous Berliner scientist and Reichstag deputy, Privy Councilor Rudolf Virchow: He is extraordinarily skeptical of Koch's theory, that the cause for tuberculosis is a bacteria.
Cheeky Jette is a typical Berlin girl. Together with her mother, she performs couplets in a Berlin suburb theatre every night. Then, a young Austrian baron, who is worshipping Jette, enables her to audition for Königstädtisches Theater. Although she at first fails with an aria from an opera, Jette wins over the hearts of the board members with her fresh style when she performs a cheeky couplet that was written by Barsch, the stage manager of the suburb theater.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson look into reports that a huge, vicious hound has killed Lord Charles Baskerville and that Lord Henry Baskerville is the next to be killed.
Aspiring singer Susanne takes over one night for her sick colleague, the slap-stick actor Viktor, at a small cabaret in Berlin where he works as a female impersonator. By chance, Susanne is then "discovered" by an agent, who thinks she′s really a man. She becomes famous and goes on tour to London. But when the local womanizer Robert catches on to her game, Viktor then has to jump in for Susanne as "Viktoria".
After a detective is assaulted by thugs and placed in an asylum run by Professor Baum, he observes the professor's preoccupation with another patient, the criminal genius Dr. Mabuse the hypnotist. When Mabuse's notes are found to be connected with a rash of recent crimes, Commissioner Lohmann must determine how Mabuse is communicating with the criminals, despite conflicting reports on the doctor's whereabouts, and capture him for good.
The accounting department of an insurance company is looking for a new secretary. To prevent a repeat of the eternal love affairs between the employees, the head of personnel -- no doubt taking advantage of the not-yet-existent anti-discrimination laws -- is seeking the ugliest troll of a woman he can find to do the office typing. And he believes he's found her in the nondescript Lotte. But the bookkeeper Fritz is deeply offended by such mean, discriminatory practices. He decides he's going to correct the boss' disgusting behaviour by going one better: to prove that even ugly people deserve to reproduce, he's going to hit up on Lotte. And obviously, this leads to all sorts of problems and funny situations...
F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and French speaking actors at the same time.
Young Anny returns from school to her circus family, which runs a little venue at the town fair. When Anny suddenly has to fill in for one of the artists, her piano-playing not only enthrals the audience, but also theatre agent Hobbes. He casts the whole family for the Apollo theatre in Berlin, where Anny quickly raises to stardom and is offered an engagement from the US.
A pre-Depression slice of proletarian life from Weimar Germany, Harbour Drift is unusually interesting for its indifferent pessimism, rejecting even the minor rays of hope which permeate the other low-life ‘street films’ of the period. A sordid tale of poverty and greed set within a quayside milieu of crime and prostitution, the narrative centres on the quest for a sparkling pearl necklace stolen by a beggar under the gaze of a prostitute, who persuades her unemployed friend to steal it back, with tragic consequences. The story unfolds in flashback, without irony or a hint of redemption: life simply goes on. The film is remarkable for the innovative camerawork of Friedl Behn-Grund, which manipulates light and shadow to create a nightmarish atmosphere of fear and premonition.
Peter Helling, the only survivor of a polar expedition, returns once more to the eternal ice. Why he calls his fate out again, what has happened? At that time he had set out with his best friend Svensson, to search for the missing friend of the woman they both love and for which they fought. In desperation, the men drag through the deep snow and the icy Arctic storms.
A family from Poland has been left homeless in the wake of World War I. They move to Germany and struggle to survive the conditions there, during the Great Inflation. Inga (Carol Dempster) is a Polish war orphan who has only accumulated a small amount of money from the rubble and hopes to marry Paul (Neil Hamilton). Weakened by poison gas, Paul begins to invest in Inga's future and he serves as their symbol of optimism.
This anti-communist propaganda film discusses the revolutionary curse of communism in the Soviet-Union shortly before and after the fall of czardom in Russia, told from the point of view of Belarusians in exile. Anti-communist copy in color which has been discovered, restored and printed by the Royal Belgian Filmarchive.
Harry Yquem buys his beloved wife some jewelry in a place where underworld middlemen trade in fake and stolen goods. By chance, he spots a man with whom his wife had an affair in the past…
As a young couple stops and rests in a small village inn, the man is abducted by Death and is sequestered behind a huge doorless, windowless wall. The woman finds a mystic entrance and is met by Death, who tells her three separate stories set in exotic locales, all involving circumstances similar to hers.
In a prologue and four acts (the prologue and the first act are lost so is necessary to describe what happens with title cards) the film depicts the terrible dream of Asmus wherein the devil joins the human world disguised as a tinker. He meets Frau Ane, Asmus' wife; Ane yearns to have a baby but in vain so the devil takes advantage of Frau Ane's motherly inner desire by making a deal with her but for his own purposes. As a result, the farmer's wife comes under the devil's spell and then seduces the local priest, giving the devil to chance to build his own church to replace the old church that has burned down.
The director and co-writer Lupu Pick plays musician Erik Paulsson, who loses his beloved son after a peaceful yet critical poetry reading is raided by the tsarist forces. Paulsson, beside himself with grief, kills the officer responsible and is sentenced to life, which will mean 18 years in prison before he is free again. While he is inside, by a strange quirk of fate, his daughter Karin falls in love with writer Sebald Brückner, the son of the state prosecutor, who indicted Paulsson and is a staunch advocate of the death penalty. The conflict between the fathers does not impair the relationship of the young couple. However, when Sebald’s long-desired success on the stage is threatened by a vengeful theatre director who had sexually harassed Karin, he is enraged and kills the other man in a fight. The prosecutor now must face the blow of losing his own son to the death penalty.
A 16mm acetate positive print survives at the George Eastman Museum.
