89-91 / BD 43, 69, 229 The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse
Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 4:13 pm
THE COMPLETE FRITZ LANG MABUSE BOXSET (DVD only)
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.
One of the legendary epics of the silent cinema — and the first part of a trilogy that Fritz Lang developed up to the very end of his career — Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler.] is a masterpiece of conspiracy that, even as it precedes the mind-blowing Spione from the close of Lang’s silent cycle, constructs its own dark labyrinth from the base materials of human fear and paranoia.
Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Dr. Mabuse, the criminal mastermind whose nefarious machinations provide the cover for — or describe the result of — the economic upheaval and social bacchanalia at the heart of Weimar-era Berlin. Initiated with the arch-villain’s diabolical manipulation of the stock-market, and passing through a series of dramatic events based around hypnotism, charlatanism, hallucinations, Chinese incantations, cold-blooded murder, opiate narcosis and cocaine anxiety, Lang’s film maintains an unrelenting power all the way to the final act… which culminates in the terrifying question: “WHERE IS MABUSE?!”
A bridge between Feuillade’s somnambulistic serial-films and modern media-narratives of elusive robber-barons, Lang’s two-part classic set the template for the director’s greatest works: social commentary as super-psychology, poised at the brink of combustion. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Lang’s early triumph in its fully-restored version with new English subtitles.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original intertitles
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• Three video pieces: an interview with the composer of the restoration score, a discussion of Norbert Jacques, creator of Dr. Mabuse, and an examination of the film’s motifs in the context of German silent cinema
• 32-PAGE BOOKLET featuring vintage reprints of writing by Lang
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
With the etching onto glass of a single word — “MABUSE” — Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang’s electrifying Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse] is the astonishing second instalment in the German master’s legendary trilogy, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema ever before — or since.
It’s been eleven years since the downfall of arch-criminal and master-of-disguise Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), now sequestered in a room of an asylum under the watchful eye of one Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi). Mabuse exists in a state of ‘catatonic graphomania’, his only action the irrepressible scribbling of blueprints that would realise a seemingly theoretical “Empire of Crime”. But when a series of violent events courses through the city, police and populace alike start asking themselves with increasing panic: “Who is behind all this?!” The answer borders on the realm of the Impossible…
Not only a follow-up to Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., but also, with the presence of Otto Wernicke’s Police Commissioner Lohmann, a semi-sequel to Lang’s immortal masterpiece M, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is itself considered by many to be Lang’s greatest achievement — a work of terrible and practically supernatural power that, like Renoir’s La Règle du jeu, seems to have prophesied the implications of the Nazi scourge… and the entirety of the 20th Century. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse fully-restored and with new English subtitles.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced high-definition transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original soundtrack
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• [Boxed DVD edition] 32-PAGE BOOKLET featuring reprints of writing by Michel Chion and excerpts of vintage interviews with Lang
• [Dual Format edition] 52-PAGE BOOKLET featuring writing by Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Arno Wagner, Michel Chion, and substantial excerpts of vintage interviews with Fritz Lang about the film
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse
After enjoying fantastic success with Fritz Lang’s two-part “Indian Epic” in 1959, the German producer Artur Brauner signed the great director to direct one more film. The result would be the picture that, in closing the saga he began nearly forty years earlier, brought Lang’s career full-circle, and would come to represent his final celluloid testament — by extension: his final film masterpiece.
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse] finds that diabolical Weimar name resurfacing in the Cold War era, linked now to the actions of a criminal gang whose methodology — executed by, among others, the bug-eyed “No. 12” (portrayed by Howard Vernon, of Melville’s Le Silence de la mer and Godard’s Alphaville) — resembles that of the same villainous mastermind who gripped Berlin with his menace in the years preceding Hitler. Séances, assassinations, and Nazi-engineered surveillance-tech — all abound in Lang’s paranoid, and ultimate, filmic labyrinth.
One of the great and cherished “last films” in the history of cinema, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse provides a stylistic glimpse into the ’60s works on such subjects as sex-crime, youth-culture, and LSD that Lang would unfortunately never come to realise. Nonetheless: deemed “masterly … lively, spontaneous, thrilling” by Lotte Eisner, and described by Roger Greenspun as asking from its audience “both greater innocence and infinitely greater sophistication than most of us bring to the movies nowadays,” Lang’s final film remains an explosive, and definitive, closing statement. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Fritz Lang’s Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse in its fully-restored version for the first time in the UK.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced anamorphic transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original soundtrack
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• 2002 video interview with actor Wolfgang Preiss
• An alternate ending taken from the French print of the film
• Optional English-language dub track, approved by Fritz Lang
• 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring vintage reprints of writing by Lang, new writing by David Cairns, notes by Lotte Eisner on Lang’s final, unrealised projects, and more
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.
One of the legendary epics of the silent cinema — and the first part of a trilogy that Fritz Lang developed up to the very end of his career — Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler.] is a masterpiece of conspiracy that, even as it precedes the mind-blowing Spione from the close of Lang’s silent cycle, constructs its own dark labyrinth from the base materials of human fear and paranoia.
Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Dr. Mabuse, the criminal mastermind whose nefarious machinations provide the cover for — or describe the result of — the economic upheaval and social bacchanalia at the heart of Weimar-era Berlin. Initiated with the arch-villain’s diabolical manipulation of the stock-market, and passing through a series of dramatic events based around hypnotism, charlatanism, hallucinations, Chinese incantations, cold-blooded murder, opiate narcosis and cocaine anxiety, Lang’s film maintains an unrelenting power all the way to the final act… which culminates in the terrifying question: “WHERE IS MABUSE?!”
A bridge between Feuillade’s somnambulistic serial-films and modern media-narratives of elusive robber-barons, Lang’s two-part classic set the template for the director’s greatest works: social commentary as super-psychology, poised at the brink of combustion. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Lang’s early triumph in its fully-restored version with new English subtitles.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original intertitles
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• Three video pieces: an interview with the composer of the restoration score, a discussion of Norbert Jacques, creator of Dr. Mabuse, and an examination of the film’s motifs in the context of German silent cinema
• 32-PAGE BOOKLET featuring vintage reprints of writing by Lang
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
With the etching onto glass of a single word — “MABUSE” — Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang’s electrifying Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse] is the astonishing second instalment in the German master’s legendary trilogy, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema ever before — or since.
It’s been eleven years since the downfall of arch-criminal and master-of-disguise Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), now sequestered in a room of an asylum under the watchful eye of one Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi). Mabuse exists in a state of ‘catatonic graphomania’, his only action the irrepressible scribbling of blueprints that would realise a seemingly theoretical “Empire of Crime”. But when a series of violent events courses through the city, police and populace alike start asking themselves with increasing panic: “Who is behind all this?!” The answer borders on the realm of the Impossible…
Not only a follow-up to Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., but also, with the presence of Otto Wernicke’s Police Commissioner Lohmann, a semi-sequel to Lang’s immortal masterpiece M, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is itself considered by many to be Lang’s greatest achievement — a work of terrible and practically supernatural power that, like Renoir’s La Règle du jeu, seems to have prophesied the implications of the Nazi scourge… and the entirety of the 20th Century. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse fully-restored and with new English subtitles.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced high-definition transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original soundtrack
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• [Boxed DVD edition] 32-PAGE BOOKLET featuring reprints of writing by Michel Chion and excerpts of vintage interviews with Lang
• [Dual Format edition] 52-PAGE BOOKLET featuring writing by Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Arno Wagner, Michel Chion, and substantial excerpts of vintage interviews with Fritz Lang about the film
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse
After enjoying fantastic success with Fritz Lang’s two-part “Indian Epic” in 1959, the German producer Artur Brauner signed the great director to direct one more film. The result would be the picture that, in closing the saga he began nearly forty years earlier, brought Lang’s career full-circle, and would come to represent his final celluloid testament — by extension: his final film masterpiece.
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse] finds that diabolical Weimar name resurfacing in the Cold War era, linked now to the actions of a criminal gang whose methodology — executed by, among others, the bug-eyed “No. 12” (portrayed by Howard Vernon, of Melville’s Le Silence de la mer and Godard’s Alphaville) — resembles that of the same villainous mastermind who gripped Berlin with his menace in the years preceding Hitler. Séances, assassinations, and Nazi-engineered surveillance-tech — all abound in Lang’s paranoid, and ultimate, filmic labyrinth.
One of the great and cherished “last films” in the history of cinema, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse provides a stylistic glimpse into the ’60s works on such subjects as sex-crime, youth-culture, and LSD that Lang would unfortunately never come to realise. Nonetheless: deemed “masterly … lively, spontaneous, thrilling” by Lotte Eisner, and described by Roger Greenspun as asking from its audience “both greater innocence and infinitely greater sophistication than most of us bring to the movies nowadays,” Lang’s final film remains an explosive, and definitive, closing statement. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Fritz Lang’s Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse in its fully-restored version for the first time in the UK.
Special Features
• New, officially licenced anamorphic transfer from restored materials
• New and improved optional English subtitles with original soundtrack
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
• 2002 video interview with actor Wolfgang Preiss
• An alternate ending taken from the French print of the film
• Optional English-language dub track, approved by Fritz Lang
• 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring vintage reprints of writing by Lang, new writing by David Cairns, notes by Lotte Eisner on Lang’s final, unrealised projects, and more