DEFA Film Library releases restored Weimar-era classic on DVD

A newly restored version of the Weimar-era film “Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?” has just been released on DVD by the campus-based DEFA Film Library.

“Kuhle Wampe” is considered by some to be one of the most significant and influential films from Germany’s Weimar period. The DVD release is the first restoration ever undertaken of the landmark collaboration among leading artists of Weimar modernism. It is also the prime example of work on film by Bertolt Brecht, a key figure in German theater of the 20th century and a major influence on European New Wave filmmakers.

Notable for its experimental film techniques, “Kuhle Wampe” brought together an exceptionally renowned group of artists. To represent the crisis-ridden milieu of working class Berlin in 1931, director Slatan Dudow engaged co-author Brecht, cameraman Guenther Krampf (“Nosferatu”), composer Hanns Eisler (student of Arnold Schoenberg and best-known for his score for Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog”), noted workers’ movement balladeer and actor Ernst Busch, actress Hertha Thiele (“Girls in Uniform”) and Helene Weigel (co-founder of the famed Berliner Ensemble). Brecht, Eisler, Weigel, and Schoenberg all lived in Los Angeles during their exile from Nazi Germany.

Already censored in March 1932, the film was banned by the Nazis in March 1933. Nevertheless, the film premiered a month later at the Cameo Theater in New York, in conjunction with talks by American leftists on the danger of Nazism.

Now, more than 75 years later, Anthology Film Archives in New York City will present the restored version of “Kuhle Wampe” on June 17-18.

The DVD includes extensive bonus materials, including three short films discovered in German film archives: a newly restored edition of “How the Worker Lives” (1930), directed by Dudow; “Slatan Dudow – A Film About a Marxist Artist,” (East Germany, 1974), directed by Volker Koepp; and “Original Film Prologue” with Herbert Jhering, (East Germany, 1958) , also newly restored.

Other materials on the DVD include “Before & After – Restoring ‘Kuhle Wampe’” (2008); “At the Hairdresser’s with Brecht and Dudow” by film historian Ralf Schenk; “On ‘Kuhle Wampe,’” an essay by Marc Silberman; and “The Second Life of ‘Kuhle Wampe’” by Wolfgang Klaue.

Also available from the DEFA Film Library is the new DVD release of “Censored: Kuhle Wampe” (East Germany, 1975, directed by Christa Mühl and Werner Hecht), a detailed docudrama reconstruction of the censorship case against “Kuhle Wampe.”

The restoration of Kuhle Wampe was supported by the Goethe-Institut, OMNIMAGO GmbH, the International Brecht Society and the DEFA Film Library.

May 27, 2009.

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