Caroline Champetier's extraordinary documentary is structured around an encounter with one of the pre-eminent cinematographers of the previous generation. Bruno Nuytten was widely celebrated for his work with directors such as Marguerite Duras, Andrzej Żuławski, André Téchiné, and Jean-Luc Godard, directed four films of his own, and then disappeared from cinema. Nuytten/Film explores the reasons why and provides unique insights into the cinematographic process and the nature of image-making.

Director Nobuhiro Suwa's most celebrated film grapples with the unrepresentable, the dropping of the atomic bomb on his native Hiroshima. Both before and behind the camera, Suwa attempts to respond to both the extant documentary material and to Alain Resnais's iconic memory film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Cinematographer Caroline Champetier created some of the deepest, most voluptuous blacks of her career in the film, and they are movingly connected to both the act of filming and the challenges of visual perception.

An "appendix" to the then-ongoing Histoire(s) du cinéma project (1988-1998), The Children Play Russian is a video essay made just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By juxtaposing and superimposing fragments from Russian and Soviet films with contemporary footage shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, Godard constructs a contrapuntal meditation on lost utopias, the relationship between montage and icons, and the nature of the cinematic image.

Cinematic pioneer Léonce Perret worked in many genres and was most famous in the early 1910s for his comedies, but The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador demonstrates his keen grasp of crime and melodrama. The central gambit is that the cinematograph can be a vehicle for psychotherapy and the awakening of repressed memories, and this is reinforced through subtle repetitions of gesture, composition, and lighting. Perret and cinematographer Georges Specht shot as much of the film as possible on location in Finistère, and they transform the rocky Breton seascape into an integral part of the psychological drama.

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier's rigor, precision, and mastery of light and composition have made her a creative partner to four generations of eminent filmmakers, including Leos Carax, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Nobuhiro Suwa, Arnaud Desplechin, Xavier Beauvois, Claude Lanzmann, Philippe Garrel, and above all Jean-Luc Godard.

Syberberg's first film in three decades, Demmin Cantos is one of his most surprising. Characteristically dense and ambitious, it is also centripetal in structure and unusually specific geographically. The Western Pomeranian town of Demmin was the site of shocking events during the final week of the Second World War, and the film includes the personal accounts of the town's residents. Both an act of mourning and revival, Demmin Cantos is a prismatic reflection upon the paradoxes of history.

The most underseen of Syberberg's features, A Dream, What Else? is a meditation on the dissolution of historical Prussia after the Second World War. Syberberg combines texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Goethe, and Euripides with extracts from the history of German music and new forms of projected photography. As in The Night (1985), the speech and expressions of actress Edith Clever give the film unique gravitas. Presented with new English subtitles.

A monumental reinterpretation of texts by writers such as Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin, The Night shares with Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977) and Parsifal (1982) a deep interest in time, scale, and ritual. The film marks a decisive turn in Syberberg's work, a clearing away of studio technology and a renewed concentration on gesture and light. Presented in five parts with newly updated English subtitles.

Hitler, a Film from Germany is the most ambitious film of the postwar German cinema. Part Dantean pilgrimage and part Freudian mourning work, it is a seven-hour examination of the impact of Adolf Hitler. Through a unique montage combination of speech, projected imagery, and music, it explores the interrelationship between cinema and the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. This version has the narration in German with optional English subtitles. Premiere in America, a 1980 documentary from the time of the film's New York premiere, is available as a supplement.

Hitler, a Film from Germany is the most ambitious film of the postwar German cinema. Part Dantean pilgrimage and part Freudian mourning work, it is a seven-hour examination of the impact of Adolf Hitler. Through a unique montage combination of speech, projected imagery, and music, it explores the interrelationship between cinema and the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. The film was a West German-French-British coproduction, and this version has the narration in English. Subtitles are optional for German-language sections. Premiere in America, a 1980 documentary from the time of the film's New York premiere, is available as a supplement.

Karl May, the second part of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "German trilogy," explores the travel and adventure fantasies of the most popular German writer of the 19th century. As always in Syberberg's work, the music of Richard Wagner and the unreconciled ghosts of the 1930s and 1940s loom large. Appropriately, May is played by the prolific director Helmut Käutner, who made some of the most iconic German romances of the 1940s.

The first part of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "German Trilogy," Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972) reinvents the imaginative universe of the eponymous king of Bavaria, creator of extravagant castles and patron of Richard Wagner. Beginning with this film, Syberberg introduced a special system of front and rear projection. Syberberg's juxtapositions developed both montage and Surrealist collage in new directions, and the treatment of images opens new perspectives on German history and dreams.

The Confessions of Winifred Wagner is the greatest and most monumental of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's early documentaries. As in Romy, Portrait of a Face (1965), Syberberg explores the complex relationship between the construction of cinematic star images, mythologizing narratives, and the revelation of human personality. Epic and bracingly direct, it provides unique insights into the arc of German music and German history. In German with English Subtitles.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg first established his reputation as a creator of innovative documentaries. Disarmingly intimate, this hour-long portrait of the iconic German star Romy Schneider exemplifies Syberberg's fascination with the expressive possibilities of cinematic portraiture, especially the use of the camera to capture gestures and faces in flux. Subtitles available.

Parsifal (1882), Richard Wagner's enigmatic final opera, was intended for performance only at the specially designed Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany. Made to commemorate its centenary, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal (1982) is a paradoxical film. A triumph of stereo sound recording that uses all the resources of studio shooting and technology, it is a grand attempt at spiritual reunification with the fractured past. Syberberg attempts to fuse the approaches of Wagner and Bertolt Brecht, while reinventing the staging and lighting strategies made famous by German Expressionism. Acknowledging the historical fissure separating the 1980s from the silent era, Syberberg's Parsifal is a Grail quest linked to the structure of cinema itself.

Journey deep into the forest of symbols and the cave of memory through sustained conversations about history, poetry, painting, music, and myth in our longest portrait film, and discover the key works of the most ambitious and challenging postwar German filmmaker.

Andrzej Wajda’s decision to end his iconic Man of Marble (1977) in the Baltic port city of Gdańsk was propitious because this was the very place where Solidarity later emerged. Man of Iron is a documentary/fiction hybrid about its formation. One of Wajda’s boldest experiments, the film’s style and tone developed in tandem with the events of August 1980. Never oblivious to the ease with which footage can be misappropriated, Wajda was also wise enough to let the documentary side take over in the extraordinary final sequences.

Man of Marble (1977) is the most important cinematic deconstruction of the socialist realist orthodoxy mandated for all artists working in any medium in the Soviet sphere from 1934 until the Thaw after Joseph Stalin's death (1953-1964). Director Andrzej Wajda’s film moves back and forth between the 1950s and the transformative 1970s as the brash and ambitious female protagonist mounts an investigation into the recent past. Generational shifts are emphasized through angular compositions, observational montage, costuming, and performance, and Wajda suggests that authentic glimpses of reality are accessible only through the process of searching.

The Birch Wood is an intimate adaptation of a 1932 short story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Iwaszkiewicz's stories are best known for their Chekhovian realism, but director Andrzej Wajda took the opportunity to rework a series of motifs from the paintings of the preeminent Polish Symbolist Jacek Malczewski. By combining elegant camera movements with surprising uses of the zoom lens, Wajda seamlessly oscillates between these two modes, and transforms this depiction of early twentieth century country life into a moving exploration of human transience.