Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.
At the height of Reign of Terror Maximilien Robespierre orchestrates the trial and execution of several of his fellow leading French revolutionaries including Georges Danton.
Nazi historical drama about Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg and his treasurer Süß Oppenheimer.
In 1921, we follow two women - Marie and Grete - from the same poor Viennese neighborhood, as they try to better the lives of themselves and their families during the period of Austrian postwar hyperinflation.
For Balduin, going out to beer parties with his fellow students and fighting out disputes at the tip of the sword have lost their charms. He wants to find love; but how would he, a penniless student, ever dare looking up to any woman worth of loving? Absorbed in his dreary thoughts and indifferent to the advances of Lyduschka, Balduin is unexpectedly offered a fortune by the mysterious money-lender Scapinelli - but on a strange condition...
A poet is hired by the owner of a wax museum in a circus to write tales about Harun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. While writing, the poet and the daughter of the owner, Eva, fantasize the fantastic stories and fall in love for each other.
Count Moffat becomes infatuated with Nana, a presumptuous stage actress, vulgar, hypocritical and promiscuous, willing to do anything to succeed.
In this convoluted melodrama, an elderly thespian falls for a rising young starlet. He admits his love for her and then announces that he will retire. The young woman pretends she loves him too, but her real motive is to give her struggling lover, also an aspiring actor, a break.
Twenty years ago, the Count of Groningen left his ancestral castle. Since then, it is said to be haunted. Shortly before his escape from the dark walls, the Count had left his newborn child to the care of the administrator and farmer Grödner. The nasty Grödner had already swapped his own child Veronika with the Count's in the cradle, probably because he hoped to one day gain possession of the castle.
Every Friday the 13th, a member of the Eulenstein family dies. The son of the most recent victim hires a detective to investigate.
All is not well in the Mollheim home. The elder Mollheim decides to marry off his daughter with an unusually large dowry, in exchange for a rare Chinese idol. The daughter of the house, being opposed to the idea, decides to hire a private detective to get to the bottom of it. The detective doesn't get far before the idol is stolen and its owner is murdered.
A young man shows his millionaire grandfather a film based on Molière's play "Tartuffe" in order to expose the old man's hypocritical governess who covets the young man's inheritance.
When farmer Rog dies, his eldest Peter takes over the farm while his youngest Johannes is determined for a better life: he becomes secretary to Count Rudenberg and starts courting his daughter Gerda. When he learns that the Count, who is terminally ill, has bequeathed a piece of land under which lies a petroleum field to his second wife, he courts her instead.
Scientist Martin Fellmann is tormented by an irrational fear of knives and the irresistible compulsion to murder his wife. Driven to the brink of madness by fantastic nightmares, he encounters a psychoanalyst who offers to treat the perplexing malady.
Botto the Clown is in love with the much younger Blanche but she is in love with the handsome daredevil acrobate Andre.
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.
A woman with a troubled past connects with two refugees while working at a homeless camp after World War II.
The story of the Renaissance-era Swiss physician, alchemist and astrologer Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known to the world as Paracelsus.
This movie, directed by Richard Oswald, is based on the operetta "Les contes de Hoffmann" by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), which is a genial musical potpourri from various short stories and novels by the Prussian writer, composer, painter, lawyer and judge E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). While Hoffmann's literary work was longtime considered to be merely fantastical, it was finally researched, in the last years, according to its metaphysical background. Characteristic for Hoffmann's work is his life-long fight against rationalism and for the revelation of nature morte, culminating mostly in carnival-like scenes anticipating literary techniques only described in the works of Bachtin and Bachelard.
On the surface a straightforward tale of the search for a buried treasure, the film is a textbook example of German expressionism, with the passions of the protagonists conveyed as much through symbolism as action.
The story of General Yorck von Wartenburg, a commander in the army of Prussian King Wilhelm, who defied the king's orders for the Prussian army to join Napoleon in his invason of Russia.
German chancellor Otto von Bismarck promises the dying emperor Wilhelm I. to be loyal to his grandson. But the gap between young Kaiser Wilhelm II. and old Bismarck is rapidly widening. It soon appears that an era is coming to an end.
In order to impress a socially superior woman with money, an unsuccessful insurance agent commits sophisticated fraud: he concludes contracts with fictitious people and collects the insurance sums after their "death". However, his first fictional persona is his downfall.
On New Year′s Eve 1871 Annelie is born – 15 minutes too late, since her parents had calculated her birth to be exactly at midnight. These 15 minutes will again and again become the girl′s fate.
A working-class couple with four children live in extreme poverty in a rear building. When the woman becomes pregnant again, she goes to a young doctor and asks him to terminate the pregnancy, as the child would be too much of a burden for her. The doctor refuses to perform the procedure because it is against the law, so she has the abortion herself and dies in the process. The public prosecutor has the man arrested and the four children are left to fend for themselves. The prosecutor's fiancée, a young teacher, lives in the front building. When she is raped and becomes pregnant in her apartment by the porter's wife's mentally disturbed son, the doctor, deeply affected by the case of the working-class couple, performs an illegal abortion on the teacher and confronts the public prosecutor with the case of his own fiancée. The public prosecutor resigns because he can no longer reconcile his office with his conscience.
Georg Bertrand, a gambling addict and the son of a wealthy landowner, is kicked out of his family home. The director of a travelling circus takes him in. In time, Georg marries the director's daughter and himself becomes the director. Georg's brother visits the circus and recognizes him. Georg must now decide whether to stay with the circus or return to the family that kicked him out.
The film tells the story of Ivan Mazeppa, a Ukrainian page at the Polish court who has an affair with the young wife of a much older count. Outraged when he learns of the incident, the nobleman has Mazeppa tied naked to a wild horse which is then released into the wilderness. The bulk of the poem describes the long hazardous journey during which Mazeppa almost dies twice but ultimately survives and returns to his native Ukraine.
Napoleon at Saint Helena (German: Napoleon auf Sankt Helena) is a 1929 German silent historical film directed by Lupu Pick and starring Werner Krauss, Hanna Ralph and Albert Bassermann. The film depicts the final years of Napoleon between 1815 and 1821 during his period of exile on the British Atlantic island of Saint Helena following his defeat at Waterloo.
An extremely jealous artist slips into a monkey costume and kills all those men who come too close to his wife, another artist.
Austrian television version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart from 1958.
Hedwig and Lola, two sisters of opposite temperaments, have their lives upended in when Lola decides to pursue prostitution and Hedwig is forced into it.
An adaptation of the Gerhart Hauptmann play of the same name. A young farmer's daughter is used and abused by the men in her life.
Ferenc life seems to be going great but after a dinner with his employer and his guest at which they discuss a unsolved murder case everything he has achieved begins to slip away from him. He plan to escape with his lover Czenczi but madness and an grisly end await them.
The everyday lives of a poverty-stricken railway trackman, his wife and daughter in a remote, isolated house in a winter landscape. One day, they receive a telegram announcing the arrival of the section inspector, who is to live with the family. After his arrival, a downward spiral begins.
The murderer “Boss” Huller – after having spent ten years in prison – breaks his silence to tell the warden his story.
A woman loses her undergarments in public. Chaos ensues.
a silent movie by Robert Wiene
Based on Shakespeare's play: The treacherous Iago plans to ruin the life of Othello by provoking him to jealousy.
The married Lady Emma Hamilton has an ill fated romance with Admiral Horatio Nelson.
The Dealer from Amsterdam (German: Der Trödler von Amsterdam) is a 1925 German silent film directed by Victor Janson and starring Werner Krauss, Hilde Hildebrand and Harry Hardt. It was made by the German subsidiary of the Fox Film Company.
Baruch Mayer, son of an orthodox rabbi from a poor shtetl in Galizia, decides to break with the family tradition and leave the shtetl to become an actor.
"Raffke" was a war profiteer, shifter, the white-collar criminal, who came to wealth with not very clean methods in a short time and also likes to show it. And this film tells the story of Raffke's daughter Lilli, who, instead of marrying the Baron chosen by the father of vanity, marries a simple employee who is about to perish.
Explores the ethics of a Berlin street during the Weimar era and the struggle for survival in a shady environment.
The film is an adaptation of the 1834 play by Alfred de Musset, On ne badine pas avec l'amour. The film is considered to be a lost film.
Directed by Aleksandr Razumnyj.
From the director of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, this is the Passion embedded in a contemporary story. An anarchist jailed for an attempted assassination is told the Passion story by the prison chaplain.
The film "Der Kaufmann von Venedig" ( The Jew Of Mestri ) was written, produced and directed by Peter Paul Felner in the silent year of 1923 and is a free adaptation of "Merchant of Venice" written by Herr William Shakespeare. It is an elegant and expensive German film production that was shot on location in beautiful and decadent Venice with some of the most important Teutonic actors of the time: Henny Porten, Harry Liedtke und Werner Krauss and even the mysterious Max Schreck.
Prince Karl Heinz enjoys his carefree life as a student in Heidelberg. He falls in love with the beautiful Käthe and everything is fine and dandy till his father is reported very ill.
Escape from the Golden Dungeon is the second part of the two-part silent movie Christian Wahnschaffe.
In China, Professor Gesellius has completed his long research on the many uses of opium. When he is about to return home, he hears about a special variety that produces fabulous sensations because of the way it is made, but can also cause the total destruction of the mind and body of the person who consumes it.
Based on several medieval mystery plays, including the late 15th-century English morality play "Everyman". The premise is that the good and evil deeds of one's life will be tallied by God after death, as in a ledger book. The drama is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind.
Based on archive holdings from nine decades, director Hannes Rossacher has created a complete Jedermann performance and thus a unique cultural-historical puzzle from Alexander Moissi to Nicholas Ofczarek. The success story of the phenomenon "Everyman" is told in an unprecedented way.
A traumatized man returning home from war discovers that his wife has slipped into the underclass.
The only surviving excerpt of a documentary on film production in Weimar Germany, featuring the different personalities of several famous directors of the era at work on the set including Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and E.A. Dupont.
Adaptation of Ibsen's play Vildanden.
A tinted silent film about a murder plot.
Silent movie adaptation of Lessing's play. Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, it describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin and the (initially anonymous) Templar bridge their gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Dida Ibsen, daughter of impoverished farmers, has, according to her father's will, to marry the main creditor. But she refuses and decides to live with a married man as a mistress, till he gets his divorce. In the town she opens a restaurant with the money of her wealthy lover, from whom she soon gets pregnant, but their dreams of marriage fail, his wife refuses the divorce. After a while, she decides to marry one of the regular guests at her restaurant, van Galen, who spent quite some time in the tropics and because of this is at the brink of madness. Shortly after the marriage his condition worsens and life becomes hell for Dida.
A young unemployed man gets a job as a private secretary by chance. A good salary, a first-class apartment - but things are not going right in his new residence. Notes warn him, a beautiful woman appears in the mirror, valuable documents disappear from the tightly locked safe.
After her brother is sent to Siberia, Sonja heads to Moscow to participate in a revolution.
In this apparently lost film, a beautiful dancer's sexual allure is used by an evil cripple to entice men to their deaths. Falling in love with one of the potential victims, she is told by the cripple that he will set her free if her lover, actually a murderer himself, survives and escapes a bizarre labyrinthe which runs beneath the cripple's house.
The daughter of a revolutionary runs away with a married prince.
Harlander, a media mogul and war profiteer, has been told that he has six months before his sanity will leave him completely. He hires a young nurse, and decides to spend all his money before his six months are up.
A couple are at the theatre with a playwright friend. At the end of the play the jealous husband strangles his wife to death. When the play ends, the man talks to his friend about such a nonsensical finale, telling the author that no man with any sense ever gets jealous enough to choke his wife in these modern times. The playwright decides to test this supposedly perfect couple about their happy feelings for each other.
An abandoned baby is saved by a river god. Now aged 20, she yearns to see the world outside the water.
Tamara becomes addicted to cocaine but hides from her daughter by moving in with the dealer Mangol. The father tells his daughter that her mother has died, but years later the daughter rediscovers her mother appearing on stage. Mangol pursues the daughter, but Tamara intervenes before dying amongst family members.
A melodrama about a virtuous wife unjustly abandoned by her husband, who get him back with the help of a Hindu mystic.
A Saracen sultan's disguised son loves an amnesiac Moslem princess.
A tyrannical landowner terrorizes his wife and seduces the daughter of one of his employees.
A documentary about the era of classic monster movies that were made at Universal Studios during the 1930s and 1940s.
The Merry Farmer is based on the 1907 operetta of the same name.
Bruce Wilton, middle-aged, rich and famous, as a producer, has been rejected by Ada von Ruyt, a revue star. Finding an affection is developing between her and Longard, now down and out, he arranges to send the man to South America with a touring company. But again rejected by the woman he loves, he causes her to be supplanted by a rival, and in a passion dismisses his secretary, her old friend. The man, who has suffered much, shoots him. Longard, thinking Ada has fired the shot, attempts to take the blame, but the murderer commits suicide.