"Actor: Alexander Granach"

• WESTFRONT 1918 & KAMERADSCHAFT (Two films by G.W Pabst) | Blu Ray | (24/07/2017) from £11.29   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl) made a flawless transition from silent to sound filmmaking with, Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft, a pair of strongly anti-war titles (Pabst himself was a prisoner of war for the duration of WWI) that combined elements of Expressionism and New Objectivity to stunning effect. In Westfront 1918, four infantrymen on the Western Front suffer the everyday hardships and insanity of trench warfare, and in Kameradschaft, a team of German miners risk their lives to rescue a team of French miners left trapped after an underground explosion. Sharing many thematic elements, as well as key cast and crew (most notably cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, M, Nosferatu, Der müde Tod), Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft represents a master director at the height of his powers, and The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present both these titles for the first time ever on Blu-ray in a special Dual Format edition. DUAL FORMAT EDITION FEATURES: Limited Edition O-card [First 2000 copies] Both films presented on Blu-ray in stunning 1080p Uncompressed PCM soundtrack for both titles (on the Blu-ray) Optional English subtitles Westfront 1918, an introduction by film scholar and author Jan-Christopher Horak Kameradschaft, an introduction by film scholar and author Jan-Christopher Horak PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by Philip Kemp, alongside rare archival imagery

• Nosferatu (1922) - Two-disc set | DVD | (22/01/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Nosferatu ... the name alone can chill the blood!". F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, released in 1922, was the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nearly 80 years on, it remains among the most potent and disturbing horror films ever made. The sight of Max Schreck's hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire rising creakily from his coffin still has the ability to chill the blood. Nor has the film dated. Murnau's elision of sex and disease lends it a surprisingly contemporary resonance. The director and his screenwriter Henrik Gaalen are true to the source material, but where most subsequent screen Draculas (whether Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella or Gary Oldman) were portrayed as cultured and aristocratic, Nosferatu is verminous and evil. (Whenever he appears, rats follow in his wake.)The film's full title--Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror)--reveals something of Murnau's intentions. Supremely stylised, it differs from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) or Ernst Lubitsch's films of the period in that it was not shot entirely in the studio. Murnau went out on location in his native Westphalia. As a counterpoint to the nightmarish world inhabited by Nosferatu, he used imagery of hills, clouds, trees and mountains (it is, after all, sunlight that destroys the vampire). It's not hard to spot the similarity between the gangsters in film noir hugging doorways or creeping up staircases with the image of Schreck's diabolic Nosferatu, bathed in shadow, sidling his way toward a new victim. Heavy chiaroscuro, oblique camera angles and jarring close-ups--the devices that crank up the tension in Val Lewton horror movies and edgy, urban thrillers such as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice--were all to be found first in Murnau's chilling masterpiece. --Geoffrey MacnabOn the DVD: This two-disc set gives you the choice of watching Nosferatu in either a sepia-tinted version or the original black & white. Both, however, feature the same modern electronic music score by Art Zoyd (at the movie's lavish 1922 premiere a live orchestra performed a newly composed, quasi-Wagnerian score by Hans Erdmann). The anonymous commentary track is a scholarly critical appraisal of the movie that exhaustively documents every aspect of it, from Murnau's aesthetic use of framing devices to the homoerotic subtext of the Hutter-Orlock relationship. In the "Nosferatour" featurette the movie's locations (principally, the Baltic cities of Wismer and Lubeck) are shown as they are today, and there is also a look at the original artwork that served as Murnau's inspiration. Two text features provide a brief history of the vampire myth from Vlad the Impaler onwards, as well as a discussion of the controversy caused by the movie's release. Appropriately, a trailer for the John Malkovich-Willem Dafoe movie Shadow of the Vampire, which imagines that "Max Schreck" actually was a vampire employed by Murnau in his obsessive pursuit of verisimilitude, is also included. --Mark Walker

• Nosferatu (Definitive Fully-restored version with original score) | DVD | (19/11/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  An iconic film of the German expressionist cinema and one of the most famous of all silent movies F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror continues to haunt - and indeed terrify - modern audiences with the unshakable power of its images. By teasing a host of occult atmospherics out of dilapidated set-pieces and innocuous real-world locations alike Murnau captured on celluloid the deeply-rooted elements of a waking nightmare and launched the signature ""Murnau-style"" that would change cinema history forever. In this first-ever screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula a simple real-estate transaction leads an intrepid businessman deep into the superstitious heart of Transylvania. There he encounters the otherworldly Count Orlok - portrayed by the legendary Max Schreck in a performance the very backstory of which has spawned its own mythology - who soon after embarks upon a crosscontinental voyage to take up residence in a distant new land... and establish his ambiguous dominion. As to whether the count's campaign against the plague-wracked populace erupts from satanic decree erotic compulsion or the simple impulse of survival - that remains perhaps the greatest mystery of all in this film that's like a blackout...

• Nosferatu | DVD | (16/11/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Nosferatu ... the name alone can chill the blood!". F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, released in 1922, was the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nearly 80 years on, it remains among the most potent and disturbing horror films ever made. The sight of Max Schreck's hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire rising creakily from his coffin still has the ability to chill the blood. Nor has the film dated. Murnau's elision of sex and disease lends it a surprisingly contemporary resonance. The director and his screenwriter Henrik Gaalen are true to the source material, but where most subsequent screen Draculas (whether Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella or Gary Oldman) were portrayed as cultured and aristocratic, Nosferatu is verminous and evil. (Whenever he appears, rats follow in his wake.)The film's full title--Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror)--reveals something of Murnau's intentions. Supremely stylised, it differs from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) or Ernst Lubitsch's films of the period in that it was not shot entirely in the studio. Murnau went out on location in his native Westphalia. As a counterpoint to the nightmarish world inhabited by Nosferatu, he used imagery of hills, clouds, trees and mountains (it is, after all, sunlight that destroys the vampire). It's not hard to spot the similarity between the gangsters in film noir hugging doorways or creeping up staircases with the image of Schreck's diabolic Nosferatu, bathed in shadow, sidling his way toward a new victim. Heavy chiaroscuro, oblique camera angles and jarring close-ups--the devices that crank up the tension in Val Lewton horror movies and edgy, urban thrillers such as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice--were all to be found first in Murnau's chilling masterpiece. --Geoffrey Macnab

• Hangmen Also Die | DVD | (13/02/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  The shot heard 'round the world! Fritz Lang one of the masters of the German expressionist cinema turns his sinister imagination and shadowy techniques to a web like take of wartime espionage in Hangmen Also Die. Set in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation the film depicts an Eastern Europe populated by spies traitors and revolutionaries' a deadly funhouse of political intrigue in which every personal encounter brings with it the threat of betrayal. Pur

• Nosferatu | DVD | (05/10/2009) from £9.35   |  Saving you £0.64 (6.84%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Count Orlok's move to Wisburg and brings the plague this reveals his connection to the Realtor Thomas Hutter and the Count's obsession with Hutter's wife Ellen - the only one with the power to end the evil.

• Nosferatu | DVD | (06/12/2004) from £10.07   |  Saving you £9.18 (104.20%)   |  RRP £17.99

  This DVD combines the original Dracula film Nosferatu (1922) enhanced by a Gothic industrial soundtrack from some of artists that were directly influenced by F.W. Murnau's Classic vampire film. An Estate Agent's Clerk (Gustav Von Wangenheim) in the city of Bremen leaves his bride (Greta Schroeder) to conduct business in the distant Carpathian mountains with an eccentric client named Graf Orlok (Max Schrek). During a long and hazardous journey the closer he gets to his destination the more terrified are the people he meets. What he finds when he reached Orlok's sinister castle is enough to make the flesh of the most devoted horror fan creep. Featuring music by: Electric Hellfire Club Christian Death Rozz Williams and more...

• Nosferatu | DVD | (21/01/2002) from £13.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (42.89%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Made in 1922, FW Murnau's Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu--A Symphony of Horrors is an unofficial but reasonably faithful condensation of parts of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Alongside Metropolis (1926) it is one of the very few European features from the 1920s that is still regularly shown, and apart from being the first great horror film it laid the foundations of the vampire genre to the present day. Wearing astonishing rodent-like make-up Max Schreck cuts such an iconic figure as the undead Count that the 2001 comedy-horror Shadow of the Vampire suggested he wasn't acting at all! Although Murnau's film was revolutionary and technically adventurous for the time, a modern audience will have to make some allowances for the fact the movie now seems both dated and technically primitive: Murnau's stylised lighting and camera effects have been endlessly imitated and improved upon since, and even its greatest defenders generally admit the film barely raises a shudder, let alone a full-blooded scare. Nevertheless, Nosferatu holds a strange dreamlike grip on the imagination and its incalculable influence on fantasy and horror cinema means this is essential viewing for anyone seriously interested in the development of motion picture art. On the DVD: Presented in Academy at 1.37:1 and with James Bernard's new orchestral score in well-recorded stereo Nosferatu looks and sounds as good as it has in decades. Bernard, composer of Hammer's Dracula (1958) among others, has written a superior score that captures the film's subtitle, "A Symphony of Horrors", and truly brings the images alive in a way previous scores have not. This restored version presents for the first time on video or DVD the blue and brown tints of the original cinema prints and replicates the original hand-designed inter-title cards which with their distinctive designs make the film much more of a compete visual experience. More importantly, this DVD offers approximately another quarter of an hour of material over the usually distributed American version. However, the restoration has not extended to repairing the many lines, scratches, variations in brilliance and other evidence of print damage present throughout. The film is perfectly watchable, being very much what one would expect from the early 1920s. There are text biographies and notes on Murnau and James Bernard, DVD-ROM material on the restoration of the print and a perceptive 23-minute discussion by film expert Christopher Frayling on many aspects of the movie. --Gary S Dalkin