"Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst"

• Diary of a Lost Girl | Blu Ray | (24/11/2014) from £12.49   |  Saving you £7.50 (60.05%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A masterwork of the German silent cinema whose reputation has only increased over time Diary of a Lost Girl [Tagebuch einer Verlorenen] traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora’s Box [Die Büchse der Pandora]. Brooks plays Thymian Henning an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her father’s pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp the degenerate villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis Spione and Frau im Mond). After Thymian gives birth to his child and rejects her family’s expectations for marriage the baby is stripped from her care and Thymian enters a purgatorial reform school that seems less an institute of higher learning than a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress’s sadistic sexual fantasies. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present this glorious restoration of an iconic German film for the first time anywhere on Blu-ray. Special Features New high-definition 1080p presentation of the film on the Blu-ray Original German intertitles with optional English subtitles Piano score of Javier Pérez de Aspeitia New and exclusive video essay by filmmaker and critic David Cairns 40-PAGE BOOKLET including writing by Louise Brooks Lotte Eisner Louelle Interim Craig Keller and R. Dixon Smith

• Pandora's Box | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £17.68   |  Saving you £2.31 (13.07%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Made at the very end of the silent era, Pandora's Box is one of the last flowerings of German cinema's greatest decade. It also marked the highpoint of two careers: Austrian director GW Pabst and American actress Louise Brooks. A merge of two linked plays by the decadent German playwright Frank Wedekind, it's the story of Lulu, the archetypal femme fatale (the same plays served as source for Alban Berg's masterly 1935 opera). At once sensual and innocent, a force of uninhibited sexuality, Lulu brings ruin on all her lovers both male and female, and ultimately upon herself. Hollywood never knew what to do with Brooks who, with her fierce intelligence and her open delight in sex, refused to play the coy flappers then in fashion. In Pabst, whose genius, she wrote, "lay in getting to the heart of a person", she found the director she needed, and he brought out her a screen persona with a depth of eroticism that's still breathtaking to see. The film features some of the finest German acting talent of the period--Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer--but it's Brooks' luminous performance that rivets the eye and makes her a great screen icon. Though the action is nominally set in the late-19th century--Lulu ends up in a shadowy London where she encounters Jack the Ripper--Pandora's Box breathes the gamey air of the Weimar Republic, vividly captured by Günther Krampf's pungent photography. This release runs well over two hours and includes, for the first time in decades, over 30 minutes of cut footage, restoring the film to something very close to Pabst's original masterpiece. On the DVD: Pandora's Box on DVD is a clean, crisp transfer in the classic 4:3 ratio, and the mono soundtrack brings out all the detail of Peer Rubens' Kurt Weill-inflected score, stylishly performed by the Kontraste Ensemble. Dialogue intertitles can be read in either English or German. We also get an outstanding 60-minute documentary, Looking for Lulu, about Brooks' life and career: warmly narrated by Shirley MacLaine, it features excerpts from an interview with Brooks from 1976. --Philip Kemp

• The Threepenny Opera | DVD | (06/12/2004) from £7.66   |  Saving you £12.33 (160.97%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The original French and German versions of this Brecht-Weill musical are included with subtitles - 'Die Dreigroschenoper' and 'L'Opera De Quat' Sous'. Set in a dreamlike Victorian London this musical tells the story of Mack the Knife and Polly Peachum.

• Chaliapin - the Adventures of Don Quixote (1933) | DVD | (03/07/2006) from £20.02   |  Saving you £2.97 (14.84%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Chaliapin - The Adventures Of Don Quixote (1933)