WWI FILM COLLECTION: 4 DVD BOX SET

Four original incredibly moving black and white DEFA feature films: The Kaiser's Lakey, The Girls In Gingham, Farewell and When Martin Was Fourteen. The East German Film Company founded in 1946 DEFA recorded the suffering of working people, the misery of life in factories and poor accommodation, the growing organisation of resistance to warmongers and profiteers, as well as the battle for a better world, and these are the topics of this extraordinary film collection. An industrialist's son, the hero of this film, is a cowardly and conventional career opportunist. He seeks the recognition of all above him, denounces competitors, and becomes the despot of both his inherited paper factory and his own family. The focal point of The Girls in Gingham is Guste, who as a maid has had to look after her lords and ladies. Her husband is conscripted, and she has to support the whole family by toiling as a hand-grenade maker. The film is a cinematographic journey through the empire, war, economic crisis, the rise of Nazi Fascism and into a further even crueller WW2. Farewell is also set in 1914 when many young men euphorically volunteered to go and fight in the First World War. Hans Gastl does not become a soldier. He is against the war and his bourgeois parental upbringing and the film recounts in flash-back form the story of his tender love to the housemaid, a love that is brutally repressed by his father, his time in a boarding school for badly behaved children, his love for a former prostitute with a fateful end, and his friendship with a working-class boy. When Martin Was Fourteen is set in March 1920 at the time of the Kapp Putsch in Germany. Reich Army units march on Berlin to create a military regime and in his village, 14 year old Martin discovers a secret store of weapons that a landowner has hidden for the organisers of the Putsch. He and a friend organise a strike but as the approaching soldiers are to keep the village inhabitants down, the boys manage to courageously fight their way through the rebellious faction in the city so that the weapons end up in the right hands. The film accurately and excitingly represents both youth and this part of history. Four DVDs, running time 400 minutes approx.