Eureka! … Since 1981

Eureka! Classics | Fritz Lang. One of the greatest directors of the silent-film era and the sound age alike. An inventor of cinematic form. An expressionist magician capable of summoning unforgettable images from abstract emotional states — fear, elation, jealousy, paranoia, insanity. Lang’s cinema is the sublimation of one man’s world-view, informed by a continent gone mad, and by his own ruminations on the nature, and future, of mankind.

This collection contains five of the filmmaker’s most legendary works. In the 4-1/2 hour Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Lang initiates the saga of villainous mastermind Dr. Mabuse, when the wicked genius first exerts his lethal grip on Weimar Berlin’s criminal demimonde. The “underworld” is given literal shape in the subterranean slave-works of Metropolis, Lang’s staggeringly influential sci-fi potboiler — and probably the director’s most famous film.

With Spione, dystopia fragments into duplicity, paranoia, and unhinged eroticism in a sprawling espionage epic that itself threatens to “break down,“ and prefigures Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in the process.

Lang’s earliest sound film, M charts the intersecting courses of the police bureau and a group of gangster vigilantes as the two groups, separate but in tandem, hunt down a child-murderer on the loose. Otto Wernicke reprises his role as M’s epicure police-commissioner Lohmann in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a continuation of the tale of the omniscient criminal genius eleven years on from The Gambler. Lang’s final German film until the late Fifties is at once an hypnotic, hallucinatory, tour de force vision of oppression and society in collapse, and an embittered farewell to a homeland by then in thrall to the Nazi masterplan.

The five films in this set are visceral explorations of mankind’s struggles inside, and against, the modern world and its mutating systems of dehumanisation. They exemplify a body of work that continually challenged the status quo and, with its every expression, issued an alarm-call versus complacency.

Eureka! are proud to present these five films in their recently restored forms, spread across eight discs, and supplemented with a plethora of extras.