NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Masters of Cinema Blu-ray (October 2026): Masters of Cinema. Beneath the Trees spreads the five films over three dual-layered Blu-ray discs. The Tinderbox has disc one to itself only sharing with it's English DUB'ed version bumped from SD, Snow White and Snow White and Rose Red share disc two, and The Frog King and The Robe are on disc three. All are 1080p from restorations by the DEFA Foundation, and despite the doubling up, every film gets a very high, consistent video bitrate, close to the format’s maximum. Compression is never an issue. The Tinderbox, Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red and The Frog King are framed at about 1.37:1, and The Robe in widescreen at about 2.35:1. The Tinderbox looks bold and slightly vintage, with saturated reds and the witch’s startling magenta hair. Close-ups are a touch soft, but grain is light and natural. Snow White is the most vivid of the five, with the stylized reds, purples and golds of the queen’s chambers really popping and impressive detail in faces and costumes, though it may look a shade digitized in places. Snow White and Rose Red has an earthier, naturalistic palette to suit its Harz locations, with more visible grain and a pleasingly film-like look. The Frog King has the heaviest grain of the four 1.37:1 films, typical of late-1980s East German stock, with warm skin tones and some inherent softness. The Robe is the weakest. Contrast is harsher, skin tones run pink and orange, and the color has a slightly dupey quality with occasional speckles. That’s not surprising for a film abandoned in 1961 and reconstructed decades later, and its greens and golds still have real punch. There are a couple of brief anomalies, such as a short stretch in Snow White where grain coarsens and color shifts toward red, and a moment in The Robe where color fades toward teal. They last a few seconds at most, likely where the original elements were compromised, and are not prevalent. Overall these are strong, grainy, film-like transfers whose limits come from the surviving elements rather than the authoring..

NOTE: We have added 140 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Masters of Cinema use linear PCM dual-mono tracks in the original German language. All five films have their original German soundtracks in linear PCM 2.0 channel at 24-bit. These are mono-era tracks, so there’s no separation to speak of, but dialogue is clear and the scores come through cleanly, with no significant hiss or damage. The Robe has a particularly unusual history, as its opening text screen explains. Only the complete picture negative and a few sound recordings survived the 1961 ban. After the fall of the Wall, the soundtrack was reconstructed from the screenplay, and the voices of actors who had died in the interim were replaced by others. What you hear is therefore largely a 1991 re-dub, which accounts for its slightly detached, post-synced quality. The Tinderbox also offers its English DUB, presented with its own much weaker, standard-definition-sourced picture. It’s smeary and edge-enhanced, with boosted blues and a tighter frame, and it’s included for nostalgia rather than quality. The Ally Pitts commentary on The Tinderbox is lossy Dolby Digital 2.0, and the Michael Brooke commentary on The Robe is 16-bit linear PCM. Masters of Cinema offer optional English subtitles for all five films (none for The Tinderbox DUB) on their two Region 'B'-locked Blu-rays.

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema Blu-ray  package is generous. There are two new audio commentaries: socialist cinema expert Ally Pitts, host of A Russian and Soviet Movie Podcast, on The Tinderbox, and film historian Michael Brooke, who is ideal for the troubled history of The Robe. In Two Kingdoms (An Enchanted Land), German cinema expert Rachel Palfreyman (A New History of German Cinema) spends almost 25 minutes on the place of folktales in German culture and how they were adapted on both sides of the border, West and East. Film and animation scholar Sam Summers’s Mirror, Mirror is a new video essay of over 20 minutes comparing DEFA’s two adaptations here, Snow White and Snow White and Rose Red. Three stop-motion shorts from the DEFA Studio for Animation Film round things out and fit the set’s themes perfectly. Herbert K. Schulz’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1956) runs almost 20 minutes and makes a fascinating companion to The Robe. Werner Krauße’s The Fisherman and his Wife (1975), from the Grimms, runs almost 1/4 hour. Katja Georgi’s Beauty and the Beast (1976), adapted from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, runs 25 minutes. The limited edition comes in a hardcase with new artwork by Carly A-F, plus reversible sleeves for each film. Its 60-page book has a new essay on the production design of DEFA’s folktales by Märchenfilme expert Corinna Alexandra Rader, notes on each film by DEFA historians Sebastian Heiduschke (East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History) and Qinna Shen (The Politics of Magic: Defa Fairy-Tale Films,) and the original stories behind all five films: Hans Christian Andersen’s for The Tinderbox and The Robe, and the Brothers Grimm’s for Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red and The Frog King.

Eureka's second volume of DEFA Märchenfilme is every bit as fascinating as the first. Drawing on Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, these five films share a distinctly East German sensibility: vain rulers, greedy courtiers and a moral that always favors ordinary working people, from the soldier of The Tinderbox, left with nothing but the friendship of the poor, to the miners who get their mine back in Snow White and Rose Red. The stars include Barbara Mehlan, Doris Weikow, Marianne Christina Schilling (Signals: A Space Adventure,) Julie Jurištová (Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea,) Katrin Martin and Jana Mattukat, whose princess in the late-GDR The Frog King must earn her prince rather than simply receive him. The crown jewel is Konrad Petzold's The Robe with Eva-Maria Hagen and Lore Frisch, an Andersen satire about a tyrant in a walled town that was shelved in the year the Berlin Wall went up and only reconstructed and premiered in 1991. Its history alone makes the set essential for anyone interested in DEFA. The restorations from the DEFA Foundation are mostly excellent, grainy and film-like, with very high bitrates and original German 24-bit linear PCM tracks. The Robe shows the limits of its surviving elements, but that is part of its story. Add two strong commentaries, informative new featurettes, three charming DEFA stop-motion shorts and a substantial book, and this is another superb Masters of Cinema Blu-ray package. Highly recommended!

Gary Tooze