The Munich Film Archive, in the

Munich Stadtmuseum The Munich Stadtmuseum (German: "Münchner Stadtmuseum") or Munich City Museum, is the city museum of Munich. It was founded in 1888 by Ernst von Destouches. It is located in the former municipal arsenal and stables, both buildings of the late ...

, is one of eight film museums in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. It has no showrooms and is limited to screening the films in a single cinema with 165 seats, as well as collecting, archiving, and restoring film copies. All analog and digital formats (except

70mm 70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is wid ...

) can be shown.

History

The Film Museum was founded in late 1963 as a department of the Munich Stadtmuseum and holds an extensive collection of copies of historical films. Which are also restored and copied locally. Special focus is placed on the collection of German

silent film A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, w ...

s, the work of the German film immigrants from the

Nazism Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was fre ...

period, the

New German Cinema New German Cinema () is a period in Cinema of Germany, West German cinema which lasted from 1962 to 1982, in which a new generation of directors emerged who, working with low budgets, and influenced by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, ...

, as well as the Munich film history (e.g.

Karl Valentin Karl Valentin (, born Valentin Ludwig Fey; 4 June 1882 – 9 February 1948) was a Bavarian comedian. He had significant influence on German Weimar culture. Valentin starred in many silent films in the 1920s, and was sometimes called the "Cha ...

Herbert Achternbusch Herbert Achternbusch ( Schild; 23 November 1938 – 10 January 2022) was a German film director, writer and painter. He began as a writer of avant-garde prose, such as the novel ''Die Alexanderschlacht'', before turning to low-budget films. He h ...

, documentary material about Munich). As

cinematheque A cinematheque is an archive of films and film-related objects with an exhibition venue. Similarly to a book library (bibliothèque in French), a cinematheque is responsible for preserving and making available to the public film heritage. Typically ...

, the museum makes its collection accessible to public and research. The in-house cinema - one of the first municipal theaters of the Federal Republic of Germany - is one of the few places in Germany, in which full historical-film retrospectives and silent films with live musical accompaniment are regularly presented. The museum does not have a permanent exhibition. Yearlong efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to attain a second cinema and an appreciation of the cinema through separation from the Munich Stadtmuseum and a renaming to the ''Bavarian Film Museum'' were unsuccessful. The Munich Film Museum has been pioneering work in the restoration of films since the 1970s. The then head,

Enno Patalas Enno Patalas (15 October 1929, in Quakenbrück – 7 August 2018, in Munich) was a German film historian, collector, and expert film preservationist. A former head of the Munich Film Museum (1973–1994), his restorations include films such as ' ...

, began with the restoration of German silent films from directors such as

Fritz Lang Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (; December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976), better known as Fritz Lang (), was an Austrian-born film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States.Obituary ''Variety Obituari ...

Ernst Lubitsch Ernst Lubitsch (; ; January 29, 1892November 30, 1947) was a German-born American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; a ...

, G.W. Pabst or

F. W. Murnau Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe; December 28, 1888March 11, 1931) was a German film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is regarded as one of cinema's most influential filmmakers for his work in the silent era. An e ...

. Patalas undertook pianist Aljoscha Zimmermann as the cinema pianist. Zimmermann researched for the original scores or wrote accompanying music. The film museum houses the cinematic works of filmmakers, who as frontier workers cannot be assigned a national film archive, such as

Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American director, actor, writer, producer, and magician who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is among the greatest and most influential film ...

Thomas Harlan Thomas Christoph Harlan (19 February 1929 – 16 October 2010) was a German author and director of French-language films. Life and work Harlan was the son of director Veit Harlan and the actress Hilde Körber. He was born and raised in Berlin. ...

, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Nicolas Humbert,

Werner Schroeter Werner Schroeter (7 April 1945 – 12 April 2010) was a cinema of Germany, German film director, screenwriter, and opera director known for his stylistic excess. Schroeter was cited by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as an influence both on his own work ...

and

Wim Wenders Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (; born 14 August 1945) is a German filmmaker and photographer, who is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among the honors he has received are prizes from the Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, Venice International Film ...

. Since 1995, the museum possesses the estates of

, in particular to the materials of unfinished films. The museum was given the Welles estates from his last companion

Oja Kodar Oja Kodar ( ; born Olga Palinkaš; 1941) is a Croatian actress, screenwriter and director known as Orson Welles's romantic partner and mistress during the later years of his life. Personal life Olga Palinkaš (spelled in Hungarian Pálinkás) wa ...

. In 2006, the museum published its reconstructions and restorations on DVD in the ''Edition Filmmuseum''. The film museum is, since 2012, co-organizer of the annual film screenings of

Filmfest München The Munich International Film Festival () is the largest summer film festival in Germany and second only in size and importance to the Berlinale. It has been held annually since 1983 and takes place in late June or early July. It presents fe ...

and the International Festival of the

University of Television and Film Munich The University of Television and Film Munich (German: Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, short: HFF Munich) is a publicly funded film school in Munich, Germany. The school was established in 1966 by decree of the Bavarian government. T ...

. The museum is co-organizer of the Internationale Stummfilmtage (International Silent Film Festival) in

Bonn Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

and displays a selection of the program later in Munich.

Literature

Chris Dercon Chris Dercon (born 1958), is a Belgian art historian, curator, and museum director. Dercon has worked and published extensively on the future of museums, working with architects Rem Koolhaas, Robbrecht en Daem, Herzog and De Meuron, Gunther V ...

: ''Auferstehung und Wiedergeburt. Das Münchner Filmmuseum wird 50 Jahre alt und ist doch quicklebendig - wie dieser Gratulant, Fan und langjährige Nachbar im Haus der Kunst bezeugen kann.'' In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 November 2013, p. 14. * Filmmuseum München (ed.): ''50 Jahre Filmmuseum München''. Munich 2013

References

External links

* *
Edition filmmuseum

{{DEFAULTSORT:Munich Film Museum Film archives in Germany Museums in Munich Buildings and structures in Munich Mass media in Munich 1963 establishments in West Germany FIAF-affiliated institutions