The Munich Film Archive, in the Munich Stadtmuseum, is one of eight film museums in

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. 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 wi ...

) 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 with no synchronized Sound recording and reproduction, 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) ...

s, the work of the German film immigrants from the

Nazism Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) i ...

period, the

New German Cinema New German Cinema (german: Neuer Deutscher Film) is a period in 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 Neore ...

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

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

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. Typica ...

, 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), known as Fritz Lang, was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States.Obituary ''Variety'', August 4, 1976, p. 6 ...

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; as ...

, 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 was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at th ...

. 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 actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...

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 the director Veit Harlan and the actress Hilde Körber. He was raised in Berlin. Throu ...

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

Werner Schroeter Werner Schroeter (7 April 1945 – 12 April 2010) was a 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 on German cine ...

and Wim Wenders. 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 during the later years of his life. Personal life Olga Palinkaš was born in Zagreb to a Hungarian father and a ...

. 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 (german: Filmfest München) 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/earl ...

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 The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

and displays a selection of the program later in Munich.

Literature

* Chris Dercon: ''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 Germany FIAF-affiliated institutions