The German Film Museum has a birthday! June 7 marks the 30th anniversary of its founding. Nearly five million visitors have come to the Haus am Schaumainkai since 1984 to enjoy important works of film history on the big screen and in the original in the in-house cinema, to trace the history of cinematography in the permanent exhibition and to visit the special exhibitions.
With a laser show, prominent guests such as former German President Walter Scheel, Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlöndorff, and with a special exhibition on holography, which seemed promising at the time, the Filmmuseum opened on June 7, 1984. The founding of the Deutsches Filmmuseum was made possible by the commitment of many film lovers at the Kommunales Kino in Frankfurt and by the initiative of Hilmar Hoffmann, then head of the Department of Culture. In 1976 and 1981, the city of Frankfurt had purchased the film-historical holdings of the enthusiastic collector Paul Sauerländer. The collection of 1,300 film prints, 2,000 film posters, 7,000 photographs, numerous pieces of film-historical equipment and much more was not to be stored exclusively in archives, but was to be made accessible to the public. Walter Schobert, then director of the Kommunales Kino, had already organized several exhibitions in the Historisches Museum with his staff and was already thinking about setting up a permanent exhibition on the subject of film in 1976. The synergies of these different initiatives finally led to the municipal decision to establish the German Film Museum. At a cost of 16.4 million marks, a Wilhelminian style villa on the Schaumainkai was architecturally redesigned to house the museum, a public film history library and the Kommunales Kino. The museum was thus another important step towards Frankfurt's Museumsufer, with which - according to Hilmar Hoffmann in 1984 at the opening of the Deutsches Filmmuseum - Frankfurt (had) created a new cultural centre in a double way: the Main, which had previously cut through the city, now became a bracket that held together Frankfurt's new cultural centre in a worthy manner.
In 1993, the Deutsches Filmmuseum had to cope with a shock: Linda Reisch, the then head of culture of the city of Frankfurt, intended to close the Kommunales Kino, which was supported by the city. After protests of unimagined proportions arose against the city's intention, supported by Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Enno Patalas and Hanna Schygulla, among others, the plans were finally abandoned. The Kommunales Kino subsequently became the property of the Deutsches Filmmuseum and has since traded under the name Kino des Deutschen Filmmuseums.
In 2006, the Deutsches Filmmuseum finally merged with the Deutsches Filminstitut, which, originally based in Wiesbaden, had moved to the Villa am Main in 1984. Since then, the Deutsches Filminstitut has been the sponsor of the Deutsches Filmmuseum. Claudia Dillmann, who had already been director of the Deutsches Filminstitut since 1997, became director of the merged houses.
Under Claudia Dillmann's leadership, the Deutsches Filmmuseum prescribed itself a complete architectural and conceptual redesign between 2009 and 2011. The motto of the renovation was "More space for film": significantly larger exhibition areas with clearly and modernly structured rooms were created. The highlight: a view of the Frankfurt skyline now opened up from all floors. A new concept was also needed for the permanent exhibition, which was to take account of the rapid digital change and be modern and fit for the future. Last but not least, the museum's educational offerings for children and young people needed to be given more space and attention in the form of a new museum education center. From 12 to 14 August 2011, the building was reopened with a three-day celebration. Stars such as Maximilian Schell, Hannelore Elsner, Caroline Link and Til Schweiger walked the red carpet. Since then, around 200,000 visitors a year have flocked to the exhibitions and the in-house cinema and taken advantage of the offerings of the museum's educational department: workshops for adults and children, holiday programmes and the ever-popular Open Film Studio. In the 30 years of its existence, the Deutsches Filmmuseum has staged 184 special exhibitions. In them, the museum has devoted itself to the inexhaustible range of topics offered by film: Three important exhibitions dealt with post-war German film in a highly acclaimed manner: "Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. West German Postwar Film 1946-1962" (1989), "Artur Brauner and the CCC. - Film Business and Studio History 1946-1990" (1990) and "Abschied vom Gestern. West German Film of the Sixties and Seventies" (1991/92).
The acquisition of estates of famous film personalities enabled extensive exhibition portraits, among others on Curd Jürgens (2000), Maria Schell (2007) and Charles Chaplin (2012). External holdings gave rise to much-visited exhibitions on film greats such as Marlene Dietrich (1998), Romy Schneider (1999), Audrey Hepburn (2001) and Klaus Kinski (2001/02). Other exhibitions addressed radical upheavals in film production and projection ("Film & Computer - digital media visions", 1998), fascinating phenomena such as the Academy Awards ("And the Oscar® goes to. - 85 Years of Best Film", 2012/13) or significant individual works such as DAS BOOT (DAS BOOT Revisited, 2006/07).
To this day, the exhibitions of the Deutsches Filmmuseum regularly go on tour and inspire people all over the world. The exhibition Stanley Kubrick (2004) has been on tour for ten years now - from Melbourne to Paris, from Amsterdam to Los Angeles: almost 900,000 visitors worldwide have seen "Stanley Kubrick" so far, most recently in São Paulo. It is currently on tour in Krakow. A single special exhibition of the Deutsches Filmmuseum has never been shown in its own building on the Schaumainkai: in 2010 the museum was closed due to the conceptual and architectural redesign. The exhibition "Gesamtkunstwerk Expressionismus. Art, Film, Literature, Theatre, Dance and Architecture 1905 - 1925" was made possible in cooperation with the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt and in its rooms. The collaboration with this institution will be continued in 2014 with two exhibitions on Surrealism, which can be seen simultaneously in Darmstadt and Frankfurt: The Deutsches Filmmuseum is showing the exhibition "Conscious Hallucinations. Cinematic Surrealism" from June 25 to November 2.
Source: Deutsches Filmmuseum