Titel Kino 2/2001(2 Alternativ) - German Films

FILM ARCHIVES
Film was the most important medium of the 20th century – we
cannot say as yet whether it will remain so in the 21st. It has left
traces behind: in people’s collective memory, and in the form of
film copies, screenplays, architectural set designs, film posters and
film criticism. And although it has made such a deep impression
on us, film is a fleeting art. The film material itself decomposes,
and materials used in production have been, and still are often
thrown away carelessly. The task of film archives and film
museums is to save the traces of film history, but also to make
them usable and show them to the public. The fact that there are
so many of these in the Federal Republic of Germany is a consequence
of the historical development of post-war society in
Germany.
A race against time
The history of film began more than 100 years ago, and yet
decades passed before the first public film archive began work.
Because this happened very late, the majority of films from the
age of silent films must be considered irretrievably lost. In a
Germany which was forcibly made to conform during the NS
regime, the film archives of the Third Reich opened on 4 February
1935 in the presence of Hitler and Goebbels. It was almost
certainly the role of film in the Nazis’ propaganda system which
promoted the establishment of a central German film archive,
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Marlene Dietrich Room/Film Museum Berlin (photo © Scherhaufer)
but it was no coincidence that it happened at this time: people
were beginning to take film seriously as an art form, but also as an
educational medium and as an historical source.
The Second World War produced a caesura here as well. Looking
back over time, the federal German archive situation during the
post-war period appears to have been something of a temporary
system. The collections of the Reich’s film archives – around
12,000 films at the end of the war – were placed at the legal
disposal of the allies. It was a private initiative which led to the
foundation of the first archive of the post-war era: after the war,
the collector Hanns Wilhelm Lavies made efforts to
re-assemble scattered exponents from the archives in Berlin and
the western zones, and in 1947 he founded his “Archive for Film
Science”, which became the “German Institute of Film
Sciences” (DIF) in 1949. It was not until some time later
that the two directly government archives were set up: the
Federal Archives, at that time in Koblenz, in 1954, and the State
Film Archives of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East
Berlin during the same year. After the unification of the two
German states, this passed over into the Federal Archives
(Film Archive). The third large archive in the Federal Republic,
the Film Museum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek
(SDK) – a foundation established in 1963 – also owes its basic
stock to a private collector, the film director Gerhard
Lamprecht.