Austrian Film Museum

The Austrian Film Museum is a Vienna cinematheque created in 1964 by Peter Konlechner and Peter Kubelka.It is situated in the Albertina building complex, close to the Vienna Hofburg.The museum has a big movie theater, a specialty library, and many collections, as well as instructional, research, and exhibition activities.The cinema museum is legally structured as an association.Each of its operations is funded by a third of the total yearly budget from the Republic of Austria, the City of Vienna, and its own income.

Since 1982, the cinema museum’s archive has been located in Döbling, Vienna’s 19th district.Almost the whole collection of the museum is held there.The nitrofilm collection is housed in a separate nitrofilm bunker in Laxenburg, Lower Austria, alongside that of Filmarchiv Austria.

Over 31,000 films are in the museum’s collection.Aside from film history classics, the emphasis is on international and Austrian avant-garde film, Soviet revolutionary cinema, and German-speaking film exile.Film documentation of modern history, as well as “ephemeral” forms such as amateur films, receive special attention.The film collection is continually growing and is presented in a variety of ways in the Film Museum’s presentations and retrospectives, such as the regular programs “Was ist Film?” and “Collection on Screen,” as well as on DVD and online.

One of the fundamental duties of all film museums and archives is film restoration and factory security through copying.Since the early 1970s, the Film Museum has been working in this field.One of the earliest major restoration attempts was Peter Kubelka and Edith Schlemmer’s rebuilding of Dziga Vertov’s early talkie Enthusiasmus – The Donbass Symphony (1930).Since 2008, the museum has used digital technology in addition to traditional analog copying procedures for film restoration.

The cinema museum also has a picture collection with over 400,000 themes, as well as document, poster, and technological collections.Among the house’s “Special Collections” are the Dziga Vertov Collection, the Michael Haneke Collection, and the Schlemmer Film Kader Collection.The assets are being utilised for scientific and cultural endeavors.Transparency and obligation towards users of these collections should be assured with “barrier-free” access to these collections.

The Film Museum library is Austria’s biggest specialised film library, with over 28,200 volumes and 400 magazine titles.It has been at Hanuschgasse 3 since 2018, having previously been situated in the Albertina building.The catalog may be seen online.The private collection of Austrian emigrant Amos Vogel (Amos Vogel collection), which contains over 8,000 books, periodicals, and youth publications, is included in the library and has been available to the public since the end of 2019.