Collections

DIF Filmarchiv
Kreuzberger Ring 56
D-65205 Wiesbaden
Tel.: +49 (0)611 9700010
Fax: +49 (0)611 9700015

The film archive of the German Film Institute - DIF is still located in Wiesbaden today, where the institute's story began. Copies of around 10.000 titles are expertly stored in chilled film-storerooms. The emphasis of the collection lies with German films, especially silent movies. Be it "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari", "Nosferatu" or "Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt", many classics among the silent movies which are still preserved are available in the best possible condition. Outstanding sound films from before 1945 are also stored in the archive. Among the oldest stock in the archive are many precious examples of the early German non-fiction-film (Sound pictures, newsreel-like short reports or documentaries and cultural films). In addition to its archive material, the DIF has many distribution copies ready which can be rented by interested people from areas such as communal film work or the cultural work departments of the Goethe-Institutes. Moreover, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation has entrusted the DIF with the evaluation of its non-commercial films. The third huge work emphasis of the film archive - apart from collecting and lending - lies with restoration.

Michael Schurig
Filmarchiv
E-Mail: schurig@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)611 970012

In the DIF's collection there are about 20.000 posters for 10.500 films: From simple written posters from the early days of cinema via magnificent evidence for the creative talents of famous graphic artists to wild photo-collages from the Seventies and finally the stylized posters of today. The stock has been digitally reproduced and listed, which enables the poster collection-team to react quickly to requests from exhibition organizers, editors, and advertising experts. Saved are: German distribution title, country, year, original title, director, actors and distribution company, further the genre, motifs, size and - if possible to determine - graphic artist and print company.
Thanks to the intense aquisition which the DIF, being Germany's oldest film institute, started immediately after its foundation in the year 1949, nearly every German premiere-poster of an US-film especially from the Fifties is available. These posters, among which are many "classics" by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford or Billy Wilder, make up nearly 35 % of the stock. Further highlights of the collection are the German posters for films by Ingmar Bergman as well as for the main works of the Italian neo-realism and the Nouvelle Vague. Posters for German films make up 23% of the collection.

Olivia Just
Bildarchiv, Plakatarchiv
E-Mail: just@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220452

In its collection, the DIF has more than 1,8 million photographs at its disposal and therefore is one of the biggest German sources for photographic material on the subject film. There are pictures for 3.000 German and international silent movies, for 8.000 German titles since the start of the sound film era, and for 9.000 American films: Black and white and colour-photos, display photos, slides, and negatives. The French cinematography (with photos for 2.800 titles), the British (2.000 titles) and the Italian (1.200 titles) are represented as well. In addition, the DIF keeps collections about smaller production countries and about 6.400 personalities from the international film business: About stars and ditectors, producers and authors, inventors and camera men. If you are looking for picture material on shooting, film technology, studios, costumes, cinemas or cinema advertising, you will make a strike in small specialized collections. Most of the time, the employees can answer your question immediately since the photo collection's database records the head words title, country, year, original title, director, actors, TV title, and production. Moreover, there are databases sorting the collection according to motifs like telephones, bathtubs, or sunglasses, for example.
In general, the DIF does not lend any originals from its photo collection due to conservatory reasons. If you order a photograph, you will therefore receive prints from back-up negatives or you can choose the quicker digital way where you receive scans of the motifs via ISDN data transfer (Mac/Win) or on a CD-Rom, produced by the department's team with five scanners and the possibilities of digital picture editing.

André Mieles
Bildarchiv
E-Mail: mieles@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220454

Opening hours library
Tue, Thu, Fri 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
Wed 10 a.m.-7 p.m.

The collection areas consist of magazines and press releases, books and film programmes, advertising advice and press kits, plus specialized collections - scripts, scores, and autographies - as well as whole estates. The library's stock can also be investigated online.

The Film magazine-collection is the core of the DIF's text documentation and may be the most important one in the archives of the German "Kinematheksverbunds" . The oldest magazine is the "Kinematograph" dated January 1st, 1907, which is nearly complete up to the last issue from 1935. Other rarities are for example all 17 issues of the Berlin magazine "Das Glashaus" from 1920 or issues of the Berlin "Film-Hölle/Film-Teufeleien" from 1920/21. Alone for the years from 1907 to 1945, there are 805 year's issues available for film historic research. Among the total of 8.600 year's issues in the collection there are 2.515 of German and 3.350 of German speaking magazines, including parts of Austria's trade press as well as Switzerland's and the former GDR's.
All in all, there are 1.900 different magazine titles available. Currently, the DIF stocks 120 national and international film magazine titles which are being analyzed and archived systematically.

In the area of the German and international talkie, apart from magazines, there are other important information sources which are only of limited availability for the silent movie era: Newspaper cuttings with reviews, interviews or obituaries, festival programmes and -reports, distribution materials, Press kits and advertising advices as well as filmographic details about people and films. Since 1982, the stock has been transferred to micro-film for space and preservation reasons, so that today 20.000 micro-films on film titles and 15.000 on film makers are available, on which a total of 280.000 pages of newspaper articles are preserved. In an additional 6.000 folders, one can find the material on foreign films and personalities as well as German films pre-1945 which have not yet been transferred to micro-film.

Since its move to Frankfurt am Main, the DIF in cooperation with the German Film museum has been carrying on a reference library on the building's fifth floor. The shared library with its approximately 80.000 media units - 40.000 of which belong to the DIF's stock - belongs to the biggest specialist libraries in Germany. Apart from books, film magazines, brochures, videos, DVDs, CD-Roms and micro forms, the so-called "grey literatute" is also collected - high school writings, festival- and distribution catalogues among others.
The collection of national and international new releases is guided by the following theme emphases:

• pre- and early history of film
• generic film history and film history of individual countries
• literature about people and institutions, about individual films, film genres and film motifs, about film industry and film technology
• published scripts and film novels
• reference books and literature about adjoining subject areas

Visitors have an online-database at their disposal which they can use for literature research.

The DIF's stock of film programs consists of 5.500 documents on silent movies and early talkies, and 24.000 documents on films made after 1945. The well-known film program-series "Illustrierter Filmkurier" (1919-1944) and "Illustrierte Film-Bühne" (1946-1969) are as good as completely available. Film programs from Austria and the former GDR can be studied as well here.

Christiane Eulig
Diplom-Bibliothekarin
E-Mail: eulig@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220432

Rüdiger Koschnitzki
Text archive: Sound film
E-Mail: koschnitzki@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220604

The DIF's film database simultaneously acts as the starting point and goal of the scientific work in the DIF. The information gathered here is the building block for research and publications and contains data on more than 18 000 feature films made in Germany since 1895. Based on this data, the CD-Rom "Die Deutschen Filme" ("The German films") was produced in cooperation with several partners in 1998, featuring every feature film made in Germany as well as extensive material on the 100 most important German titles. This database is being systematically extended and supplemented and completed through cooperations and further research projects.
Research on people and title comparisons are being handled with extra thoroughness. Based on the information the DIF receives from different film-economic, film-political, and journalistic sources, this arduous but critical work is being done here.
In the database you will find the several departments of the DIF again: The poster- and photo-archives as well as the text archive are linked with the data stock. These assignments not only make research work easier, but also enable a presentation of the available data together with digitized documents in the internet, as was done for example with the "Edition der Zensurentscheide der Berliner Film-Oberprüfstelle" ("edition of the censorship-decisions made by the Berlin Film-Oberprüfstelle").

DEFI
The extensive project of building a "Deutsche Filmografie" (Defi) ("German filmography"), which could only be accomplished by an alliance of the German film- historic institutes, managed to gather data for German films in a database with 17.900 titles. It was the DIF's task - in cooperation with the German Film Museum - to investigate the German feature films after 1945. This was an arduous and expensive work, requiring a lot of manpower, since in Germany films are being recorded with huge gaps only, and often are only screened at a festival instead of regular cinemas, so that their traces can vanish easily. But nowadays, the DEFI represents the first complete datastock of German film production and is available as a CD-Rom.

Christof Schöbel
EDV-Entwicklung
E-Mail: schoebel@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220414

Over the last years, several research emphases of the DIF have developed. Of special notice is the unique editorial work on the German censorship practice between 1920 and 1938. Within the framework of a project which was sponsored by the German Research Community, the censorship decisions of the Berlin Film-Oberprüfstelle concerning over 890 films were digitized and censorship information on these films was gathered.

The project is being continued now on a European level as part of the project Collate, which will also put an emphasis on the systematic, comparing, contents-regarding approach to the documents and their assessment. Collate is sponsored by the European Union and develops new web-based, "collaborative" work tools and technologies to reach these objectives.

Another emphasis lies on reception oriented questions and methods in film science. During a project on the social history of the German film, an extensive documentation about the German post-war film was created together with students from the Frankfurt Film Science, which not only looked at numerous well-known films from new aspects, but also included unknown films.

Finally, the DIF is also dedicated to the research of gender representation behind the camera. In the research project "f_films: female filmworkers in europe", the significance of women working in film production shall be investigated and a database built in cooperation with other partners.

Georg Eckes
E-Mail: eckes@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220631

In April 2001, the DIF organized the Festival of the Central- and East-European Film "goEast" in Wiesbaden for the first time. With the new festival, the DIF continues its film cultural tradition of East-European film weeks in the past decades. As an international film forum of a new kind, goEast also spotlights the changing social, psychological, and political situation in the Central- and East-European countries. As a means of cultural integration, the medium film shall make a critical contribution to the support of international exchange and understanding. One of the main emphases of the festival is a symposium which introduces the respective national subjects and gives room for extensive discussion.

Swetlana Sikora
E-Mail: sikora@deutsches-filminstitut.de
Tel.: +49 (0)69 961220653

In addition, the DIF organizes thematic film series in the Wiesbaden cinema "Caligari" as well as in the cinema of the Frankfurt Film Museum.

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