Austrian Film Museum

Especially the retrospectives, which the Film Museum organized as part of the Viennale since 1966, gave it a unique rank in the German-speaking countries.

He maintained the fundamental goals of the museum, expanded the range of programming and the number of screenings, intensified collection and restoration activities, and strengthened the areas of education, research, and publications.

[7] The concept of an "Invisible Cinema" first emerged in conversations between Peter Kubelka and architects Johannes Spalt and Friedrich Kurrent around 1958, before the founding of the Austrian Film Museum.

The cinema was envisaged as a machine that serves as a relay between director and audience, with an architectural space that is completely focused on the image and sound of the film.

[8] In 1989, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Film Museum, the "Invisible Cinema" was opened according to Peter Kubelka's concept: a black-in-black screening room, a "seeing and hearing machine" that strives for the highest possible concentration on the cinematic event itself.

[10] In October 2003, in consultation with Peter Kubelka, Friedrich Mascher and Erich Steinmayr realized the "Invisible Cinema 3" at the same location, now significantly renovated and expanded, with new seating and improved possibilities for image and sound reproduction.

[13] Artist VALIE EXPORT was named the first Honorary Member by the Film Museum's Board of Directors in the summer of 2021.

[14] Among the filmmakers who have visited the museum throughout its history are Martin Scorsese, Chantal Akerman, John Alton, Olivier Assayas, James Benning, Busby Berkeley, Bernardo Bertolucci, Stan Brakhage, Luigi Comencini, Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Catherine Deneuve, Claire Denis, Lav Diaz, Jean Eustache, Valie Export, Harun Farocki, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Danièle Huillet, Chuck Jones, Elia Kazan, Alexander Kluge, Kurt Kren, Fritz Lang, Claude Lanzmann, Richard Leacock, Sergio Leone, Richard Linklater, Dušan Makavejev, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Groucho Marx, Jonas Mekas, Jeanne Moreau, Marcel Ophüls, Arthur Penn, Christian Petzold, Yvonne Rainer, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, Paul Schrader, Werner Schroeter, Ulrich Seidl, Don Siegel, Michael Snow, Alberto Sordi, Jean-Marie Straub, Tsai Ming-liang, Agnès Varda, Paul Verhoeven, Luchino Visconti, Viva, Kôji Wakamatsu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Frederick Wiseman.

They must be preserved and shown in the same fashion as historical source materials and documents: undistorted, unabridged, uncommented and in their original language.

One of the first major restoration projects was the reconstruction of Dziga Vertov's early sound film Enthusiasm - The Donbass Symphony (1930) by Peter Kubelka and Edith Schlemmer.

[26] Since 2002 the Film Museum has been inviting children and teenagers between the ages of 5 and 18 to visit its screenings, lectures, close-up-programs and laboratories in the framework of the Cineschool series.

[29][30] Working in cooperation with Austria's universities, the Film Museum regularly hosts and organizes academic courses and seminars.

For example, starting in 2004, the Dziga Vertov Collection was scientifically processed and put online, followed by the research project "Digital Formalism" (2007-2010) with the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna and the Interactive Media Systems Group at the Vienna University of Technology.

[32] The KUR_Program for the Conservation and Restoration of Mobile Cultural Assets enabled the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Austrian Film Museum to secure the outtakes of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Tabu (1931) through recopying, to edit them scientifically, and to publish them in digital form.

In a second series, books and booklets on the work of Jean Eustache, Yasujiro Ozu, Humphrey Jennings, and Robert Gardner appeared in the 1980s and early '90s.

[37] In 2003, a new book series called KINO was inaugurated jointly with Zsolnay-Verlag, with volumes on popular film genres (including.

As a founding member of the Edition Filmmuseum, the Austrian Film Museum has been producing DVDs of rare films (by Erich von Stroheim, Lev Kulešov, Josef von Sternberg, Dziga Vertov, Straub/Huillet, John Cook, Michael Pilz, James Benning, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz) since 2005.

[40] Edition Filmmuseum is a joint project of film archives and cultural institutions in the german-speaking part of Europe.