Collection on Screen:
Classics from the Film Museum's Collection from 1964-2024
July 10 to 26, 2024
Like many film collections around the world, the collection policy of the Austrian Film Museum has been fundamentally guided by the principle of representing the medium of cinema through a selection of highlights across the wide variety and possibilities of the medium. Specifically, and luckily for the Austrian Film Museum, decisions about what exactly constitutes a "highlight" were made by a short series of head curators with a beautifully idiosyncratic taste in cinema, a special passion for international avant-garde and independent films, and a rare ability to translate their passions into a new canon that extends well beyond the city limits of Vienna.
The collection is not small – in sixty years it has expanded to include about 31,000 different titles – and as such necessarily reflects not only the ambitions of its curators, but also traces of time: the constant evolution of the medium that should necessarily go hand in hand with our ever-evolving understanding of it.
Like every collection, ours suffers from gaps that will only multiply and deepen with the passing of time and the explosive proliferation of moving images; gaps that we attempt to fill in our daily programming in order to create a more pluralistic vision of film history – which, as Godard already knew, is better described as histoire(s).
Our summer Collection on Screen, on the other hand, ignores the gaps (and the science of counterfactuals to which they belong), instead focusing on a small selection of seldom screened canonical titles produced every ten years after the founding of the Film Museum in hopes of conveying at least a glimmer of a journey that cinema – and everything that it reflects – has undergone since 1964. (Jurij Meden)
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are expected as guests on July 25, 2024.
Like many film collections around the world, the collection policy of the Austrian Film Museum has been fundamentally guided by the principle of representing the medium of cinema through a selection of highlights across the wide variety and possibilities of the medium. Specifically, and luckily for the Austrian Film Museum, decisions about what exactly constitutes a "highlight" were made by a short series of head curators with a beautifully idiosyncratic taste in cinema, a special passion for international avant-garde and independent films, and a rare ability to translate their passions into a new canon that extends well beyond the city limits of Vienna.
The collection is not small – in sixty years it has expanded to include about 31,000 different titles – and as such necessarily reflects not only the ambitions of its curators, but also traces of time: the constant evolution of the medium that should necessarily go hand in hand with our ever-evolving understanding of it.
Like every collection, ours suffers from gaps that will only multiply and deepen with the passing of time and the explosive proliferation of moving images; gaps that we attempt to fill in our daily programming in order to create a more pluralistic vision of film history – which, as Godard already knew, is better described as histoire(s).
Our summer Collection on Screen, on the other hand, ignores the gaps (and the science of counterfactuals to which they belong), instead focusing on a small selection of seldom screened canonical titles produced every ten years after the founding of the Film Museum in hopes of conveying at least a glimmer of a journey that cinema – and everything that it reflects – has undergone since 1964. (Jurij Meden)
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are expected as guests on July 25, 2024.
Related materials
Link Contributors
Link Birthday programs and anniversary activities
Link Film Collection
Film Series Collection on Screen
Blog Following Film Tom Waibel on Moolaadé (in German)
Link Birthday programs and anniversary activities
Link Film Collection
Film Series Collection on Screen
Blog Following Film Tom Waibel on Moolaadé (in German)
