Research
The Austrian Film Museum is a research and educational institution. As such, we develop and support research projects in academic and non-academic settings worldwide. In this area we focus on artistic and scholarly research on the film medium in all its dimensions – historical, contemporary, and in respect of its continuation in other media. Film and the moving image play a significant role in the formation of society – in researching their multifaceted reality, we see ourselves as a place where relationships are established: between the works and documents themselves, between the image and the viewer, the subject and the other, between the individual and society. We therefore actively pursue a dynamic exchange with other fields of art, research and scholarship and position ourselves as a place of knowledge and creative production: a kind of laboratory-in-the-museum.COOPERATION. We provide researchers and artists with access to film-historical sources (films, photographs, writings, and posters), support their projects with archival as well as film, artistic, and theoretical know-how in the field of the moving image, and provide a transdisciplinary international network. In addition, our own collections are continually processed. Films are identified, cataloged and restored, and their social, cultural, and historical significance is explored in collaboration with other academic institutions and cooperation partners. Accordingly, we have a broad spectrum of research projects.
IN-HOUSE. The results of this research work as well as our collection often form the basis of our education activities. In our focus areas – film history and memory, experimental cinema/avant-garde, the materiality of film, digital humanities, curatorship, preservation, and intersectionality – and beyond, we function as a venue for the exchange of ideas, with curatorial practices and artistic research (with an eye to the intersection of film with other forms) as the methodological cornerstones of our university courses. An open attitude towards all forms of the moving image is reflected in the scope and subjects of our symposia. You can gain more insight into our in-house processing of film and film-related objects on the Collections pages.
ON LOCATION. The current dissolution of boundaries in cinema corresponds to that of the Film Museum, whose team is regularly active outside its own four walls. In addition to numerous film screenings "on location," the forms of cooperation we engage in are very diverse – we show films in different contexts and visit universities as well as a wide variety of institutions, festivals, and museums. Films and other artifacts from our collections are used for exhibitions, and we also organize a multitude of special programs. We attend symposia, congresses, exhibition openings, and retrospectives, where we deliver lectures and present the results of ongoing research projects. In addition, we lend numerous works from our collection for retrospectives and festival screenings around the world.
