Day 8 – Visit to Deutsche Kinemathek’s Museum fur Film und Fernsehen/German Museum of Film
On Tuesday a small group of us set off to review the German Museum of Film at Potsdammer Platz. I was excited as I’m a big fa of film in general, but also because my knowledge of German film beyond Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Michael Haneke is not great. This was an opportunity for me to learn more about, what some would argue, where cinema really began.
As we entered the museum, we were confronted by an unusual method of display. Three fairly large back projections just out of the walls of a room that is on all six sides covered with mirrors. Its very difficult to know what these mirrors signify and how they relate to the birth of cinema in Germany (cinema as a distorted reflection of reality?), but it created an unpleasant atmosphere.
The mirrors theme continued throughout the museum, but thankfully not to the same intensity.
The first main focus of the museum was the iconic film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). The display methods leading up to this section complimented the film’s adventurous set design excellently. Monitors and cabinets jutted out of walls at odd angles and, although looking slightly post-modern, prepared you nicely for marvellous diorama of the studio in which Dr. Caligari was shot.
The museum is obviously blessed with a huge collection of historic documentation relating to various points throughtout German film history. This was particularly evident as we transferred through to the next major focus of the museum: The Fritz Lang era. Cabinet after cabinet of letters and photographs. The letters written in German, naturally, but with no English translation. Very frustrating. That may sound lazy on my part but as everything else is signposted in Germ and English it seemed odd not to translate a letter.
The Fritz Lang section focussed heavily on Metropolis as expected but also featured a very impressive two-storey wall of monitors displaying disaster scenes from various Lang movies, all enhanced by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
The main crticism of the whole museum would be, while there is an obvious necessity to focus on the history of cinema in Germany, as an outsider I felt it was important to give this history a context. There is next to zero reference to what is happening in cinema in other parts of the world at the key moments of development in the museum’s display. On the occasions that focus is moved away from Germany, it is only related to the mass exodus of actors and directors from Germany to the US in 1930/40s and how these German stars influenced Hollywood’s development. For me this was disappointing and, without prior knowlegde of the history of film, slightly alienates the display and to a certain extent the viewer.
The main attraction to the museum is the extensive collection of Marlen Dietrich memoribilia. From dresses to love letters to lucky charms, there are at least three large rooms dedicated to the famous actress.
The Dietrich rooms lead into a focus on the NS era of German cinema and a feature on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia ducumentary. Surprisingly only documentation of the making of Olympia was on display and not any footage from the actual film. The sombre atmosphere of this part of the museum was compounded by the morgue-like drawers which were used as interective display cases, something that I really enjoyed.
The museum ends with a relatively small room summing up the past 60 or so years of German cinema, perhaps the most frustrating section of the whole museum. Such a large portion of German film history featuring work by Wim Wenders and Michael Haneke and some fascinating hand drawn story boards were crammed into such a small space.
Overall the museum was spectacular both in the amount of artefacts it possesses and in how dissapointing it was. The display was dense and dry but the content on the whole was extremely interesting.
