After film archives have been established all over the world for the last 50-60 years the time now seems to have come for film museums. During the last 10-15 years film museums have appeared in Europe and the United States, with MOMI in London as the climax of the movement, replacing the earlier traditional exhibitions of old apparatus and memorabilia in the mausoleum-style of for instance Henri Langlois' Paris-Museum.

Whether the rise of film museums are due to a growing interest in the history of the cinema, which Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone might be proof of, or if it is caused by the general boom in museums and the tendency to turn museums into entertainment centers in order to attract a young audience and the growing number of people with too much spare time because of retirement or unemployment, is a question to be answered in quite different ways.

Many film archives have plans for film museums, waiting for better times in economical terms to be realized. But in Germany they just did it and on August 21st opened the third film museum in the recently unified nation. After Potsdam and Frankfurt, Düsseldof now has a Filmmuseum as a department of Filminstitut Düsseldorf. Why in Düsseldorf? It is the birthplace of Helmut Käutner and the first German city in which opened an Asta Nielsen-cinema (in 1911). But one cannot claim that the charming city played a major role in the development of the German cinema.

Since 1979 Düsseldorf has had a very active Filminstitut and a crowd of energetic and enthusiastic people, not only in the institute but also behind it in the city's cultural administration, which is more remarkable and unique, and they have long dreamed of establishing a film museum. And now it stands there. In a new building, shared with the fine Hetjens-Museum of ceramics. In the middle of the old town, near to the Rhine, in charming surroundings. The Filmmuseum covers 2200m2 and the Landesregierung Nordrhein-Westfalen has contributed with 6,4 million DM to the realization of this museum.

The heart of a filmmuseum is the cinema, as was said in the speech of the Kulturminister at the inauguraion, and the heart of the Düsseldorfer Filmmuseum has been beating before it opened. In the building nearby, where the offices of the Filminstitut still are. But now the heart, called Black Box, has been transplanted to the museum and you enter from the ground floor.

To get to the museum you have to take the stairs to the first floor where you enter a kind of Hall of Fame and an attractive foyer with vitrines filled with costumes and on the walls are stills and posters on Hans Albers and Greta Garbo, two of the stars well known to a German audience, even today. The mood is created. It is the magic of the moving images, which is the main theme of the exhibition, more focused on experience than on information.

According to Hartmut W. Redottée, the driving force behind it, the concept of the museum is to create a mosaic or a caleidoscope and there are very attractive spaces, interesting ideas and surprisingly rich collections, with shadowplayfigures, dioramas, lanterna magicas, posters, stills, models etc. And there is also at the top floor a studio-like room with cameras and trollies. Finally you can visit a room for special exhibitions. The first one is an exhibition on the set designer Karl Schneider (born 1916), who worked both in GDR and FRG best known outside Germany for his sets for Wolfgang Staudte's 1951-film Der Untertan.

In connection with the opening of the new filmmuseum, Filminstitut Düsseldorf had arranged a one day international symposium on the theme "Filmmuseums: Visions, Traditions". Hans Helmut Prinzler from Berlin, Paulina Fernandez Jurado from Buenos Aires, Ray Edmondson from Canberra, Robert Daudelin from Montréal, Gösta Werner from Stockholm and Bärbel Dalichow from Potsdam gave reports. Wolfgang Klaue was moderator and there were lively debates with participation of most of the attending archivists and filmmuseum people. The general conclusion was that there are many different ways in which a film museum might look and function, but it was also stated that it is not an easy task to create a film museum, which often tries to reach very different groups, the young people with no knowledge at all about the history of the cinema and with most of their interest in films from television and older people, looking for nostalgic experiences.

Appealing to the amateurs and the professionals and covering history, technique, aesthetics, politics, social life, costumes and sets, art and entertainment. To create a film museum may seem as an impossible dream, but more and more are dreaming and some even succeed in realizing the dream, as they now have done in Düsseldorf.

Ib Monty