GERMAN FILM MUSEUM IN FRANKFURT

HOW TO FIND A GERMAN FILM MUSEUM IN FRANKFURT

While you are making your way through the streets of the ‘Innenstadt” (inner city) of Frankfurt, it’s about a perfect time to cross the Main River, which has once graced the city with its name, and to visit the German Film Museum in Frankfurt, or DEUTSCHES FILMMUSEUM in Frankfurt. The authentic name of this, to a great extent, extraordinary place is no less than the ‘Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum’ (The German Film Institute and Film Museum). The building once found its place at Schaumainkai 41, at arm’s length from the city’s main river within a picturesque promenade across the business district of Frankfurt. The location is of easy access through the ‘Untermainbrücke’ bridge, which can be translated as ‘A bridge under the Main’.

THE HISTORY OF THE DEUTSCHES FILMINSTITUT & FILMMUSEUM

Regardless of the historical origin of the building, the German Film Museum in Frankfurt was inaugurated no earlier than 1984 and is now among the seventh institutions of its kind in Germany. The Film Institute and Film Museum carry on a heritage of non-commercial cinema performances that previously used to be performed within the post-war building of the Historical Museum. At the forefront of the creation of a film museum, a historical villa on Schaumainkai 41 was repatriated and reconstructed. It’s worth mentioning that the place gained its full modern name only in 2006 as a result of the merging of the Film Museum and the Film Institute (Deutsches Filminstitut). The year 2009 witnessed the start of the renovation works, which took two years, and the new grand opening was ceremonially managed on August 12, 2011. The premises of the building store one of the largest movie archives in the world, with more than 80,000 tapes and footage, all for the public. 

MUSEUM’S LOBBY

The lobby of the German Film Museum can be characterized as no less than a masterpiece of design and a desirable piece of cake for all who are in love with movies. Once you find yourself inside, it’s easy to experience the involvement in this art, which we generally used to face beyond the movie screen at home or in the cinema. You may start your visit with one of the information brochures, devoted to both the main exposition of the museum and the movie classic. This improvised route to the cash office would also be accompanied by a thematic store.

You are free to buy a book on movie theory, thematic albums devoted to recognized directors, and specific movies in German and English. Movie posters, pens with movie designs, decks of cards, cups, platters, toys, and even bags for shopping with printed images. The walls of the lobby are covered with compilations of scenes from well-known movies; several plastic installations were placed all over the hall, and the authentic movie projector of the early XX century seduces to touch it or take a photo at least. Indeed, even the cafe looks like a cozy addition to the movie interior, integrated with stairs, a cloakroom, and a WC also made to correlate with the place.      

FLOOR 1: FILM VISION

The Film Vision is no less than the first part of the permanent exhibition of the Film Museum. The very floor of the building is dedicated to the evolution of the public perception of the media, our sense of what will later revolutionize into a world of cinema and television. The exhibition covers the years of the XVIII-XIX centuries and uses the evolution of the mechanisms and techniques to reveal the early history of the media with the invention of the Lumiere brothers in 1895 as the culmination. We are now ready to study the accessories used by the forefathers of the projector and the camera. The exhibition deepens into the influence that these inventions and their public accessibility have had on world culture.  This simplestof  equipment indeed can rationalize the very nature of the human sense and perception. At the same time, it’s not so much about the chronology of the inventions but rather about the evolution of the perception and circulation of information.

CURIOSITY. The exhibition welcomes us with a variety of accessories: a peep show kinetoscope, a kaleidoscope, and anamorphosis. In other words, we face the inventions of optical illusions. As a means of example, a few screen images lined up one in front of another at the right angle can form a dimensional representation, similar to modern 3D. What is more interesting is that you can explore the authentic accessories on your own to reveal pretty much the same picture that once intrigued the public of New York or Paris back in the 19th century. 

MOVEMENT. Well in advance of Lumière’s ‘coming train’, the optical illusions of the past were used to provide a means to experience an illusion of the moving images. You can observe the famous ‘Faraday Wheel’ as well as its later modernized version, known as the ‘Wheel of Life’. The flipbooks or kineographs were no more than images within the pages of the notebook, which could be ‘brought to life’ using fast paging. The ‘Movement’ exposition provides an understanding of how our brain can sense any movement as a succession of single images and vice versa. No movie can exist without movement, and the invention of the stroboscopic effect in the 19th century once allowed us to reinvent our knowledge of the visual presentation of the surrounding world.

EXPOSITION. Highly likely that every movie enthusiast and those inquisitive by nature know about the ‘Camera Obscura’. It was a tough call to depict any image or a picture pattern and to make it constantly accessible. Photography has once come to the rescue and become another important forefather of movies and television.

PROJECTION. Probably only a few know the invention, called the ‘light’ or ‘lamp-post-camera’. The exhibition provides us with an authentic rough copy of the century-before-last accessory with images accompanied by music, songs, and even commentaries.

MOVING IMAGES. In the last years of the 19th century, both scientists and entertainers were a hand’s width apart from the invention of the cinema. Several prominent historical figures and early filmmakers, such as Lumière and Skladanowsky, photographer Ottomar Anschütz, and inventor Etienne-Jules Marey, all were wrestling with the problem of correlating the space with a projection of images. You can both fascinate yourself with the original Lumière movie posters and projectors, and bring to life the famous train on its way to the 1895 platform.   

MOVIE. You will probably move around this modest showroom on your way to the exposition. And it’s time to draw aside the curtain, take a place on a bench, and experience a few dozen movies from 1895 to 1911. Silent movies in the early years of moviemaking, the authentic films of the Lumiere brothers, and even the first movie made in the city of Frankfurt.

FLOOR 2: THE MOVIE STORYTELLING

To the extent that the first floor of the exhibition provided us with the elementary course of the prehistory of moving images, the second part of the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum exposition deepens into the elements of filmmaking and reveals the effect on the viewer. Beyond question and no mistake, we live in an era of rapid technical progress and evolution of recording and projection inventions, yet an emphasis on the technique will always prevail through the mastery of movie storytelling. Parts of the German Film Museum exhibition on the second floor show us how the angles can affect our outlook, the special effects can animate the decorations, how actors personate into the most incredible characters, the lightning influences the emotional climate, how music accompanies the image, and editing can create masterpieces of kilometers of the black film stock or terabytes of the digital information.

MOVIE ROOM. Another bigger movie hall once found its place directly opposite the entrance, giving the increasing impression of a site you are now visiting. It is highly unlikely that you would find another place to experience the four-in-one movie screen with two of them perpendicular. The museum booklet informs us that the movie repertoire includes a 40-minute montage of the movie’s scenes from a hundred films. This show of editing combines the scenes from one particular movie and a contrast montage of similar moments. The museum used to operate the more archaic version of the projector with a specialist to deal with the stock, and now it’s all about HD digital images without the need to ‘change’ the film strip. 

ACTING. In little matters, whether beautiful images the filmmakers have, yet it’s the characters who ‘tell’ the story, and the mastery of acting fills the action with the emotional background. The left part of the exhibition pays attention to the movie characters, whose actors were ‘hidden’ beyond the masks and makeup. We can see the costumes, elements of the complex face paint, and a model of ALIEN from the 1979 original movie, made up full-size, thanks to the original sketches of Hans Rudolf Rüdi Giger. 

A little further, the ‘ACTING’ museum exposition informationally plunges us into the make-up process with the backstage photos of actors. Among other things, we observe Dustin Hoffman during his preliminary hours to act in ‘Death of a Salesman’. The authentic concept of the T-800 for Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘Terminator 2’. The sketches of costumes for ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’. The photos of 1942 once featured German actor Otto Gebühr, who used to put his makeup on to make him look relevant to Friedrich II, a king of Prussia, in a propaganda movie of the Third Reich era known as ‘The Great King’.

The upcoming exposition points attention to the helmet of Darth Vader. This very plastic movie prop was not destined to be included in the legendary Star Wars saga, yet it was used to tune the lighting for ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. It was of great disturbance to use the illumination onset to avoid flares within the scenes with the main antagonist. The wall on the right impresses with the authentic German posters of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (1961) with Audrey Hepburn and ‘Queen Christina’ (1933) with Greta Garbo, respectively. 

Another shadow glass box of the exhibition, dedicated to ACTING, reveals the nature of body language in movies. For example, the shot-by-shot breakdown of movement for characters in ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937). The emotional shots from the movies of Romy Schneider, a French-German actress. The facial expression from the dialogues of the ‘Rats’ (1955), a West German movie. The next highlight of the museum exposition, after the Alien and the helmet of Darth Vader, is no less than a real OSCAR statue. It was once awarded to the Austrian actor Maximilian Schell for his legendary role in ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ (1961).

SOUND. It’s common for people to underestimate sound and music in movies, though even the trailers and teasers for the upcoming premieres are generally printed on memory thanks to the soundtrack and impressive audio mixing. These poorly lit corners of the exhibition of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt expose the piano score for the ‘Metropolis’ (1927), a classic of the silent movie era. The glass exhibits the cover and the platter itself of the soundtrack for the ‘EASY RIDER’. A little console with earphones gives you a chance to mix the audio effects for the action scene from ‘MATRIX’, a fight between Neo and Morpheus. 

IMAGE. Insofar as the first floor lets us into the basics of composition, here we can specialize in the particular elements, which can influence our perception. The mastery of the cameraman as well as the positioning of the camera, the lighting, the movie location and decorations, the color palette, and special effects. Every visitor of the museum has a chance to experience the famous ‘GREEN SCREEN’, an integral feature of modern filmmaking. You can position a particular spot on the floor to find yourself inside the illusion of one of the three screens. 

The exhibition continues our way to see the real cameras of the past and present moviemaking to create the image. Passing another cozy showroom, you would find the sketches dedicated to the image. For example, drawings for ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Shrek’. Shot-by-shot animation for the ‘TRON’ 1982 movie. A sketch of the color palette for the classic ‘PETER PAN’ (1953) and exposure sheets of the T-REX from ‘Jurassic Park’. A cardboard cutout of the residential estate from ‘PERFUMER’ (2007). A design for panoramic shots of the city of the future from ‘AI’ by Steven Spielberg. 

EDITING. The image, sound, and even the mastery of acting can all come to life as a complete creation thanks to editing. This work generally takes even more time than the filming itself, and the process demands months of audio mixing and being self-imprisoned in the editing studio. A complete installation is dedicated to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ You can see from a short distance the very wooden tablet, used for decades to line up the scenes into a montage. The interactive panel gives a chance to edit scenes from legendary movies such as The Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones.