Who Is Going to Look at That?: Experiences, Possibilities, and Pitfalls of Keeping Experimental Film in a Mid-sized Film Archive

Thanks to the interest and persistence of our curatorial predecessors at Deutsche Kinemathek- Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Eva Orbanz (who served as general secretary and president of Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film for many years), and Walther Seidler (a landscape architect turned filmmaker turned archivist), we are proud to keep an extensive collection of films deemed "experimental" in our archive. Leaving the discussion of whether experimental is a genre, or even a useful term, aside, if we call up "experimental" in our database, we have almost a thousand hits. Discounting the viewing elements on DVD or VHS, there are still almost seven hundred items on film. Discounting again the viewing prints of canonized classics by Fernand Léger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Walther Ruttmann, and so on—films which many archives have and we are happy to possess but don't have the mandate to preserve in a proactive fashion because we lack the preprint elements—we still find a large number of elements for experimental films that are not projection prints but reversal originals, negatives, and other preprint elements. There are films in all formats, from 8mm by Bruce Conner to 35mm original negatives of films by Rebecca Horn, as well as a large collection of 16mm films made by such well-known German filmmakers as W+B Hein, Werner Nekes, Dore O., Klaus Wyborny, K. P. Brehmer, Karl Heinz Hödicke, Fritz André Kracht, Wolfgang Ramsbott, Bernd Upnmoor, Wolf Vostell, and many others.

From our records, it is evident that many filmmakers, once having made the decision to archive their films in the first place, remained faithful to the idea and regularly kept depositing new work, mainly preprint elements. When questioned on how this extensive collection of original elements came into being, Eva Orbanz replied,

The main influence to acquire experimental and artist's films for Deutsche Kinemathek came from Helmut Wietz [her companion in life and a filmmaker and producer himself]. He had organized film shows with Werner Nekes and others in Hamburg. Both Walther Seidler and ourselves knew the filmmakers personally. And Helmut had made films with artists after his studies at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie [DFFB]. It quickly became clear to me that these films, often only existing as 8mm or 16mm reversal originals, would be lost if they would not be collected. And through Helmut I managed to earn the trust of the filmmakers, which is a factor not to be underestimated. . . . What was frustrating, however, was the fact that proactive preservation and programming of these films was hardly ever possible for budget reasons.¹

We would like to discuss here how this frustration continues and perhaps also how it can be overcome. How can these films be kept for the long term? How can they be evaluated and contextualized in a manner that keeps them alive not only physically but also culturally— in cinemas, museum galleries, or in new media formats?

Experimental films and related documents are often somewhat neglected in larger film archives, certainly in Germany. The reason for this is probably that these films—apart from some "classics" that are well known and have become widely available—are produced and distributed, and thus also archived, outside of the mainstream, commercial industry. As a result, experimental film as a topic is not typically existent in the large paper archives of film corporations and the trade papers now available in institutions like ours, or in libraries and university collections, which are vital sources for film scholars and their writing and rewriting of film history. The world of experimental filmmaking remains small and depends on personal relationships between artists, archivists, and scholars, and no machine of professionally produced public relation material that has now turned into an archival resource supports and promotes it.

The film archive of Deutsche Kinemathek seems to have offered a safe haven for these homeless films, especially for key German experimental works...