Educational Programs between Research and Public Outreach

A museum is a place where materials about people and their surroundings are collected, preserved, explored, and exhibited for the purposes of study, education, and entertainment. Beside the presentation of film as an art and as a cultural technique, the task of a film museum is to unlock film as certainly the most important historical document of the twentieth century.

In recent years, an occupation with film as an “agent of history” in the academy has been largely replaced by a purely empirical one, based on the facticity and the “truth” value of the film source. At the same time – especially with the accessibility of film documents in the Internet – there is an increased public interest in non-canonic material, so-called “ephemeral film” (industrial films, advertising and amateur film, newsreels).

In this lecture, I will present examples of the educational work at Österreichisches Filmmuseum and selected partner institutions in the realm of “film documents of history” and discuss the significance of such events for creating a critical and politically sensitized public.

Michael Loebenstein is film historian and educator, working amoung others as freelance for Österreichischen Filmmuseum (ÖFM); until 2008, he was responsible for the education and research programs at ÖFM. He is co-editor of various museum publications, such as Peter Tscherkassky (2005), Dziga Vertov: Die Vertov-Sammlung im Österreichischen Filmmuseum (2006) as well as the DVDs Entuziazm and Blind Husbands (2006).

www.filmmuseum.at

Saturday | Jan. 17 | 11:30 am