Museum, Art: German Museum of Film and TV

So one of my elements is to visit an art museum, the idea being that a society's relationship to art is an expression of how they see the world, and how they see themselves in the world.

The challenge in each place is not to find the museum but to decide which of the museums I want to write about. On this trip to Germany, we visited five very different art museums, from ancient to modern, each was impressive in someway. So, it is a surprise to me that I am writing about the film museum. At the outset it was not even on my list. But one day we found ourselves at Potsdamer Platz with a couple of hours to kill. We had gone to see the impressive redevelopment of the ‘platz’ itself (Sony dropped a few billion on it) only to get there and discover it pretty much closed (it was a Sunday and Boxing Day no less) You could wander around outdoors, but it was about -10° C - not very inviting. We needed a place to go and the film museum just happened to be there, open and heated. It turned out to be a lucky happenstance. The Museum is both fascinating and eye-opening. Today, when you think ‘film’, you think Hollywood. That's where the films come from. And that means an American perspective dominates the vision of world cinema.  As true as that is, it was not always so. And maybe did not need to turn out that way.

The museum chronicles the early years of the development of cinema as an art form.  It displays the technology and the finished product. At the beginning there was an exceptionally strong German presence in both. Landmark films like the ‘Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ and ‘Metropolis’ and global stars like Marlene Dietrich are testament to the German product and potential.

And then something happened. The Nazi era destroyed nearly everything that had been built by German film before it. It chased its best technicians and talent, mostly to Hollywood. What it did not chase it completely discredited.  The brilliance of Leni Reifenstahl (Olympia and Triumph of the Will) is impossible to separate from the depravity of the Nazi movement.
The rest as they say, is history. Hollywood became the center of the film universe and German film, though it still exists, toils mostly in obscurity. Germany's favorite films? Not German. One wonders what might have been.