Mission Statement

As the custodian of Austria’s audio-visual heritage, the Filmarchiv Austria is the country’s central institution for collecting and documenting film. The diversified holdings span a period of more than one hundred years, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The FAA currently owns 200,000 films, 2,000,000 photographs and film stills, 50,000 film programs, 16,000 film posters and more than 40,000 books and journals. At its three main locations – the Film Repository Laxenburg, the Audio-Visual Center Augarten, and the METRO Kinokulturhaus – the FAA attends to its varied tasks of preserving, documenting, communicating and presenting the cinematic heritage.

TO PRESERVE AND TO SHOW

However, an archive is only really alive to the extent that it is used. It is therefore one of the archive’s main objectives to make its extensive holdings visible to the public. True to its motto “to preserve and to show,” the Filmarchiv Austria considers communicating the archive a logical and necessary extension of an archive’s traditional core competences ‒ collecting, preserving, restoring. In recent years, the archive has initiated a number of strategic projects that underscore its commitment to being an active, productive archive.

RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS

Besides making its collections accessible to the public with the establishment of a Study Center at its Augarten location, the Filmarchiv Austria has continually broadened its publishing activities. Intense in-house research has resulted in countless publications and editions. Today, the Verlag Filmarchiv Austria ‒ established in 2001 ‒ is Austria’s largest publisher of film-related books. Since 2006, the archive has also been increasingly active as a purveyor of audio-visual content, authoring a number of internationally noticed and commercially successful DVD editions. Currently, the Filmarchiv Austria is working on a strategy for making its holdings accessible to the public through the internet.

METRO Kinokulturhaus

In 2002, the Filmarchiv Austria adopted the old Metro Cinema as its first permanent theater and a prominent showcase for the house’s educational and presentational programs. From 2012 to 2015, the Metro was substantially expanded through the inclusion of additional floors. With the new Metro Kinokulturhaus, which now accommodates two theaters as well as spaces for exhibitions and events, the Filmarchiv Austria has created a venue for the multi-media presentation of Austrian film culture from its beginnings to the present day. The exhibition spaces ‒ the first ones in Austria exclusively devoted to cinema ‒ allow the Filmarchiv Austria to extend the conversation about film beyond the silver screen. Over the last years, the METRO Kinokulturhaus has developed into an excellence center and a meeting place for the Austrian film industry.

STRATEGIES FOR THE FUTURE

In the coming years, the Filmarchiv Austria will continue in its efforts to share the riches of its holdings with the public at large. With participation one of the watchwords of our digital age, it will be necessary to devise new participatory models in order to make the most of the unprecedented opportunities afforded by the internet. The digital archive will be an innovative low-threshold space where people can tap into the national cinematic heritage and thereby breathe new life into the moving images from the past. The archive of the future will be less a passive repository than a builder of bridges between the treasures of the past and today’s new media reality.