With Burja around Europe – Austrian film museum

In the second half of May, my colleague and I visited the Austrian Film Museum, the central Austrian institution for the preservation of domestic and world audiovisual film heritage in Vienna, as part of the staff mobility of the Erasmus+ program. We had planned the visit for a long time. Still, it was essential for us for a few reasons – Vienna has become a major immigrant city and a cultural meeting point for more than a hundred different national communities that live and work there. Among them are also a multitude of Balkan nations. Vienna has always been a city that has historically influenced the development of Slovenian society. Once, a little more than 100 years ago, it was also our capital. Vienna is also a city that has always been (over)known for its excellence, tradition, cultural heritage and respect for it.

Another compelling reason for our visit was the creative director of the program, Juri Meden. His expertise in film, social conditions, and the European social climate is unparalleled. He has a unique ability to attract viewers from diverse backgrounds to film retrospectives, bridging cultural gaps and fostering intercultural dialogue. Juri, who spent many years in Rochester, USA, before returning to Europe, is a key figure in the museum’s mission.

The third reason is the film and cultural-educational program that Jurij is preparing with his colleagues. How he plans it, contacts the authors, addresses the audience, and plans educational workshops before, during, or after screenings, how they archive their extensive film collection and how they market themselves. And how they foster intercultural dialogue through retrospectives of various European filmmakers and genres. All these were among the topics that led us to this working visit. In addition, we learned the concepts of green transition and sustainability, which the city of Vienna plans and implements, and the film museum itself, which has obtained the certificate of a sustainable and green organization.

The Austrian Film Museum is one of the last oases of affordability in the strict city centre, which allows the average person, either a student or a worker interested in the subject, to visit the city centre with specific content. Everything else is already devoted to mass world tourism, further dividing Vienna into two different cities in the glare of the central part, where there are various palaces, museums, philharmonic, opera, parks, elite restaurants, hotels, etc. Just a few tram stops away, another majority Viennese reality begins – a place where different ethnic groups live in multinational ghettos, struggling with the essential emancipation and prosperity of their own families.

Nevertheless, it was a great pleasure to meet the colleagues of the collective, who welcomed us warmly. We held working meetings with the management and various colleagues who take care of different departments – from planning to technical service, program implementers, etc. We also have many points of contact and possibilities for future cooperation. Also, through group mobilities of learning adults, we could make an excellent program that covers many creative, green, digital, and organizational competencies. Above all, intercultural dialogue.

The basis of the Film Museum’s educational policy has always been the presence of a film shown, a cinematic event. The cinema is the most suitable place to encounter the film medium because it is a unique intersection between historical technology, aesthetic environment, and social situation.

The Film Museum has received many awards for its work at home and abroad. Advocacy for a museologically appropriate way of presenting film continues to be a highly valued aspect of its educational work. The radical approach of the museum’s co-founders, Petr Kubelka and Petr Konlechner, was a novelty in the sense of a methodological approach to going to the roots of Austria in the 1960s.

At the time, the film was declared a museum object and thus introduced to high culture, taking into account the primary role of the sensory film experience while emphasizing independent and avant-garde positions. Despite the purported purism of the film museum, education was already conceived in a broader sense at that time, as it referred to those activities that go beyond regular (evening) film screenings or supplement and expand this form of presentation. Since the 1960s, the institution has offered contextual material on film history and film aesthetics in various ways (publications, lectures, talks with artists, guided tours of the collections, etc.).

Since 2002, these activities have gradually increased. Issues of contextualization, the transfer of the cinematographic experience into an educational framework (in cooperation with universities and schools), and publicist and editorial work about collections are gaining an increasingly important role in museum work. The Film Museum has been considered a school of viewing  (Die Zeit) since it was founded in 1964. This school does not begin when one becomes an adult or enters university.

The goal of the film educational politics of the Austrian Film Museum has long before begun to give impulses and focus on the critical and playful study of moving images – both from the past and from the present. As Umberto Eco says, “Democratic civilization will only be saved if it turns the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis.” In addition to the changing retrospectives of the Austrian Film Museum, the long-term cyclical programs are closely related to the educational work and collecting policy of the Film Museum. Since 1975, several conversations with filmmakers have been recorded, and since 2004, almost all educational events (lectures, symposia, debates, questions and answers) have been documented on audio or video. In the last ten years, quite a few social transitions have influenced the development of the film museum and the perception of the cultural, and educational institution and program. And the only constant that the Austrian Film Museum can always count on is immigrants. With the immigrants will come their culture and their filmmakers. New potentials for excellence and excellence. To preserve and nurture intercultural dialogue—film cultural heritage.

New and old mission.