filmforum Duisburg

In the location's words:

Marlene Dietrich looks... at the waiting moviegoers - full of art and grace. Her images from film history give the façade of one of Germany's oldest municipal cinemas a programmatic character. Because cinema can be more than a distraction from everyday life, it can see reality in a new and different way, it can look behind a supposedly beautiful appearance. The point of view arouses interest. Cinema fans from all over the region seek and find a sophisticated film program at Duisburg's Dellplatz.

At the beginning - in 1959 - the Duisburg adult education center still operated under the name "forum". So it was only natural to offer events on film culture topics under the title "filmforum". The initial spark for this was the new works by Ingmar Bergman, which people not only wanted to watch but also discuss. Eleven years later, in 1970, the SPD politician and later Lord Mayor Josef Krings chose an unusual method to convince his council colleagues of the necessity of institutional film work. It should be noted that German cinema at the time was dominated by schoolboy films and schoolgirl reports, which were light years away from any artistic aspirations. During a cultural committee meeting, Krings picked up a daily newspaper and read out loud what was to be shown in Duisburg's cinemas that day. It could not have been great art. At the end of the presentation, the council members approved the establishment of a municipal cinema under the umbrella of the VHS - the first in Germany to do so. At the start on September 27, 1970, "When the Cranes Migrate" by Michael Kalatosow brought light into the dark Duisburg cinema landscape. The premiere was celebrated in the large auditorium of the VHS before moving to "Studio M" in the former Mercatorhalle.

In 1980, they found their own home on Dellplatz. The building, which was rebuilt after the war and had a long cultural history, had also housed a cinema since the late 1940s. The filmforum set up shop there, spoiled its guests with the cozy historical ambience and challenged them to discover cinema as art with film series, lectures and numerous discussions. Not only film fans from Duisburg came to the newly revitalized Dellplatz, which also became home to other cultural institutions and pubs in the following years. The filmforum took advantage of the new start and soon became more than just a screening venue. Over the decades, it amassed a collection of old cinema treasures.

A visual memory Today, there are tens of thousands of posters, photos and program booklets, some of them historical, for around 11,000 film titles. In addition to film literature, old projection equipment and film cameras, the treasure chest of the filmforum archive contains real gems of cinematic art: a film reel with the first dog as a cinema hero has been found and the classic "Saved by Rover" from 1905 has been archived. In addition to copies of David W. Griffith's monumental epic "Birth of a Nation", the shelves of the Communal Cinema are well-stocked with very rare films featuring the music of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich. And there are even moving images from 1895, the year of the film's birth.

The filmforum preserves milestones in cinema history just as carefully as the cinematic documents on the history of the city - now digitally on hard disks and still classically in the climate archive, which is intended to protect the celluloid from decay.
Cinematic time travel Urban history on the big screen became a box office hit in the 1980s. The treasure trove of films about Duisburg's history, which had been lying dormant on archive shelves, deserved more publicity. The municipal cinema began to produce programs for its own screen. Two films were produced: "Duisburg - 1914/45" and "Duisburg - 1945/66".

The Dellplatzkinos and the filmforum's filmwerkstatt provide a perfect base for Duisburg's most famous film festival, theDuisburger Filmwoche . The most important festival for German-language documentary film has a high international reputation, and the technical and spatial possibilities offered by the filmforum are of corresponding importance.

Summer cinema in a unique setting A film festival of a very different kind is the "Stadtwerke-Sommerkino", which has been attracting up to 45,000 visitors to the blast furnace in the Landschaftspark-Nord for a cinematic summer retreat every year since 1996. Viewers can expect an irresistible mix of current hits, classics and cult films, and when the illumination of the world-famous light magician Jonathan Park bathes the night-time backdrop of the blast furnace in a bizarre sea of color at the end of each screening, the border to magic is no longer far away. The filmforum as organizer together with the promoter, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, has turned the open-air event into a blockbuster.

Different films - shown differently: A few examples may perhaps illustrate what this means. After lengthy research, the filmforum tracked down the film music for the Ernst Lubitsch classic "Madame Dubarry" in New York, which was thought to be lost. The filmforum plans and organizes film and media programmes for all of the city's major cultural festivals. However, one focus of the municipal cinema's work is on education. More than 8,500 children and young people visit the filmforum every year in programs such as children's cinema, school cinema and workshops. That's 10% of the people who visit the cinema at Dellplatz every year. A good reason for us to be proud.

filmwerkstatt. Since 2017, the filmforum has had a "place of work". After or before the movie, you can engage with the medium of film in a more intensive way. The filmwerkstatt is used for expert discussions, readings, lectures, conferences and workshops. For example, our annual workshop for young people "How do YOU live?", which takes place in the fall vacations, has found its home here. Pupils then work on their own film in their free time. They are supported in the conception and production by media educators. Nobody has to explain the recording medium to them - filming is always done with a cell phone. Our support association has also discovered the inviting space, equipped with archive copies and display cases, as a small oasis for cineastes.

Cinema is art and was its most important form of expression in the 20th century. No other is closer to our human perception, no image is more believable to us than the moving image. As part of a changing media industry, cinema will play a different role in the future. The media industry will push for more direct, digital distribution channels as part of its business model in order to make profits available more quickly. Nevertheless, the movie theater will remain, because only in the darkness of the cinema room can film language become magic, can fantasies supposedly become tangible - as illusions of fear, sadness, redemption or happiness. The municipal cinema has dedicated itself to preserving this form of storytelling and will always remain a guardian of this art.

This content has been machine translated.