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MIDAS - Moving Image Database for Access and Re-use of European film collections

The Participants


Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF

The German Film Institute (Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF e.V.) in Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden is one of Germany’s largest cinematic institutions. As an association founded in 1949 it is regularly funded by the German Federal Government, the State of Hesse, the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden, the German public broadcasting authorities, leading organizations of the German film industry and the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. The DIF is registered as an approved non profit-making association.

Along with the Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv (Federal Film Archiv) and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (Foundation of the German Cinemathèque), both in Berlin, the DIF is a full member of the German Federation of Cinemathèques, sharing with the above mentioned organizations the duties of a central German Cinemathèque. Since 1952, the institute has been a full member of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), and also participates in international projects.

In addition to the film archive DIF has built up a collection of 7,000 files filled with clippings and 36,000 microfilm jackets. The collection of film magazines starts in 1907 and runs until today with 120 issues. The international film magazine stock comprises 1,900 titles, 8,600 volumes within 3,350 German language magazines. For the period from 1907 until the end of the War, 805 issues are available. The film still collection consists of about 1.5 million stills from all countries. Furthermore, the DIF has collected 24,000 film programs, including 5,500 silent and early sound films, about 30,000 posters and thousands of censorship cards. In the library, which is operated together with the German Film Museum, one can find 90,000 titles, 50,000 of which belong to the DIF.

The focuses of the institute’s work are on scientific aspects of film culture, in particular the use of new technologies for archiving and presenting films and film related material. In the past years, the DIF’s work has increasingly focused on electronic publishing. The institute has created and is running the biggest German database on German and international film productions as a basis for its most successful project, the portal on German cinema, www.filmportal.de. Furthermore the institute is working on promoting the European film heritage in regular screenings and has established a new film festival, goEast, the festival of Central and Eastern European films in 2001.

The DIF initiated several successful projects within the last years, for example, a research project in cooperation with Frankfurt University concerning the social history of Western Germany. Aside from these projects on cultural history, the DIF focuses on film history research. In 1998, the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/German Science Foundation) funded the digitisation of a corpus of film censorship documents of the DIF and a follow-up project.

From 2000 till 2003 the DIF was project partner and contents coordinator in the EU-funded COLLATE which aimed to build up a web-based collaboratory for indexing and annotation of historical documents. The focuses were on censorship documents from Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany.
In February 2005 the DIF launched filmportal.de, a project unique in Europe. The portal provides information on 30,000 German films as well as on around 75,000 people of the cinema world on a free basis. A selection of 3,000 films are presented with a detailed filmography, including contents, photos, posters or licensed reviews from newspapers and film magazines; for over 550 persons, biographies, portraits and interviews are provided. Specific theme complexes are added to integrate the historical and cultural background.

  
  07-Feb-2006