Archive for film studies
Archive for Film Studies was the name of the first film archive set up in the Federal Republic of Germany after the end of the Second World War .
In the course of the war, the holdings of both the Reichsfilmarchiv and the Ufa-Lehrschau were partly destroyed and partly scattered to the wind. The initiative to set up a new film archive came from Hanns Wilhelm Lavies , who as a private citizen began an intensive collecting activity immediately after the end of the war in Berlin and in the West German occupation zones and brought together films and film-related documents. Since the beginning of the Cold War , he was supported by the American occupation authorities. He tried in vain to move his archive for film studies, founded in 1947, to the photo collection of the Institute of Art HistoryMarburg University to be affiliated. With the support of Curt Oertel , the archive was located in Wiesbaden in 1948 , where it moved to Biebrich Castle in 1949 and was renamed the German Institute for Film Studies (DIF) on April 13, 1949 . In 1952 the archive was converted into a department of the DIF and was given the new name Deutsches Filmarchiv .