Collect Films!

If Germany ever was the land of poets and thinkers, today it is the land of hunters and gatherers. After all, a good 400,000 of our fellow citizens have a hunting license. They are joined by around 500,000 model train collectors, one to two million stamp collectors and countless other people who collect and treasure comics, fashion, coins, sporting goods and all sorts of other things worth loving and keeping. It is fitting that Germany has an immensely rich landscape of museums, archives and public collections between Aachen and Zwickau. This also applies to film heritage, which is preserved and maintained by publicly accessible archives and several cinematheques and film museums. Hundreds of thousands of film reels are stored in these film heritage institutions. However, there are many more small archives and collections in this federal state, which are often privately owned and pursue their own specialized collection interests.

Despite the size of the public archives, it happens time and again that certain works cannot be found there. Here, the small archives and collections fill important gaps in the holdings and ensure a richer, more diverse transmission of the film heritage. What gaps do the small archives fill? What is collected there and for what reason? Who are the people behind these small collections? How do they shape their profile? These are the questions that our new recurring series "Collect Movies!" will be exploring, presenting small collections and the driving forces behind them.

Our first guest is Bernhard Marsch from Cologne, who has built up the private RAMSCH film archive there. He is a filmmaker, author, curator, film lover and the driving force behind many film projects of the "Kölner Gruppe". He has been a member of the Cologne Filmclub 813 team since 1990 and today Bernhard Marsch preserves the complete cinematic oeuvre of the German-Bulgarian filmmaker and artist Marran Gosov. At the Zeughauskino, he presents personal favorites and particularly rarely seen films.