The complete archive of all programs presented by the Austrian Film Museum, from its founding to the present day, is available online. This resource includes information about each individual screening and all retrospectives, starting with the first printed invitation in March 1964, through the legendary "brown paper bag" calendars from October 1967 ("New American Cinema") to 2002, up to the contents of the current programs.
322 original calendar (from 1964 to 2002) were scanned using OCR (optical character recognition). The scans provide users with a concrete impression of the historic programs, including all film notes.
More than one hundred programs from 2003 to the present have been incorporated into our steadily growing database. In order to get full access to these (including program notes and screening details), you need to register with us. If interested, please write to: (e-mail subject: program archive) to get your personal access account. You can log in here afterwards. Without registration and login, you will have access only to the monthly program overview without the individual film descriptions.
Search Results
Filmmakers and film titles can be searched, as well as any associated texts. Due to variations in font sizes and typefaces, the reliability and completeness of the results from the film notes cannot be guaranteed. (In particular, umlauts and special characters in densely printed text often remained undetected by OCR.)
There are two types of search results, depending on the program date: after the login into our program archive, when browsing programs dating from 2002 to the present, search terms will lead to the exact text and events in which these terms appear in the database. The location of the term can be found on the homepage, using the Ctrl+F command. From May 2003 to the present, introductory texts on the programs are available in English. The film notes on individual screenings and events are available in German only (with growing exceptions).
For search terms from the years 1964 to 2002, there is a list of monthly calendars, which leads directly to the respective PDF. There, using the search function of the respective Acrobat Reader program, the exact reference matching the word/name can be searched. (Due to the issues with OCR reading mentioned above, a successful search cannot be guaranteed – in those cases, an exact match is essential.)
Search Tips
Search options are numerous, but must follow a specific syntax:
PHRASE QUERY
When a phrase - i.e., a film title - is being searched, the words in the title must be enclosed with quotation marks ("Cape Fear").
BOOLEAN QUERY
Boolean operators, such as and, or, etc. can be specified to refine the search: For two words to be linked by AND, an "AND" is placed in between them or a "+" is placed in front of each word.
Martin AND Scorsese
or
+Martin +Scorsese
For two words linked by OR, an "OR" is placed in between them or nothing is added, as OR is the standard linking mode.
Martin OR Scorsese
or
Martin Scorsese
For example, if it is necessary for the word "Duck" to appear in the search, but not necessarily the word "Soup", then one should enter:
+Duck Soup
WILDCARD QUERY (=PLACEHOLDERS)
To specify a wildcard for a single character, a "?" is used. For example, Bu?uel when searching for "Buñuel".
To specify a wildcard for multiple characters, a "*" is used. For example, Mitch* searches for the names "Mitchum," "Mitchell," etc.
DISTANCE QUERY
It is possible to search for words separated by a specified maximum distance. For this, the tilde symbol ("~") is used followed by the number of words by which the search terms can be separated, after the given phrase.
For example, "stands life"~10 when searching "He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life." (Here, the search is for the words "Stands" and "Life," which can be no more than 10 words apart.)
SEARCH TIPS FOR WORDS WITH SPECIAL CHARACTERS
One can activate the field "Similar Words?" and thus generate a so-called "fuzzy search." In this manner for example, not only the word "Bunuel" is searched but also "Buñuel," not just "Celovek" but also "Čelovek"). Similarly, one can use wildcards (see above).
Note: Starting in 2002, Russian names and movie titles were given in the original language when possible using the transliteration (ISO) system. In the "brown paper bag" era, mostly German translations were used (eg, "Tschelovek“ instead of "Čelovek“ and "Wertow“ instead of "Vertov“). When processing files for the Archive, care was taken to integrate both spellings for search purposes, so that under certain circumstances, both spellings can be found.
