Electronic exhibition guides are making their presence felt in many museums. But the Deutsches Filmmuseum has dealt with this development in a very special way; for the production of its multimedia guide it has invested three years of its time and obtained the involvement of about 60 children and youngsters. They played a significant role in determining the content of the guide and adapted entries for the display objects they had chosen from the Permanent Exhibition for the main target groups – children, youth and families.
This change of perspective allows the museum to draw important conclusions for future formats of film education. What do children find most interesting in the Filmmuseum, particularly with reference to the Permanent Exhibition? For this purpose each of the three age groups made themselves available for a period of six months to research various subjects.
From Saturday 2nd September visitors will be able to use the guide and its many interviews, film and sound clips, photos and other entertaining access points to inform themselves about film, its history and its modes of communication.
An important aim of the project’s involved process was to use the multimedia guide to open completely new points of access for visitors to the Filmmuseum’s content, subjects and display items, as well opening the museum as a whole to a broader range of target groups. Beyond that, it was also about finding out how youngsters react to what the institution has on offer and which objects they find most engaging.
“It has been extraordinarily successful, with quite surprising results,“ asserts Claudia Dillmann, Director of the Deutsches Filmmuseum. Project leader Barbara Dierksen: ”Thanks to the support of our sponsors, we were enabled to develop this project over such a large timescale. This gave space to the often differing needs of the children who participated and gave us the opportunity to adapt project procedures flexibly. Only in this way can participative processes really succeed and structurally affect our future work.“
Contact: Barbara Dierksen, dierksen@deutsches-filminstitut.de