Filmtechnik 1925-42 (2021)
⭆ Research | Collecting | A neglected source of interwar media culture revisited
2017–2021 | Fellow Researcher | A cooperation with the Göteborgs universitet, the Hasselblad Foundation and the Akademin Valand (all Gothenburg, Sweden) | This is my contribution to the The New Eye – Interwar Lens Cultures 1919–1939 research project | Publication and exhibition are scheduled for mid 2021 |
By 2020 I had digitised the index pages of all issues of the German technical journal »Die Filmtechnik« from 1925 to 1942. This data base now makes it possible to browse through the 6,000 articles by category, author and title. Since this important source is almost unknown even to specialists, I dedicated my article for the upcomming New Eye publication to the history of this journal. At the moment I’m trying to find an institutional partner to build up a full text repository of all the content between 1925 and 1942. Should you be interested in such a venture let me know!
About: Technical journals are notorious for being boring and are usually considered unreadable by the non-expert. They also age badly because their respective topics eventually – and in some cases almost immediately – become obsolete. So despite their high circulation, they disappear from historical awareness relatively quickly and are only used as reference sources in exceptional cases. On closer inspection though, one of these journals, »Die Filmtechnik«, published by Wilhelm Knapp from 1925 on, proves to be a veritable treasure trove of primary sources on the media history of the interwar period. The fact that the journal extended the narrow field of technology to include aesthetic and political issues soon after its first publication is at least partly due to the two influential personalities who were its editors: Guido Seeber and Andor Kraszna-Krausz.
Read the full story here.