Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art

Friends of the German Cinematheque (German: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V.) is a Berlin-based, non-profit film society founded in 1963 to promote public access to world cinema and film history. The organisation opened the repertory cinema Arsenal in 1970, launched the International Forum of New Cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival the following year, and has been operating publicly as Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. since 2008.

Foundation

Film historian Gero Gandert and the film critics Ulrich Gregor and Erika Gregor registered Friends of the German Cinematheque on 30 March 1963, seeking to make the newly established Deutsche Kinemathek’s collections and other rarely shown works accessible to the public. Before acquiring its own venue, the association programmed monthly screenings at the Akademie der Künste, premiering independent titles such as Adolfas Mekas’s Hallelujah the Hills for German audiences in 1964.

Using private loans and donations, the group purchased the disused Bayreuther Lichtspiele in Berlin-Schöneberg and reopened it on 3 January 1970 as the Arsenal, Germany’s first non-profit archive cinema. The cinema relocated to the Filmhaus on Potsdamer Platz in 2000, and on 1 November 2008 the association formally adopted the name Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. to reflect its expanded archival and educational remit.

Activities

Arsenal now organises more than 600 screenings annually and administers a collection of about 9,000 film prints that is being digitised under the long-term “arsenal kollektion” project.