Reel Adventures
October 15, 2026
What do private films tell us about life in Vienna? This question was the focus of the research project Reel Adventures, which took amateur films in the Austrian Film Museum's collection as its starting point. The project involved creating an online platform to make approximately 200 amateur films made in Vienna available to the public. Time-based annotations were applied to the films, which were also auto-analyzed and linked to geo-data. They were complimented by interviews and viewing notes by filmmakers, contemporary witnesses, and experts, as well as by materials such as photographs and written documents.
The main question was how the use of innovative analytic tools can shed light on the connections between personal memories and the public history of the city. It is precisely these films' openness that raises the possibility of finding new entry points to forms of remembering Viennese history. (Stefanie Zingl / Translation: Ted Fendt)
What do private films tell us about life in Vienna? This question was the focus of the research project Reel Adventures, which took amateur films in the Austrian Film Museum's collection as its starting point. The project involved creating an online platform to make approximately 200 amateur films made in Vienna available to the public. Time-based annotations were applied to the films, which were also auto-analyzed and linked to geo-data. They were complimented by interviews and viewing notes by filmmakers, contemporary witnesses, and experts, as well as by materials such as photographs and written documents.
The main question was how the use of innovative analytic tools can shed light on the connections between personal memories and the public history of the city. It is precisely these films' openness that raises the possibility of finding new entry points to forms of remembering Viennese history. (Stefanie Zingl / Translation: Ted Fendt)
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