For more than 50 years, public broadcasters have been producing, co-producing and purchasing cinema films, launching programs and commissioning freelance authors and filmmakers. The invaluable collection that has emerged can be attributed to the enthusiasm of individual editors and editorial teams, as well as to the public broadcasters' educational mission enshrined in law. However, from the start, there has been a contradiction between the public funding of the stations and limited publicity for the products, which have often disappeared into archives after being broadcast, available for commercial exploitation.
In a day-long symposium on September 23 featuring three panel discussions, participants will discuss the possibility of turning TV archives into "living archives" and making their collections available for research and cultural education. Taking as an example the filmmakers Navina Sundaram, Harun Farocki and Sohrab Shahid Saless, who worked closely with NDR, WDR and ZDF in particular, the idea is to develop concrete models, alongside these broadcasters and other social actors, to ensure (public) access to the collections and thus to the visualization of film history.
