# EYE Film Institute Netherlands

Eye Filmmuseum is a film archive, museum, and cinema in Amsterdam that preserves and presents both Dutch and foreign films screened in the Netherlands.

## Location and history

Eye Filmmuseum is located in the Overhoeks neighborhood of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Its predecessor was the Dutch Historical Film Archive, founded in 1946 by David van Staveren, Felix Halverstad, and directors of Filmtheater Kriterion Piet Meerburg and Paul Kijzer. Following the accession of the archives of the Filmtheater de Uitkijk, the archive was renamed the Netherlands Filmmuseum under the leadership of its first director, film collector Jan de Vaal. The Filmmuseum was located in Kriterion and Stedelijk Museum until 1975, when de Vaal succeeded in acquiring a discrete space for the Filmmuseum in the Vondelpark Pavilion. In 2009, Nederlands Filmmuseum merged with Holland Film, the Netherlands Institute for Film Education and the Filmbank and plans were announced for a new home on the north bank of Amsterdam's waterfront. The Filmmuseum was renamed the Eye Film Institute Netherlands and was officially opened on April 4, 2012, by Queen Beatrix.

## Buildings
### Eye Filmmuseum

The Eye Filmmuseum building is designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, whose other projects include the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. The building features two gallery exhibition spaces, one 300-seat cinema, two 127-seat cinemas, and a fourth intimate cinema of about 67 seats. One of the gallery spaces is devoted to a permanent exhibition on the technical and aesthetic histories of cinema. The exhibit includes historical equipment drawn from the Museum's collection of approximately 1,500 cinematic apparatuses, as well as an immersive presentation of about one hundred film clips from the Museum's archive, including Dutch and international films dating from the silent era and beyond. The second gallery space is dedicated to experimental cinema or expanded cinema, a commitment which dates back to the Filmmuseum's founding and the weekly screenings it organized at the Stedelijk Museum in the 1950s under the emerging aegis of cinema as a "seventh art." Past exhibitions in this space have focused on auteurs and cinematographers, as well as video artists and visual artists like Ryoji Ikeda and Anthony McCall.

### Eye Collection Center

In 2016, Eye opened its new Collection Center, designed by cepezed. The collection is made up of analog, digitized, and born-digital materials which are situated beside a sound restoration and digitization studio, a digital image restoration studio, and a grading and scanning suite. The collection includes 210,000 cans of acetate film, 57,000 film titles, 2.5 petabytes of digital data, 82,000 posters, 700,000 photographs, 27,000 books, 2,000 journals, 1,500 pre-cinema and film apparatuses, 4,500 magic lantern slides, 7,000 musical scores, and 250,000 press cuttings.
The collection originally consisted of films from the Uitkijk archive, compiled by members of the Dutch Filmliga (1927–1933). After joining the International Federation of Film archives (FIAF) in 1947, the Filmmuseum started to actively collect and preserve Dutch film productions. Since then, a number of significant collections have been acquired, ranging from Dutch distributors (Desmet, Centra, and UIP); filmmakers (Joris Ivens, Johan van der Keuken, and Louis van Gasteren); and producers (Matthijs van Heijningen and Kees Kasander) to institutions and organizations, such as the Netherlands Film Academy; the Netherlands Film Fund; and the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film (NIAf). The collection also includes many seminal silent film works, Hollywood classics, international arthouse productions, and independent filmmakers of international renown.

### Nitrate Bunkers

Eye stores 30,000 cans of flammable nitrate film in bunkers near the coast of North Holland in Overveen, Castricum and Heemskerk. These nitrate films date between 1896 and the mid-1950s and include a unique collection of 68mm film. Two of these bunkers were built during the Second World War to protect Dutch art museum holdings from theft and destruction; Rembrandt's The Night Watch was among a few of the paintings which were stored in the Castricum bunker for part of the war.

## Restorations

Recent silent film Eye restorations include the formerly lost film Beyond the Rocks (1922) starring Gloria Swanson, J'accuse! (1919) by Abel Gance, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) by Germain Dulac, Raskolnikov (1923) by Robert Wiene, Flower of Evil (1915) by Carmine Gallone, and Shoes (1916) by Lois Weber.
Restorations of Dutch films include Wan Pipel (1976) by Dutch-Surinamese director Pim de la Parra, Zeemansvrouwen (1930) by Henk Kleinmann, Karakter (1997) by Mike van Diem, Spetters (1980) by Paul Verhoeven, and Abel (1986) by Alex van Warmerdam.
Other restorations include Eve (1962) by Joseph Losey, M (1931) by Fritz Lang, and We Can't Go Home Again (1979) by Nicholas Ray.

## Projects

Eye is performing a major film digitization and preservation project together with IBM and Thought Equity Motion, a provider of video platform and rights development services. The project involves scanning and storing more than 150 million discrete DPX files on LTO Gen5 Tape in the Linear Tape File System format.
The institute's youth platform is named MovieZone (previously MovieSquad).

## Annual events

* International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November)
* Eye International Conference (May)

## Publications

In 2009, in collaboration with Amsterdam University Press (AUP), Eye began publishing academic books on restoration, preservation, archival and exhibition practices through their "Framing Film" series.
| Title | Author | Year |
| From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition | Giovanna Fossati | 2009 |
| Watch and Learn: Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films after 1940 | Eef Masson | 2012 |
| Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives | Julia Noordegraaf, Vinzenz Hediger, Cosetta Saba, Barbara Le Maitre | 2013 |
| Light Image Imagination | Martha Blassnigg | 2013 |
| Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema | Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati and Jonathon Rosen | 2015 |
| Filming for the Future: The Work of Louis van Gasteren | Patricia Pisters | 2015 |
| Multiple Language Versions Made in BABELsberg: Ufa's International Strategy, 1929-1939 | Chris Wahl | 2015 |
| Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film | Peter Verstraten | 2016 |
| Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory | Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever | 2016 |
| The Conscience of Cinema. The Works of Joris Ivens 1912-1989 | Thomas Waugh | 2016 |
| Women in Silent Cinema. History of Fame and Failure | Annette Förster | 2017 |
| The Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography. The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946–2000) | Bregt Lameris | 2017 |
| Images of Occupation in Dutch Film. Memory, Myth, and the Cultural Legacy of War | Wendy Burke | 2017 |
| The Films of Bill Morisson. Aesthetics of the Archive | Bernd Herzogenrath | 2017 |
| The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema | Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe | 2018 |
| The Greatest Films Never Seen. The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreen | Claudy Op den Kamp | 2018 |
| Images of Dutchness. Early cinema, Popular Visual Culture and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914 | Sarah Dellmann | 2018 |
| Performing Moving Images. Access, Archive, Affects | Senta Siewert | 2020 |

## Collection

* The Adopted Brother by Christy Cabanne and D.W. Griffith. Silent film, 1913. Running time: 10:41
* Charlie in Turkey, silent animation by Pat Sullivan, 1916. 9:39
* Flight tests with the helicopter Pescara 2R of Raúl Pateras Pescara. Silent film 1922. 1:25.
* Poster by Cândido de Faria for the silent Pathé Frères film Les Vampires de la côte, 1908
* Nieuw Weekblad voor de Cinematografie 1, 6 oktober 1922. Dutch weekly of cinematography.
* Filmstar Lilian Harvey by Alexander Binder, 1920s
* Filmstar Truus van Aalten by Alexander Binder, 1920s
* Filmstar Greta Garbo by Alexander Binder, 1920s
* Film restoration