About the MSN Warsaw Filmoteka

The MSN Warsaw Filmoteka is a project for digitizing and sharing access to outstanding films created by Polish visual artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Filmoteka is also a research and educational project devoted to the media dimension of Polish art. In addition to archiving films, the museum posts them on the internet for educational and promotional purposes, on behalf of the artists.

Since the watershed era of the avant-garde of the 1930s, film has been one of the main means of expression for visual artists. A groundbreaking period for the reordering of art in the 20th century was in the 1960s and 1970s, when media such as film and photography began to be employed by artists even more often than painting and sculpture. Now it is impossible to understand the development of contemporary art since the 1960s, or write a credible history of art in recent decades, without mentioning film. This is the medium in which many of the most valuable works of Polish art have been created. And numerous extremely important performances, happenings, interventions, speeches, shows, exhibitions and the like have also been documented in film.

While films produced in film or TV studios had a smoother path to distribution, films by visual artists, mainly produced privately without the involvement of professional film institutions, unfortunately sank out of sight after brief circulation in museums or galleries and were not further distributed.

MSN Warsaw’s Filmoteka is a project devoted primarily to rescuing artistic films made and stored under amateur, non-institutional conditions and now threatened with disappearance. These films often exist only in one copy which has seen hard use. Nonetheless, some of them are numbered among the most outstanding achievements of Polish art of the 20th century. At the Filmoteka, we produce high-quality digital copies, which are then stored in appropriate, purpose-built technical infrastructure.

The MSN Warsaw Filmoteka is also involved in protecting films that were executed from the late 1990s to the present day but stored on impermanent digital media. In addition to digitizing, disseminating and educating about historical works, in the coming years the Filmoteka curators will select films of importance for contemporary culture, by currently active Polish artists, for archiving and digital preservation.

Nearly 900 films are currently presented on the MSN Warsaw Filmoteka website.