The Schlemmer frames collection

Abstract

The Schlemmer collection is kept at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Austrian Museum of Cinema) in Vienna and consists of 1850 frames taken from diverse nitrate films. The peculiar conditions under which they were preserved (inside 67 hand-made envelopes along with a typewritten letter from the original collector from around 1950) poses a moral dilemma to the authors of this article, who are also in charge of identifying such frames: they can either stick to the personal order the collector had given them according to his artistic desires, but which looks random and chaotic to anyone other than him, or they could attempt to classify them in a justifiable manner. Finally, this situation led them to suggesting a new provisional general methodology for organizing collections received under similar circumstances.