BERLIN.- For the first time, the Museum für Film und Fernsehen, in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Emden, is showing storyboards for films of the last 80 years to a wide audience. The spectrum spans from delicate, monochrome works in graphite and Indian ink to tremendous bursts of color carried out in colored pencils, crayons or felt-tip pens, chalk and watercolor.

A storyboard serves to visualize motion pictures, long before shooting actually begins. Both the sequences in front of the camera and the movements of the camera itself can be sketched out like in a comic strip. A storyboard allows insights into the artistic conception of a film on the one hand, while also developing its own independent, aesthetic attraction. Although the storyboard as an art form is close to the classic sketch with its centuries-old tradition, until now it has remained almost undiscovered within a museum context. The curators of the exhibition have succeeded in bringing together loans of storyboards from important international film studios and film archives for approximately 20 influential films, such as GONE WITH THE WIND (Victor Fleming, 1939), THE BIRDS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, 1976), APOCALYPSE NOW (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and A.I. – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Steven Spielberg, 2001). A large percentage of the exhibits are being publicly displayed for the first time.

The drawings are accompanied by and compared to original film sequences and loans by international artists who have been associatively selected – works by Tony Oursler, Henri Michaux, Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana, for instance. In this confrontation with the fine arts, it becomes apparent just how much the visual languages used by art and film have inspired and influenced each other.

The Berlin exhibition is enhanced by a section about working methods in the studios, which introduces the application of storyboards in German film production. Examples range from the earliest “paper film” of the 1930s, to “optische Drehbücher” (literally “storyboards” or visual film scripts) for Defa productions, to the storyboards for current films by Wim Wenders, Chris Kraus and Tom Tykwer.

Composed of high-caliber loans from the fields of film and art that are displayed on two floors, this is the Deutsche Kinemathek’s most extensive exhibition presentation to date.