The occasion for the Ruhr Museum's major special exhibition is the birthday of Essen's "Filmstudio Glückauf", which turned one hundred years old on March 1, 2024. This makes it one of the oldest surviving cinemas in the Ruhr region and North Rhine-Westphalia. The Ruhr Museum at the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site is marking this anniversary with an exhibition on the entire history of cinema and film in the Ruhr region. The Ruhr Museum not only revives the great days of cinema in the 1920s and 1950s, but also shows the changes in cinema culture and the people in front of and behind the cameras. The "Filmstudio Glückauf" was founded in 1924 as a reform cinema and was intended to counteract the feared dangers of the "immoral and, above all, youth-endangering" new medium by showing sophisticated films. The "Filmstudio Glückauf" has maintained this claim for over a hundred years and has been part of Essen's film art theaters since the 1990s. In an unprecedented civic campaign, it was saved from closure and destruction in the 2000s and was able to remain one of the beacons of cinema culture in North Rhine-Westphalia. With a total of six venues, including the famous "Lichtburg" premiere cinema, Essen's art house cinemas form the core of Essen's cinema landscape, and it is thanks to the unprecedented initiative of their owners Hanns-Peter Hüster and Marianne Menze and their team that Essen and the Ruhr region still play an important role on the German cinema map today.

Prof. Heinrich Theodor Grütter, Museum Director of the Ruhr Museum, explains: "We have created a cinematic monument to our home region. For the first time, we are shedding light on the entire cinema and film history of the Ruhr region. And this story is also worthy of a movie." The exhibition "Glückauf - Film ab! Kino und Filmgeschichte des Ruhrgebiets" is a chronological journey through the film landscape of the Ruhr region and its magical performance venue, the cinema. It tells the entire history of cinema and film in the Ruhr region spanning more than a hundred years, from the birth of cinematography at the end of the 19th century, the great cinema buildings of the 1920s, the instrumentalization of film and cinema during the Nazi era and the cinema experience of the 1950s to the transformation of cinema from the 1970s to the present day. At the same time, the exhibition is more than just a history of cinema and film. It presents the entire world of film and cinema in the Ruhr region, from screening technology to film and cinema advertising, especially in the 1950s, to the legendary cinema owners and operators. It shows the region as a location for important films and the associated film equipment as well as the filmmakers who emerged from the Ruhr region or filmed here. It also sheds light on the specifics of film in the Ruhr region, such as documentary film work, the close connection between the coal and steel industry and film, the film avant-garde, film and cinema in an intercultural context, the region's important film festivals and, finally, the scandals in the cinemas that revolved around environmental problems, sex films and the image of the Ruhr region.

Over 900 exhibits from museums, archives, cinemas and the private collections of filmmakers are on display. The exhibits range from posters, autograph cards, scripts and props to spectacular film clips, evidence of documentary film work, film advertising and photographs, as well as a wide variety of film projectors and various media and genres that have enriched and shaped the film landscape. The result is a panorama that shows what an important cultural asset film and cinema were and are in the Ruhr region.

Marianne Menze, Managing Director of Essener Filmkunsttheater: "The exhibition is dedicated to the great passion for film and cinema of the people in the Ruhr region. And it is precisely thanks to this passion that our cinemas exist today and will continue to exist in the future."

The new entertainment medium of film and its presentation venue, the cinema, were particularly important in the Ruhr region, once the largest industrial conurbation in Europe. Even before the First World War, Essen was home to the "Schauburg", the largest cinema of all with 2,000 seats, and in the 1920s, several cinemas in the Ruhr region, such as the "Lichtburg" in Essen, which opened in 1928, were among the largest cinemas in Germany. But even in the decades that followed, especially in the 1950s, the heyday of cinemas and the heyday of the Ruhr industry during the economic miracle, feature films and cinema played a prominent role in the Ruhr region. At the end of the 1950s, the region had several hundred cinemas before the slow death of cinema began and it began to retreat in competition with television and later other media and is now just one of many entertainment formats. But even today, Essen still has the largest multiplex cinema, the "CinemaxX", and the largest movie theater in Germany, the "Lichtburg".

Moving images in the bunker: the unique rooms on the bunker level of the coal washing plant provide a spectacular setting for the Ruhr region's cinematic and film history. Even in the stairwell, the journey becomes a countdown for guests. Once on the exhibition level, the main room with its three-aisled structure opens up before the visitors. Four large projection screens are powerfully arranged here. A total of over 20 different media stations offer a wide range of films on all topics and periods of the Ruhr region's film and cinema history.

The 20 chapters of the exhibition are structured by the exhibition structures arranged along the central axis, which extend from the entrance to the end of the main room like a spine. The vanishing point at the end is a huge hand-painted banner from the heyday of cinema advertising. As a visual prelude, a large projection with architectural photographs from the region, which is rich in impressive cinema buildings, appears in the middle of the room. White exhibition furniture, velvet red object backgrounds, contrasting with gold anodized backgrounds, are reminiscent of the "golden age of cinema". The design of the cabinets is reduced to basic, recurring elements, thus achieving maximum focus on the content itself.

Designer Hannes Bierkämper from südstudio says: "Cinema thrives on big images. And that was also our approach for the exhibition. This makes it just as magical as the cinema experience itself."

In addition to the classics such as guided tours and workshops, there will be a series of lectures, excursions, two panel discussions and the most extensive film program ever to accompany a special exhibition at the Ruhr Museum. The daily offerings include the free audio guide, narrated by none other than actor Henning Baum, and the free quiz for families with children aged 6 and over. Both lead to the highlights of the exhibition.

To accompany the exhibition, various film series will start in September 2024 - both at the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site and at the "Filmstudio Glückauf" and in some Essen districts. As part of 25 Sunday matinees, Essen's film art theaters will be showing outstanding feature films from the last 100 years that were shot in the Ruhr region or deal with the milieu and typical characters of the region. As part of the Wanderkino series of events, five classic films will be shown in their original Turkish, Spanish, Greek and Ukrainian versions with German subtitles. They will be shown in a living room atmosphere in various districts of Essen. From October, a documentary film series will follow at the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site, where rarely shown film treasures from the last 120 years will be presented on ten Tuesday evenings. Film experts will introduce the events, which will be followed by discussions with the audience. Detailed information on the film screenings will be available here from mid-August and in the film program booklet published at the same time.

Various guided tours are available for school classes, in which the cinema and film history of the Ruhr region is discussed in the exhibition using exhibits and film clips. The pupils use exhibits to analyze the special features of the Ruhr region in film. To help you plan your visit, you can download the accompanying material for schools for the special exhibition "Glückauf - Film ab!" here.

The exhibition project, the accompanying program and the catalog were generously supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung, Allbau GmbH, Kulturstiftung Essen, Sparkasse Essen, Stadtwerke Essen AG and Stiftung Mercator.