The museum of the Film Archive comprises a small jewel in the history of Greek cinema. The rare exhibits found here include: a collection of the first movie cameras and projectors as well as a complete range of early equipment and objects used in the production and editing of sound and image. There is also an exhibition of “pre-cinema” projection devices, such as: zoetropes, kinetoscopes, praxinoscopes, magic lanterns and others.
The Museum traces its beginnings to 1990 and the ground floor of the Deligiorgi Mansion, where the Greek Film Archive was housed. There was displayed a collection of exhibits - both graphic and mechanical – which contributed to the birth of the motion picture. The exhibits were divided into 4 categories:
I. The first category concerns the prehistory of Cinema where, through drawings, the play of shadows, rock paintings of many-footed animals, games involving the movement of flame etc. are reproduced.
II. In the second category, there is a collection of original mechanical devices used from the 17th to the end of the 18th century for the reproduction of movement. The exhibits of this series include zoetropes, magic lanterns, phenakistoscopes, gyroscopes, etc.
III. The third category includes the “persistence of vision – and its applications”: namely: photography, beams of light and photographic lenses, film and its properties and the first production of the Lumière brothers.
IV. Finally, the fourth category, which is the richest exhibit in terms of artifacts, includes movie cameras and projectors from 1910 up 1970, developers, printers, recording devices, montage tables and a wide range of tools used in different phases of the craft.
Concerning the current period its main goal is to reopen the film museum so as to be able to exhibit again its collections of apparatuses that predated the modern film projector-zoetrope’s, kinetoskopes, magic lanterns-to the earliest film cameras and projectors. There are also early films and cameras and projectors, together with a collection of set designs and costumes and a large collection of posters, some of which will be displayed permanently and others periodically. The small film museum used to operate in the previous seat of Tainiothiki, at Deligiorgis house (this was the original headquarters of Tainiothiki) and has been documented in Theo Angelopoulos film Ulysses gaze. A new museological plan has been made Professor Liti and has been submitted to the Ministry of culture.
