Research Tips for the Video and Audio Catalog

The Video and Audio Catalog contains all films and scores in our collection. It can be searched according to different needs: You can search for individual films, films by specific directors, films from a specific year or country. In the audio library, you can search for single scores or the scores of certain composers.

You can also search with keywords, i.e., thematic terms, or for documentaries about filmmakers.

Here you will find useful tips on completing a successful search:

To search for a specific film or film score: Enter “original title”.

Note: The films are always listed under their original title, e.g. "The Birds" or "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis". Translated titles (whether German or other languages), on the other hand, are not always recorded. A search for "Die Vögel" or "Willkommen bei den Sch'tis" may therefore not produce any results, even though the films are available.

Tip: Have you forgotten the original title of a film? On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) you can figure out what a German-translated film title is in the original.

To search for the films of a specific director: Enter Name.

Tip 1: If you enter only the last name, the films of all directors with that last name will appear. Therefore, searching for "Kaurismäki" will return not only the films of Aki but also those of Mika Kaurismäki. Searching for "Aki Kaurismäki", on the other hand, yields only the films of Aki Kaurismäki.

Tip 2: If the director comes from a linguistic area with a non-Latin alphabet (Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc.), it can be helpful to start several searches with different spellings ("Tarkowski"/"Tarkovsky", "Muratowa"/"Muratova").

All films in our collection are indexed and can be searched for by thematic keywords. You can search for:

• Genres (e.g., "adventure film", "screwball comedy")
• Motifs, themes, materials (e.g., "adolescence", "colonialism")
• characters (e.g., "doctor character", "menacing husband", "twins")
• settings (e.g., "village", "prison", "desert")
• film historical periods (e.g., "Cinema Novo", "New Hollywood")
• narrative forms and narrative aspects (e.g., "episodic film", "parody")
• production and reception aspects (e.g., "connection product", "censorship case")
• film adaptations (e.g., "comic adaptation", "literary adaptation")

Note: Only terms contained in the keyword index (in the catalog to the right of the search fields) can be used as keywords. A search with other terms will not yield any results.

The video library has about 4000 documentaries about filmmakers (actors, directors, cinematographers, editors, composers, etc.). To search for documentaries about a specific person: Enter the name of the person.

Note 1: The list of persons (in the catalog to the right of the search fields) contains the names of all filmmakers about whom (at least) one documentary film is available. A search with other names will not yield any hits.

Note 2: To search for films about a director: Enter name in the "Person" search field. To search the films about a director: Enter name in the "Director" search field.

To browse for movies from a specific country: Enter “country name”.

Note: The country name must be written out in full ("Sweden"); country abbreviations ("S", "SE") will not produce any matches.

To search for movies from a specific year: Enter “year”.

Tip: To search for films from a specific time period, e.g., 1939-1945: Enter the beginning and end of the period according to the following example: "1939...1945".

To view all films released within a series (e.g., "Criterion Collection") or collection (e.g., "Bond 50: The James Bond Anniversary Collection"): Enter “name of series/collection”.

To search for the scores of a composer: Enter their name in “Schnellsuche Audiothek".

To start a combined search, enter multiple terms in the search bars in one query.

Example 1: To search for all Swiss films of the 1980s, enter "Switzerland" and "1980...1989".

Example 2: To search for the British films of Alfred Hitchcock, enter "Alfred Hitchcock" and "Great Britain".

If several matches of the same movie appear in the search result, it means that it is available in different editions. These differ in one or more points (language version, length, picture format, available subtitles, carrier medium, etc.).

Tip: If there are several results for the same film, it is advisable to click on "Detailed view" to be able to compare the information.