A postcard. Of a Cinema. Yes, it is that exciting.

Last Weekend the best girlfriend ever and myself made one of those unavoidable journeys to Germany that tend to ruin the weekend as there is the inevitable early morning dash to the airport, the never-ending desire to throw something at Germans who just can’t queue and far too much Weissbier. To alleviate this conundrum we extracted ourselves from our family duties and ventured to Duesseldorf (also known as Ork-City), to visit the city’s Film Museum, combining lore and light entertainment. Placed in an attractive street of this otherwise drab town, the entrance of the Film Museum bristles with toned down efficiency, and a friendly attendant takes your money and sends you up the stairs. There you enter the ‘panthenon of directors’, a circular collection of pillars with a picture, quotes and some trivia on famous and rather obscure directors. I have no problem with the fact that the curators find Andrzej Wajda as good as Howard Hawks and Hitchcock (but omitting Kazan and Houston) but please, at least tell us which films they were responsible for. Movies past 1980 don’t seem to be included, so no Fincher, Spielberg or Polanski.

Really?

The rest of the museum is an uninspired, haphazard collection of old projection and recording material thrown together with some postcards of cinemas worldwide, some programmes from the forties and thirties and a ludicrous motley accumulation of figurines (and a Harry Potter cup). The shelves are dusty and the whole place looks like someone has taken some cinematic collections and randomly placed them around the limited space. There is no programmatic thread and no cohesion.

Heartily uninspiring and disappointing. Avoid.