We all have movies that we want to learn everything about. Documentaries and interviews usually provide cinephiles with anecdotes from production and shed light on the intention of the filmmakers, while Google searches and Wikipedia help to fill in the gaps. But some films and filmmakers are so popular and impactful that they actually require their own museums.
Gerhard Strassgschwandtner was such a die-hard fan of the 1949 classic film noir The Third Man , about a pulp novelist investigating the death of an old friend, that in 2005 he opened up the Third Man Museum in the Fourth District of Vienna, alongside fellow enthusiast Karin Höfler. “The museum is a project of enthusiasts. It is a private museum without sponsors and subsidies,” writes Strassgschwandtner over email.
Across 16 rooms, the Third Man Museum displays 3,200 artifacts, including the original scripts, the cameras that shot the film, interviews with its cast and crew, and the zither used by Austrian composer Anton Karas to record its iconic soundtrack . British director Carol Reed ’s seminal film noir isn’t the only cinematic phenomenon to get this treatment. The Mad Max 2 Museum in Silverton, Australia, is full of memorabilia from the 1981 dystopian action film that will transport you to the post-apocalypse.
The Ghibli Museum on the outskirts of Tokyo will make you feel like you’re walking through an animation from Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki ’s Studio Ghibli . Northern Italy’s Fellini Muse.