LOUISIANA, DENMARK.- The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents Starlight - 100 years of film stills, on view through February 25, 2007. When we remember scenes from a film, it is often not the film itself that we see in our mind’s eye, but the distinctive, highly evocative photos with which the film has been launched, promoted and later documented in books or on posters. It is the ‘shots’ that have come to stand for posterity as the very epitome of a particular film. Ideally, they capture not only the frozen moment of shutter time but the whole mood and meaning otherwise played out over time in the narrative of the film. We know them all from the showcases and foyers of the cinemas – and from the newspapers, where they have typically been used as illustrations of the reviews.

The twentieth century has been called the century of film, and there is no doubt that film as a medium has been important to our culture in an almost inconceivable number of different ways and with a power that is overwhelming; it has fundamentally affected our way of telling stories, our way of seeing the world, our knowledge of the world outside our own little circle, the formation of our identities and thus our behaviour on the large and small scale. Film is our strongest common cultural reference, perhaps the only one that really is common to us all.

The exhibition shows more than 700 film stills in many different formats and presentational forms. Today the still is a field of research, an obsession, a collector’s item and first and foremost an acknowledged genre on its own terms. The exhibition unfolds the history of film for us, but it also shows us something that is not in itself film, but rather a history of culture and mentality. In Copenhagen, at the Danish Film Institute in Gothersgade, we have one of the world’s finest collections of film stills – some 2.3 million pictures from the whole history of the medium, and it is with a point of departure in this unique body of material that Louisiana is mounting an exhibition of about 500 carefully selected photos.

The exhibition is arranged by Louisiana in collaboration with the Danish Film School and the Danish Film Institute and is supported by The Greater Copenhagen Authority HUR. Architects: Gudrun Krabbe and Anne Schnettler.