Eye Filmmuseum

Museum · Amsterdam-Noord (Overhoeks)Amsterdam,Netherlands

A white faceted building on the north bank of the IJ, no two sides alike, reached only by boat, its archive kept somewhere else.

The Eye Filmmuseum is a white, faceted building on the north bank of the IJ with no two sides the same, so it changes shape as you walk around it. Inside, almost no angle is square, and the route up to the exhibition rooms was made deliberately longer than it needed to be. A wide wooden staircase faces a full-height glass wall, and that wall frames the old city across the water. Four cinemas sit behind it. The Viennese architects finished it in 2012 and laid the inside out like a film sequence. What you will not see here is the archive: since 2016 the films have been kept in a separate depot elsewhere in Amsterdam-Noord, more than fifty thousand of them. They include the entire stock of one 1910s Amsterdam distributor, which UNESCO has listed. What reaches this building is whatever is on a screen or in a case. There is no bridge across the IJ at this point, so everyone arrives by boat.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come late in the day and stay outside first — The building faces south across the water, so late sun lands on the terrace while the old city opposite lights up.
Check whether a screening has live accompaniment — Silent programmes here are often played with a musician in the room, improvising to the picture, which is the thing this cinema can do that an ordinary one cannot.
Most of the building costs nothing to enter — The hall, the cafe, the terrace and the steps down to the water are open to anyone; only the basement exhibition and the four cinemas are ticketed.
Try to find a right angle inside — Walls lean, floors fold up into walls, and the main staircase is built as seating, so the interior reads as one continuous surface rather than a set of rooms.

Things to do

1
Sit on the steps and read the opposite bank
Leave the building on the water side and go down the wide steps to the edge. Facing you is the whole front of the old city, with the station in the middle and church towers standing up behind it. Stay long enough for a ship to cross the frame and for the light to change.
2
Take a seat halfway up the wooden stair
Find the broad wooden staircase in the main hall and sit down on it. It faces a full-height glass wall and is built as seating rather than as a way upstairs. The glass works like a cinema screen, except that what moves across it is the harbour itself, with ferries and freight passing in real time.
3
Cross in the middle of the night
Take the ferry back long after the last tram. The boats run all night, they are nearly empty and the deck is open to the weather. From mid-channel the old city is a low line of light and the north bank is dark, and you finally see how wide this water actually is.