Architectures of Containment

Cinema and the Colonial Museum Infrastructures

Bibliographic Data

ID22223381
AuthorsEkin Pınar (0000-0002-8367-1234, Middle East Technical University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume17
Issue1
Pages127-155
Publication date2026-06-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
Venuesinecine Sinema Araştırmaları Dergisi (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2636-784X
PublisherSinema Arastirmalari Dergisi (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.32001/sinecine.1913635
OpenAlexW7163182187
LanguageEN
References cited25

Colonial museums do not simply display looted objects; they regulate their visibility, movement, and containment through interconnected infrastructures of exhibition, storage, and circulation. This article examines how cinema critically represents and destabilizes these museal infrastructures through three films: Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, dir. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953),You Hide Me(dir. Nii Kwate Owoo, 1970), andDahomey(dir. Mati Diop, 2024). The article argues that these films conceptualize and, in turn, challenge the colonial museum as “architectures of containment.” These interrelated spatial formations (the vitrine, the storage vault, the shipping crate, and the journey) control and define the visibility, mobility, and meaning of stolen cultural artifacts. While recent scholarship has emphasized the museum’s role in colonial accumulation, this article argues that cinema provides us with its own distinct mode of analysis by revealing and challenging these infrastructural systems that underpin it. Accordingly, it demonstrates how cinema shifts our attention from the museum as a site of display to the spatial regimes of display, storage, packaging, and transport. Through its reintroduction of agency, visibility, and mobility to looted artifacts within these four spatial regimes, cinema thus constitutes its own counter-museum

Colonialism · Movie theater · Scholarship · African history and culture studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · South African History and Culture

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access