Museum film as a means of making museums

This paper explores the potential offered by a cinematographic approach to the study of museums, particularly science centres. By setting up an intermedial lens that maps between the museum medium and film – particularly the visitor experiences in museums onto a specific genre of museum film – correspondences between these media and their respective ‘grammars’ are analysed. After a brief overview of the relationship between museums and film in the twentieth century, a language of documentary film suitable for museum film is introduced based on the film theory of Jon Boorstin, who also directed a film on the Exploratorium in San Fancisco, which adapted post-war insights in communication design as developed by the Eames Office. Reviewing five documentaries about the Exploratorium shows that only Boorstin’s museum film could adequately convey the museum experience to others, thus going beyond intermediality to enable a transmedial transfer. How this film emerged through the cooperation of the Exploratorium with the Eames Office and national funding agencies is presented in some detail in order to show that the intermedial lens can work both ways, allowing for the transmedial application of film analysis to the museums themselves

Film festival · Film studies · Lens (geology) · Order (exchange) · Through-the-lens metering · Visitor pattern · Cinema and Media Studies · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · Museums and Cultural Heritage