Museums of Cinema and Their Audience

Museums of Cinema and their Audience examines how cinema has been transformed and strengthened through museological and archival activities since its origins, and asks what paradoxes may be involved in putting cinema in a museum. Cere examines the ideas which developed around the need to establish n [...]
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Museums of Cinema and their Audience examines how cinema has been transformed and strengthened through museological and archival activities since its origins, and asks what paradoxes may be involved in putting cinema in a museum. Cere examines the ideas which developed around the need to establish national museums of cinema, how these have negotiated and defined the boundary between the national and the international in their exhibitionary and screening practices. She looks at the tensions between the history of film as an aesthetic product and cinema as a 'leisure' activity, and at how, museums of cinema's exhibitions, collections and festivals organised under their aegis, resolve them. The book also explores the way the ideal of public access to a cultural heritage is contradicted by the recent emphasis on museums as 'tourist spaces for individualised consumption'.All these themes combined will be concretised through the empirical study of five different museums of cinema, including a visitor and audience study and interviews with leading staff, adopting a comparative focus because the resolution of many of the theoretical questions posed above may be shaped by the prevailing sense of national cultural and filmic traditions, as well as the motivations of founders and funding agencies, which may be inflected differently in varying national contexts.