Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences? Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

Perfectly Boring? The Public Afterlife of Private Films

<p>Home movies are now viewed in a variety of public contexts, a shift that entails a loss of their original meanings. In order to consider the impact of exhibiting these private documents, this thesis analyses the use of home movies within recycled footage productions, archival curation and online video-sharing. Investigating a variety of formal and informal screening contexts through close readings and archival research, it asks: what meanings do home movies acquire in new contexts? How might the reuse of home movies affect our understandings of their production and the past they portray? Does a perception that home movies could appear boring influence how they are framed or altered for public audiences? Due to their form and content, home movies may seem ill-suited to public exhibition. Popular discourses about home movies during their heyday of production reveal a widespread belief that they were boring (for outsiders) to watch. While recent literature has assessed home movies more favourably, it has tended to overlook their potential to bore viewers who have no personal relationship to them. Drawing upon theories of boredom, this study argues meaningfulness is the principal factor determining whether a viewer finds a particular film interesting or boring. In their original form, home movies may appear relatively meaningless and therefore boring to public audiences. Recycled footage films re-edit images, however, to create engaging viewing experiences through narrative and affect. While more experimental productions frequently question the evidential value of home movie images, television documentaries tend to encourage audiences to perceive footage as authentic or nostalgic. Narrative and affect also feature in the exhibition strategies of moving image archives. Curated public programmes provide informative and enjoyable viewing for general audiences, but almost inevitably promote certain understandings of the past by offering specific interpretations of selected films. Moreover, the affective appeal of home movie images may outweigh other forms of meaning for viewers, particularly in community or participatory screening contexts. Online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, which are curated by algorithms rather than human expertise, feature numerous home movies without any kind of framing or description. While this might seem profoundly boring, viewer comments suggest meaninglessness can foster imaginative and empathetic responses to home movies, often expressed as nostalgic longing. This propensity of home movie footage within different screening contexts to encourage nostalgic sentiments, or a belief that life was better in the past, has implications for collective memory and understandings of history. Moreover, the ability of at least some viewers to enjoy home movies in relatively contextless spaces suggests that in certain instances qualities associated with boredom may not be a significant impediment to meaningful experience after all.</p>

BETWEEN REAL AND SYMBOLIC SPACE. DEATH REPRESENTATION IN WIKTOR TOŁKIN’S MARTYROLOGY MONUMENTS

It is the representation of death in the monuments by Wiktor Tołkin found at the former concentration camps: Stutthof (at Sztutowo) and Majdanek (in Lublin) that is discussed. As an art historian, the Author confronts Tołkin’s monuments with the theorical framework related to the aesthetics of death representations in martyrology museums. The monuments were created in the late 1960s. The Author has studied how the monuments coincide with the contemporary exhibition strategies used in Holocaust-dedicated museums.

Archiving Asian Cinema

This chapter explores issues of archiving and digital preservation in light of changing exhibition strategies, with a focus on the important roles played by the South East Asia Pacific Audio Visual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA) and the Asian Film Archive (AFA) in the creation and maintenance of a regional Asian cinema. The chapter also considers the issue of archiving broadly, to encompass not only the physical preservation of films from Asia but also journals, societies, and other forums that have sought to preserve scholarly interpretations of those films.

Co-Mix and Exhibitions: Interview with Art Spiegelman

This chapter includes a 2017 interview conducted by art historian Kim A. Munson with Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman about his touring retrospective Co-Mix, exhibition strategies, Masters of American Comics, narrative in exhibits relating to Maus and R. Crumb’s Genesis, Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode paintings, the wordless comics of Si Lewen, and the flattening of art history.

Experiencing the Filmpoem

Susannah Ramsay’s Experiencing the Filmpoem: A Film-Phenomenological Inquiry presents five short experimental films which evoke multi-sensorial experiences for the viewer through visceral combinations of lens manipulation, camera movement and rhythmic editing. For Ramsay, filmpoems are a synthesis of these experimental techniques with poetic narration and soundscapes which constitute a deeply personal, expressive form of filmmaking. Her written statement contextualises this practice with historical insights and outlines her exhibition strategies for the work which aim to produce a reciprocal relationship between the artwork, the screening space and the viewer to provide an embodied experience.

‘More like an Arcade’ – The Limitations of Playable Games in Museum Exhibitions

This study investigated the relationship between playable, interactive games on original hardware and the representation of game culture using the case of the exhibition Game On 2.0, often considered to be the largest exhibition of digital games in the West so far. Our results suggest that play as a way of engaging with games as museum objects has limitations which make it necessary to add other means of contextualization in order to afford critical engagement with digital games as contemporary culture. Play excludes visitors who lack necessary gaming skills as well as many genres of games which need longer or different kinds of interaction than a museum can allow for in the context of an exhibition. Moreover, we show that not all games can be exhibited in the same way and that we need to adapt exhibition strategies to individual game and their properties and contexts.

The Museum and its Spectres

This chapter analyses a number of exhibitions that include ghostly apparitions of historical figures, in a modern and high-tech version of the 18th and 19th century Phantasmagoria. This kind of solution is particularly common in history and memory museums, where audio-visual projections of historical characters or testimonies appear, like spectres, to tell their story to visitors. The chapter analyses some relevant case studies, which include Peter Greenaway’s Peopling the Palaces, an artistic audio-visual installation in the historical site of Venaria Reale, in Italy. These kind of audio-visual exhibition strategies create evocative and impressive experiences, intensifying the emotional impact of the exhibitions and the visitors’ involvement.

Introduction

The introduction presents the subject of the monograph: the use of moving images in the exhibition design of museums. The focus is on different kinds of institutions, chiefly art, history, science and ethnographic museums in Europe and the US. Within these settings, films and audio-visuals are not displayed as works of art, but rather as tools for contextualization, explanation or visitor engagement. However, their role is far from being merely instrumental, and they deeply affect the exhibition strategies of museums. Furthermore, the introduction provides the theoretical framework of the monograph and illustrates the methodology. In order to investigate the display of moving images in museums, the book adopts a strongly interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical and methodological tools drawn primarily from museum, film, and media studies. Following museum studies, it pays attention not only to the way in which exhibition design can influence the meaning of the exhibits, but also to the type of relationship that the visitor establishes with the contents proposed by the institution. On the other hand, film and media studies offer methodological instruments to investigate the dissemination of moving images outside the movie theatres, both in the past and in the present.