Clarke Elgin

Cinema Museologica

Year: 2008

Keywords: , ,

Information:

Institution:
Queen's University of Belfast
(at time of presentation)

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Abstract:

Cinema shares many similarities with the ‘museological project’, operating both as a means of representing archives and as an archival process in itself; it is an ideal medium through which to explore the changing function and representation of museums and archival practices throughout ‘modernity’.  While museological motifs and metaphors are prevalent in a diverse array of films, this paper will focus on the integration and abstraction of the museum in classical Hollywood narrative films such as Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby (1938) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), films that are themselves ‘archived’ in the cinema of post-war European modernists (eg. Godard, Truffaut and Marker).