Cinema and the Museum

Thoughts about the museum - collections - Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas
(Image above - Warburg Library, Warburg Institute, London)

Deadline for submissions for "Moving Image and Institution: Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century" Conference is Friday 18 February.

Moving Image and Institution: Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century seeks to establish a new international forum for discussion of the physical and theoretical intersections between cinema, screen media and the moving image, and the museum and institutional art space. This international, interdisciplinary conference will run alongside a range of public events in and around Cambridge in early July, to draw attention to the converging interests of both Cinema and the Museum.

Attracting academic speakers, museum professionals and artists across the spectrum of the Arts and Humanities from a range of disciplines and sectors including film studies, museum studies, architecture, history of art, modern languages, cultural geography, anthropology, ethnography and archaeology, the conference will offer an exceptional environment where cross-connections can be fostered between these fields, in order to interrogate the future shape of the very cultural institutions in which they are so heavily invested.

Cinema and the Museum have a shared heritage of historical and socio-cultural development. Both emergent in the late 19th century as public institutions, but with very different infrastructures, the public concerns of the cinema and the museum have established them firmly within the cultural imaginary of many of the key dynamics of the 20th century – from popular spectacle to Futurism, from Surrealism to the emergence of the post-colonial world, from the avant-gardes to the aftermath of total war, from the information network to the cusp of the virtual world. Both Cinema and the Museum share an ambivalent relationship between the past and the future: while safeguarding, documenting and archiving the past is a part of their shared role, the shifting technologies and modalities of cinema and the museum are also instantiating fundamental changes to what constitutes the very concepts of ‘Cinema’ or ‘The Museum’. In the 21st century museums have become extraordinary 'laboratories of change'; audio-visual media have permeated the museum space: from handheld devices to large screen projections, to interactive technologies at the intersections of material and digital culture. Cinema is entering the Museum, and the Museum is disseminating itself within the cinematic as a means of expanding its engagement with the public on multiple levels, including but certainly not limited to notions of viewing experience, immersion and object-interaction.

The conference organisers welcome the submission of abstracts for a 20 minute paper, or a 10 minute moving image/lens-based media presentation + 10 minute talk. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in total.
The organisers would also welcome proposals for roundtables or structured discussion from groups of 2-4 museum professionals, artists or other practitioners.

The call for submissions is open to academics, curators, museum professionals, filmmakers and artists and all others with professional interests in this emerging field. The focus of these papers is not limited to the contemporary period: presentations may choose to explore earlier case studies or period with a contemporary methodology, for example. It is anticipated that a publication will arise from this conference.

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following themes:

• Creative geographies
• Transformative spaces of the cinematic
• Film and moving image installations
• Proto-cinematic technologies and the museum
• Visual narratives in cultural institutions
• Materiality and digital media
• Sociological trajectories in cinema and in the museum space
• The role of the public institution in moving image practice
• Exhibition practices and cinematic exhibition
• Curatorial practice in the new museum
• Cinema and the new museology
• Ethnographic film
• Filming the archive and archiving the film
• Performative spaces and screen language
• The Virtual Museum
• Film and user/visitor experience
• Audio-visual mediation and the presence of the screen in the museum space
• Museums on film
• Museums and genre cinema
• Period film and questions of authenticity
• Museums, memorials and commemoration: display and exposure

Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be directed to jlgc3@cam.ac.uk  with the subject heading “CINEMA AND THE MUSEUM CONFERENCE” no later than 18 February 2011.

http://cambridge.academia.edu/JennyChamarette/Blog/5894/Moving-Image-and-Institution-Cinema-and-the-Museum-in-the-21st-Century

The Cinemas of Transactions

by Leon Gurovitch on Dec 22, 2010 • 8:44 am

This research offers a reading of the relationship between the cinematic image and the promotional process in the context of emerging digital technologies. Asserting that computer generated image forms now function as a single currency across multiple audiovisual economies, this thesis posits a new understanding of digital attractions as constituting a ‘cinemas of transactions’. Neither a singular, unitary ‘cinema’ nor a singular ‘transaction’, the cinemas of transactions constitutes a complex and multiply interrelated system of textual, technological, aesthetic and economic developments whereby computer generated attractions and promotional practices span many media and textual forms. While Anglo-American film theories of the twentieth century separated the study of film form from those of spot advertising, the contemporary context, characterised by a wane in Marxist aesthetic discourse and a rise in theories of converging new media, offers a moment in which to question this separation. In this theoretical context, the relationship between the computer generated attraction and the promotional process is explored through the analysis of a broad range of media texts which all feature spectacular digital special effects. Through case studies of Hollywood films, trailers, net attractions and spot advertisements this thesis expands the work of film theories conducted in the 1980 and 1990s into the expanding domain of new media discourse.

Keywords:
Cinema of Attractions, Digital Media, CGI, Advertising, High Concept, New Media, Product Placement, The Train Effect, Cinemas of Transactions, Youtube, Digitextual, Audiovisual Culture.
Publisher:
Television and New Media
Link to Article:
Article can be accessed here

WEBSITE: http://www.drleongurevitch.com/?p=68

Collected Works

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas

Review - Books http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/collected_works/

Warburg conceived of the art historian as a ‘necromancer’ who conjures up the art of the past to give it an enigmatic new life, a ‘strange figural floating’. 2 He was intrigued by the representation of movement, by the way in which the gestures of Classical bodies in motion survive into the art of the Renaissance and beyond, each image possessed by a particular ‘pathos formula’ which gives it a specific allure and is resurrected centuries later in similar attitudes and expressions. Obscurely linked by the ‘conductive medium’ of the black ground, human bodies flex and falter in an array of gestures that stretches from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to the contemporary physique of a woman golfer, from medieval zodiacal figures to a 1920s advertisement for 4711 cologne. Zeppelins float in the darkness beneath ancient cosmological maps; the entire anachronistic discordia concors is dedicated to finding the most startling relationships between images that are worlds apart. The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the ‘iconology of the interval’. God, he famously declared, resides in the details; the inhuman presence that hovers in the darkness between these images is, says the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today beginning to glimpse’. 3

In 1879 the 13-year-old Aby Warburg, the eldest son of a wealthy Hamburg banking family, is said to have traded his birthright for a more lasting inheritance. Already convinced (despite parental objections) of his future as an art historian, he struck a deal with his younger brother Max, who would inherit the family business on condition that he agreed to supply the elder Warburg with as many books as he required. (Max later wrote: ‘I gave him what I must now admit was a very large blank cheque.’) When Warburg died in 1929, his library contained 60,000 volumes and had been transformed by his colleague Fritz Saxl from a private collection into a research institution. Four years later it was transplanted to London and became the Warburg Institute, now part of London University.
If his library was already the most eccentric of collections - organized not alphabetically or according to subject but by ‘elective affinities’, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself intuited between its volumes - its oddest offshoot is surely the massive and fragmentary constellation of images that Warburg, in the last five years of his life, obsessively tended and reorganized: the Mnemosyne Atlas. It is the strangest of art-historical artefacts: the kaleidoscopic image of the scholar’s enigmatic reordering of a lifetime’s meditation on the image. The Atlas, wrote Warburg, was ‘a ghost story for adults’: it invents a kind of phantomic science of the image, a ghost dance in which the most resonant gestures and expressions its creator had discovered in the course of his career return with a spooky insistence, suddenly cast into wholly new relationships.
In a sense, the Mnemosyne Atlas has never really existed, at least not in the form Warburg envisaged. At the time of his death it comprised 79 wooden panels, covered with black fabric, on which were pinned some 2,000 photographs from Warburg’s collection. The project was never completed, and only ever constituted a provisional version of its eventual incarnation in book form. 1 The panels themselves were lost when Warburg’s colleagues, fleeing Nazi Germany, relocated to London, and the images are now dispersed in the archives of the institute. Warburg’s final arrangement of the Atlas survives, however, as a series of 79 photographs. In reproductions these are often cropped to show only the black background and the luminous images, but the original photographs include the edges of the panels, beyond which can be glimpsed the shelves of Warburg’s library, so that you cannot fail to imagine the scholar himself at the centre of his grand photographic planetarium, setting the whole thing in fantastic motion as he searches for the proper arrangement of his fragmentary universe.
Warburg conceived of the art historian as a ‘necromancer’ who conjures up the art of the past to give it an enigmatic new life, a ‘strange figural floating’. 2 He was intrigued by the representation of movement, by the way in which the gestures of Classical bodies in motion survive into the art of the Renaissance and beyond, each image possessed by a particular ‘pathos formula’ which gives it a specific allure and is resurrected centuries later in similar attitudes and expressions. Obscurely linked by the ‘conductive medium’ of the black ground, human bodies flex and falter in an array of gestures that stretches from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to the contemporary physique of a woman golfer, from medieval zodiacal figures to a 1920s advertisement for 4711 cologne. Zeppelins float in the darkness beneath ancient cosmological maps; the entire anachronistic discordia concors is dedicated to finding the most startling relationships between images that are worlds apart. The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the ‘iconology of the interval’. God, he famously declared, resides in the details; the inhuman presence that hovers in the darkness between these images is, says the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today beginning to glimpse’. 3
It is perhaps fitting that the sturdy panels of Warburg’s unfinished project have vanished somewhere between Hamburg and London, evanesced into the dark drawers of the institute’s present archive. The notion of its essential immateriality, its existence as a pure phantasmagoria in the imagination of its author, is given a faint outline on the pages of the large hardback notebooks in which Warburg ceaselessly planned and revised its shape. The pencilled ghosts of absent images haunt these volumes’ notional arrangements of the actual material. With their blank squares and scrawled captions, they are the perverse mirror images of the textless patterns on the photographic plates, hastily sketched storyboards for a movie that only ever played in the mind of the scholar/director. Warburg, who was obsessed by the figure of Laocoön, the dying Trojan prince, seems to have conceived of art history according to an image from G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), in which the German writer describes the poetic and painterly depiction of mist: ‘it is used to render both the visible invisible and the invisible visible’. Gaze long enough at the dark screen of Mnemosyne and it is like looking at a ‘black’ cinema screen; as your eyes grow used to the dark, something comes to light: the screen itself, the empty but meaningful interval between images.
If there is a ghostly quality to the Mnemosyne Atlas, perhaps it resides in the odd amalgam of science and superstition that it shares with other works on the image and memory. It looks back to the taxonomic efforts of Charles Darwin to photograph the essences of human emotions, and forward to the memorial extravagance of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962-ongoing). But it also brushes up against Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’ and Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘monogram’: the memory-image that adheres to the last photograph of a loved one. Despite Warburg’s intense effort to bring the past into focus in the present, it appears to suggest that an anatomy of the image is only ever a science of spectres: an impression heightened by its sudden demise in 1929, as if Warburg had succeeded in freeze-framing European culture in a paradoxical pose of frenzied immobility, just before the continent was plunged into the terrible mass-mobilization that sent his colleagues into exile in 1933. Warburg turned the scholarly archive into a mobile (and moving) artwork, transforming, as Karl Kraus wrote of the true artist, a solution into an enigma.

1. Eventually published as Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
2. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes, Zone Books, New York, 2004, p. 261.
3. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, p. 90.

Brian Dillon


REVIEW: Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes, Zone Books, New York, 2004,
http://glasgow.academia.edu/RichardWoodfield/Papers/154061/Review_of_Philippe-Alain_Michaud_Aby_Warburg_and_the_Image_in_Motion

ABY WARBURG - In 1886 Warburg began his study of art history, history and archaeology in Bonn and attended the lectures on the history of religion by Hermann Usener, those on cultural history by Karl Lamprecht and on art history by Carl Justi. He continued his studies in Munich and with Hubert Janitschek in Strasbourg, completing under him his dissertation on Botticelli’s paintings The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

THE WARBURG INSTITUTE - http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=119