Museums and the Moving Image

Museums and the Moving Image is the first volume to span overlapping but disciplinarily distinct research into museums, exhibitions, art and film. It draws together approaches in art history, museum studies, anthropology, film studies, performance studies and digital cultures, to uncover the shared ethical and political concerns about two crucial sites of knowledge creation: in the moving image, and in the cultural institution of the museum. Whether or not you know the artwork or film in question, Jenny Chamarette writes in a language that speaks to specialists and non-specialists alike about issues of Eurocentrism, colonialism, race and gender. She institutes a new way of thinking, through cinemuseology, a practice of understanding the entwined and parallel cultural powers of cinema and the museum. From her exploration of French museum-funded ethnography of the 1950s and West African cinema’s retort to it, to disruptions of performance, video and digital art by women artists in North American museums from the 1970s; from moving image artists’ millennial probing of the 18th century white men whose private hoards lead to the first collections of public museums in the UK, to the hopeful and healing restoration of the B/black archive in contemporary global installation art; from the caring archive of indigenous documentary filmmaking, to the work of experimental filmmakers in Britain; Chamarette consistently asks: how do moving images make the museum think?