This chapter looks at museums’ long relationship with moving image technologies, from the introduction of the moving image into museum spaces such as auditoriums and galleries, to the ways in which museums have engaged with broadcast and cinema outside their own buildings. While museums are often seen as antithetical to media and to mass culture, they have actually enthusiastically engaged with these media. Wasson provides a historical account which demonstrates their mutual imbrication. Focusing on the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), New York City, and its early history of experiment and collaboration with cinema and television, Wasson argues that assessing film technologies within and beyond the museum requires us to think more fully about what constitutes museum space (auditoriums, museum mobiles, traveling shows) and what constitutes the pace and rhythm of a museum visit. The chapter addresses media in the context of museums not just as content but as infrastructure, and in certain cases as architectural elements of the museum, and suggests that the museum should not be thought of solely as a permanent, unmoving physical structure but as a kind of tentacular hub for a range of circulating things and ways of presenting those things: an elastic, mediated museum.
Film studies is currently undergoing a needed and healthy expansion of methodologies and critical approaches, including media, cultural and technology studies. This is crucial not just for examining cinemas present but also its past. Using format theory, this article opens up our understanding of what cinema has been, rather than what it should have been. It does this by documenting the minor technological footprint of movie theatres when compared to the expansive one consisting of 8mm and 16mm small-gauge projectors. In the United States by 1980, these portable devices,outnumbered commercial theatres by an estimated factor of 1000:1.
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