Museum without Objects: A Phenomenological Study of the Cinema Museum

ABSTRACT

Traditional museums consistently attend to the collection, research, and exhibition of material objects. When it meets cinema, the museum begins to transform its perspective from object-oriented to experience-oriented, shifting its aim from the musealisation of objects to the musealisation of Being and ushering in the birth of the “cinema museum”. Expanding from the phenomenological perspective, we contend that the cinema museum's primary purpose is not the cognition of material objects such as artifacts and technologies; rather, it is concerned with bringing into audiences’ perceptual world the living experience or the meanings expressed through film, thereby embodying phenomenological cinematic worlds as opposed to presenting a knowledge-based history of films. Unlike traditional museums, a proper cinema museum will demonstrate a new existential mode—a “museum without objects”—in which musealia is not to be cognised through the museality of objects but to be experienced through the museality of Being.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum
• phenomenology
• museality
• cinema
• musealisation

Acknowledgements

We extend special thanks to Laishun An for sharing ideas about this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Westworld is a science fiction series released by HBO in 2016. The TV play envisages a role-playing theme park which mirrors the American western culture. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a virtual world based on a series of Marvel Pictures films. Ghibli Park is a theme park designed according to several classic films produced by Studio Ghibli. The Metaverse consists of a digital living space incorporating a new social system built with the help of digital and virtual technologies. Despite the fact that they all offer virtual experiences, cinema museums place an emphasis on providing virtual experiences based on cinematic worlds.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Ministry of Education of China [Grant Number 22YJC760138].