Online Publications by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Interviews by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Rick Prelinger wears many hats: he is an archivist and an activist, a writer and a filmmaker; he ... more Rick Prelinger wears many hats: he is an archivist and an activist, a writer and a filmmaker; he has preserved the eccentricities and banalities of American cultural heritage and projected them back to the world via both Open Access digital repositories and carefully curated programs of ephemeral and orphaned films. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of about 60,000 industrial, advertising, educational, and amateur films, which encourage and facilitate not only preservation, but appropriation by allowing free access, downloading and reuse of its materials.
For this special issue Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera, and Papagena Robbins reached Prelinger virtually to talk about his work, bridging the distance between Montreal, Quebec, and Santa Cruz, California, where he currently works as an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California. The text that follows is an edited interview with Prelinger about his films, his work as an archivist, and the establishment of Prelinger Archives.
! irst one drop of rain, then another, hit the lens, blurring the vistas in front of it. A gust o... more ! irst one drop of rain, then another, hit the lens, blurring the vistas in front of it. A gust of wind moves the camera, precariously attached to a homemade windmill, and frames the natural scenery. The raindrop is not a stain, nor is the wind a disruption; rather, these elements represent some of the many ways in which nature participates in Chris Welsby's films. The rain, the wind, the tide-these are his intimate co-workers, accompanying his solitary journeys to mountain vistas and coastal estuaries and actively shaping the films' form and temporality.
Reviews by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Necsus - European Journal of Media Studies, 2012
El cine en el espacio del arte. , 2010
Londres Wallflower Press, 2007 259 páginas 11.89 £ / 21,55 ! Bajo el lapidario título de Subversi... more Londres Wallflower Press, 2007 259 páginas 11.89 £ / 21,55 ! Bajo el lapidario título de Subversion. The Definitive History of Underground Cinema, Duncan Reekie nos presenta un recorrido por lo que él define como cine underground y que es sobre todo el resultado de su experiencia personal como director de cine y activista del colectivo londinense Exploding Cinema. Tanto por medio del libro como por medio de la práctica, la intención de Reekie es exponer un modelo de hacer, exhibir y distribuir el cine fuera del circuito, del mercado y de las instituciones que sustentan a una maquinaria oficial, en su opinión, profundamente restrictiva. El autor trata de elaborar una historia diferente de un cine, el underground, que no ha encontrado su espacio junto a otros géneros o movimientos dentro de la historia del cine más canónica; desde su perspectiva, busca insertar este movimiento dentro de la cultura dominante, y en ese sentido la frase «historia definitiva» empleada en el título resulta un tanto contradictoria, puesto que nos sitúa más cerca de ese con-cepto de historia única del que Reekie tanto se queja. La ironía es el arma que en ciertos momentos el autor utiliza para no caer en una visión excesivamente canónica, ironía que se nutre de un cierto espíritu de revancha presente por ejemplo al abordar su crítica a las instituciones oficiales.
Selected Conference Presentations/Talks by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
In this talk, I explore the parallels between women's labor in the creative industries and in the... more In this talk, I explore the parallels between women's labor in the creative industries and in the knowledge economy of the corporate university. Both contexts are marked by casualization, increased job insecurity, and a culture of personal commitment that privileges long, unstructured working patterns. These, along with the need to constantly nurture professional networks contribute to blur professional and personal identities, what leads to feelings of burnout, exhaustion, and perceptions of failure in performing what is expected. I argue that these issues affect more intensively women workers, especially those in the lower ranks: below the line workers, graduate students, early career researchers, and part-time faculty members (and more so if we add racial difference and class to the question of gender). Considering the situation described here, would it help to return to the micropolitics of the personal and raise awareness of a culture of work that has become rather pervasive and damaging? How can we use feminist labor politics to mobilize from within?
Since the 1990’s blockbuster-movie themed traveling exhibitions such as The Dinosaurs of Jurassic... more Since the 1990’s blockbuster-movie themed traveling exhibitions such as The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (American Museum of Natural History, 1993), Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (Smithsonian Institution, 1997), Indiana Jones and the Adventures of Archaeology (Montreal Science Museum, 2011), or Star Wars: Identities (Montreal Science Museum, 2012) have attracted millions of visitors across museums worldwide. As part of the growing subfield of media industry studies, my dissertation Coming to a Museum Near You: Blockbuster Movie-Themed Exhibitions and the Making of a Cultural Alliance discusses the blockbuster movie-themed exhibition as a new articulation of the American film industry into the context of museums and other related cultural institutions. For this one-day symposium, I would like to focus on a section of my project, which explores the significant rise of design firms and film production departments dedicated to the development, distribution, and promotion of cinematic museum events and blockbuster movie-themed exhibitions as the ones above mentioned.
Following John T. Caldwell’s cultural-industrial methodology as well as Derek Johnson’s study of the management of media franchises and their cultures of production, my project combines archival research in museum institutions with interviews to exhibition developers and technical providers to analyze the ideas, creativity, labor, and social relations that shape the networked production and circulation of blockbuster movie themed-exhibitions. Questions driving this presentation will include: How design companies and cultural workers negotiate in practice the sometimes conflicting interests of the film industry and the museum? How do these collaborations and networked practices shape both museum institution and film industrial activities today? And, in which ways are the tensions and questions around brand control and creativity dealt with and distributed among them? Overall, I will provide insights about the reliance of museums and the film industry on outsourcing practices, and the multiple production layers and daily operations that drive the development of blockbuster-movie themed exhibitions.
This presentation discusses Jurassic Park’s cross-promotional museum exhibitions and events in li... more This presentation discusses Jurassic Park’s cross-promotional museum exhibitions and events in light of Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore’s popular economic conceptualization of experience. The two economists co-authored the best-seller book, The Experience Economy, where they discussed the shift from product-based value to experience-based value, arguing that consumers were increasingly asking for experiences rather than things. By analyzing how the entertainment and cultural industries enthusiastically adopted their business model I will show how blockbuster movie-themed exhibitions were strategically used to connect museum visit with cinema-going, opening the museum to a new leisure economy. Overall, the paper will argue that this partnership makes manifest both, fundamental changes in the circulation, promotion, and consumption of media related goods, and a reconfiguration of museum space and visit.
Science fiction as a genre often relies on narratives of self-discovery that aim to explore the m... more Science fiction as a genre often relies on narratives of self-discovery that aim to explore the meaning of life and humanity not only at the personal level but also as a species. Taking the film franchise as its cue the traveling exhibition Star Wars: Identities (Montreal Science Centre, 2012) relies precisely on those generic conventions, offering visitors an experiential tour of self-discovery mediated through the characters and the props of the films. By moving sequentially between a set of interactive stations that present film objects along with gaming interfaces and screens with didactic videos, the exhibit invites visitors to learn about the biological and social forces that influence subject-formation while consuming yet another iteration of the multimedia franchise. Consequently, expanding the films’ narrative universe into the territory of science, and as such contributing to justify the presence of the franchise in the museum as well as legitimize its cultural value in the face of museum curators as something more than commercial entertainment.
Departing from the encounter between museum and Star Wars, this paper aims to interrogate the historical, political, and economic significance of this hybrid form of exhibition to propose that it functions simultaneously as a transmedia marketing tool, a disciplinary apparatus, and a symptom of biopolitical techniques of control. In order to do so I will rely on museum studies' critique of the disciplinary regime that examines the institution as a site of knowledge and citizen formation (Bennett), to move on to discuss the exhibition in light of its use of visual databases and biometrics, which altogether present the organizational principles of the biological life of the exhibit's fictional populations. In any case this paper intends to argue that visitors are subjected to these forms of power, but rather to explore the frictions and pleasures of navigating through such an ideologically charged space. Thus, the premise for writing this paper is to discuss how the museological institution shapes the presentation of the media franchise into this particular form, and ultimately understand: how is life according to Star Wars.
On May 1936, a mere two months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, M.F. Alvar publishe... more On May 1936, a mere two months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, M.F. Alvar published Cinematografía Pedagógica y Educativa. Subsidized by the Republican government, Alvar’s book was the result of a yearlong study traveling around Europe aimed at consolidating the establishment of educational cinema in the country. This somewhat untimely proposal can be understood as the culmination of the debates and initiatives undertaken by a variety of political and social actors throughout the 1930’s who embraced the use of cinema, particularly in the documentary form, as a crucial means for furthering social transformation and cultural modernization in Spain.
Departing from Alvar’s propositions this paper considers the role of documentary film in the context of educational debates in Spain during the 30’s so as to reveal the complex web of expectations, desires, and concerns that collectively contributed to imagine a vision of the future and its possibilities for social change. Likewise, it argues for the value of turning towards these emerging cultural practices, which might have not ended up rooting, but still can help us understand the role envisioned for documentary film within the debates about visual education. This is, what documentary film could have been and could have done for the state and its citizens at this particular historical time. Yet rather than reading this moment as a sign of failure, or simply of the “what could have been”, this paper reconsiders the past of educational cinema as a point of entry into the discourses shaping film’s social intervention during periods of transformation, if not crises. Ultimately, it aims to acknowledge the importance of addressing the emergence of educational cinema in Spain and reconsider its place within the larger discourses shaping how film serves the state, particular political interests, and the public.
The first half of the 20th Century saw educators and filmmakers coming together to debate the ben... more The first half of the 20th Century saw educators and filmmakers coming together to debate the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating media technologies in the classroom. Newspapers, radio, television and film played a pivotal role in mediating the relation of the students to the modern world surrounding them. Within these, film provided industrial efficiency in combination with entertainment, contributing to the development of new educational methods that reshaped teacher/student dynamics, and expanded the classroom beyond its walls through the circulation and exhibition of educational materials in other nontheatrical settings. Recent scholarly accounts have started to historicise and map the use of film as an educational tool with a particular focus on the United States, Canada, and Central Europe. These histories share a common ethos that can only be fully understood if we think of them as part of the network of ideas and debates around the educational uses and effects of film circulating across different cultural contexts of the time.
This paper contributes to this history by considering the work of José Val del Omar (thereafter VdO), a Spanish filmmaker, innovative theoretician and inventor. VdO’s ideas about film and education took shape during his collaboration with the Misiones Pedagógicas, a progressive educational program that sought to fight against high illiteracy rates in rural Spain during the Second Republic (1931-1939). Best exemplified in his text “Feelings on a Kinaesthetic Pedagogy,” his theorizations provide a novel and emancipatory way of overcoming traditional text-based education by shifting the learning process from reading and memorizing towards experience. He saw film as a medium that activates instincts, involving the whole body and allowing audiences to engage in a more direct relationship with the world at large and their own communities. VdO’s cinematic theories were certainly utopic but nonetheless participated in larger discussions about the revolutionary role of cinema as an educational tool for the masses. In this paper, I will discuss how VdO’s ideas speak to, as well as depart from, contemporary pedagogical models that conceived educational and instructional films in a more utilitarian and directed way. VdO’s technological interventions and understanding of cinema as a total sensorial experience with democratic potentialities, introduce an original perspective important to the larger history of educational film.
One of the noticeable developments in museum practices of the recent years has been the enormous ... more One of the noticeable developments in museum practices of the recent years has been the enormous success of blockbuster movie-themed exhibitions. Taking their cue from popular movie franchises such as Jurassic Park or Star Wars, the museums aspire to entertain while also insisting on the exhibitions’ pedagogical value in accordance with their cultural status as sites for the production and consumption of knowledge. While blockbuster movies make no claims to being educational, blockbuster film-related exhibitions do – extending, as a result, the blockbuster films’ reach into areas of wider cultural and educational significance.
With this paper I will examine how the new creative synergies that arise from the convergence of these two powerful economic and cultural sectors - museum and corporate Hollywood - reinvent the blockbuster as a pedagogical tool through the development of new textual relationships and spatial arrangements. Indeed, expanding the film industry’s business into new creative scenarios.
My paper will contribute to the study of the “relocation” of cinema - to borrow Francesco Casetti... more My paper will contribute to the study of the “relocation” of cinema - to borrow Francesco Casetti’s expression - within the museum by accounting for a generally overlooked site: the science museum. While scholars like Erika Balsom (2013), Maeve Connolly (2009) or Haidee Wasson (2005) have interrogated the presence of cinema in art museums, few have considered the specificities of its display within the particular institutional framework of the science museum, with the notable exception of Alison Griffiths (2002; 2008). Nevertheless, the science museum has long played host to moving images in order to present the subject of science under the frame of spectacle and entertainment, while attempting to reconcile scientific rigor and large popular audiences.
I will therefore examine the association between the science museum and the film industry through a close analysis of two contemporary exhibitions: “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (2011) and “Star Wars: Identities” (2012). I will show how both exhibits, produced in collaboration between Lucasfilm Ltd. and the Montreal-based company X3 Productions, extend the film industry directly into the museum. As moving images became available, museums began to exhibit a technologized display of science; however, these two exhibitions use cinema not only as a medium but also as a source for scientific knowledge itself. Moreover, whereas cinema provides the science museum with the allure of popular icons and narratives, the blockbuster movie attains surplus cultural value. As a medium, the museum delivers a particular knowledge about science but, I will argue, it also constructs a particular knowledge about cinema.
Within the blurring lines between film industry, blockbuster cinema, and museum, lie a set of concerns that are linked with shifts in museum and cinema-going consumer practices and the circulation of media flows within late-capitalist societies. These exhibitions indeed take part in the iteration of the Lucasfilm franchises across varying media forms, from blockbuster film to toys to theme park attraction to museum display. As such, it is necessary to interrogate what kind of distinct knowledge the science museum brings about popular cinema, especially since the museum has been a key participant in the ontological discourse that aims to find possible answers to the questions: “What, when and where is cinema?”
Papers by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for c... more The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term 'media convergence' relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while 'participatory culture' refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences. HJ: In some ways, I see it as a crucial turning point for the kind of mediacentered fans, the mostly female fans that I wrote about in Textual Poachers. Up until that point, most of fandom had been organized around Star Trek, which had been a defining text for a generation of fans. Suddenly, you were seeing forms of fan expression that were taking shape around Star Trek expanded to incorporate new texts, including Star Wars. We can see this as a move from a fandom centered around individual stories to a multi-media fandom, which would continue to expand across genres, across franchises, to the present day. So if we think about the texts that defined fandom over time, Star Trek is certainly one of those, Star Wars is another, Harry Potter is another, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another, maybe Xena-these are the fandoms that represent a profound shift in the way fandom operates. It's easy to understand, then, why some Star Trek fans saw Star Wars as a threat or competition. Star Trek was seen as true science fiction-science fiction about ideas, about the future, about utopian and dystopian alternatives. Star Wars was seen as space opera, fantasy, bound up with spectacular special effects. But I never understood why you had to pick one over the other. Different tastes, different moments in our lives, but both representing exciting contributions to the larger development of science fiction. DHF: Unlike most previous fantastic storyworlds, Star Wars was, in many ways, a transmedia experience from the very start: the comic books, the novelizations, the arcade games, the action figures, the soundtrack albums, foreWord: "i Have a Bad feeling aBouT THiS"
Shore Line I (1977) © Chris Welsby irst one drop of rain, then another, hit the lens, blurring th... more Shore Line I (1977) © Chris Welsby irst one drop of rain, then another, hit the lens, blurring the vistas in front of it. A gust of wind moves the camera, precariously attached to a homemade windmill, and frames the natural scenery. The raindrop is not a stain, nor is the wind a disruption; rather, these elements represent some of the many ways in which nature participates in Chris Welsby's films. The rain, the wind, the tide-these are his intimate co-workers, accompanying his solitary journeys to mountain vistas and coastal estuaries and actively shaping the films' form and temporality. Welsby-born in Exeter, Great Britain in 1948-started his career as a filmmaker in the early 1970s after training as a painter and spending some time working as a sailor. His attentiveness to the structural relationship between landscape and natural systems is an integral part of his work. At the core of Welsby's cinema is a relational process with the environment in which contingency and interaction present a very particular way of understanding technologies and the apparatus of filmmaking. As part of the avant-garde collective London Film-Makers' Coop , Welsby shared an interest in exploring the temporal and material process of film. He immigrated to Canada in 1989, where he became a professor of Film and Digital Media at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia-a post from which he recently retired.
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, 2018
Rick Prelinger wears many hats: he is an archivist and an activist, a writer and a filmmaker; he ... more Rick Prelinger wears many hats: he is an archivist and an activist, a writer and a filmmaker; he has preserved the eccentricities and banalities of American cultural heritage and projected them back to the world via both Open Access digital repositories and carefully curated programs of ephemeral and orphaned films. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of about 60,000 industrial, advertising, educational, and amateur films, which encourage and facilitate not only preservation, but appropriation by allowing free access, downloading and reuse of its materials. For this special issue Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolome Herrera, and Papagena Robbins reached Prelinger virtually to talk about his work, bridging the distance between Montreal, Quebec, and Santa Cruz, California, where he currently works as an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California. The text that follows is an edited interview with Prelinger about ...
NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 2012
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Online Publications by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Interviews by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
For this special issue Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera, and Papagena Robbins reached Prelinger virtually to talk about his work, bridging the distance between Montreal, Quebec, and Santa Cruz, California, where he currently works as an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California. The text that follows is an edited interview with Prelinger about his films, his work as an archivist, and the establishment of Prelinger Archives.
Reviews by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Selected Conference Presentations/Talks by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
Following John T. Caldwell’s cultural-industrial methodology as well as Derek Johnson’s study of the management of media franchises and their cultures of production, my project combines archival research in museum institutions with interviews to exhibition developers and technical providers to analyze the ideas, creativity, labor, and social relations that shape the networked production and circulation of blockbuster movie themed-exhibitions. Questions driving this presentation will include: How design companies and cultural workers negotiate in practice the sometimes conflicting interests of the film industry and the museum? How do these collaborations and networked practices shape both museum institution and film industrial activities today? And, in which ways are the tensions and questions around brand control and creativity dealt with and distributed among them? Overall, I will provide insights about the reliance of museums and the film industry on outsourcing practices, and the multiple production layers and daily operations that drive the development of blockbuster-movie themed exhibitions.
Departing from the encounter between museum and Star Wars, this paper aims to interrogate the historical, political, and economic significance of this hybrid form of exhibition to propose that it functions simultaneously as a transmedia marketing tool, a disciplinary apparatus, and a symptom of biopolitical techniques of control. In order to do so I will rely on museum studies' critique of the disciplinary regime that examines the institution as a site of knowledge and citizen formation (Bennett), to move on to discuss the exhibition in light of its use of visual databases and biometrics, which altogether present the organizational principles of the biological life of the exhibit's fictional populations. In any case this paper intends to argue that visitors are subjected to these forms of power, but rather to explore the frictions and pleasures of navigating through such an ideologically charged space. Thus, the premise for writing this paper is to discuss how the museological institution shapes the presentation of the media franchise into this particular form, and ultimately understand: how is life according to Star Wars.
Departing from Alvar’s propositions this paper considers the role of documentary film in the context of educational debates in Spain during the 30’s so as to reveal the complex web of expectations, desires, and concerns that collectively contributed to imagine a vision of the future and its possibilities for social change. Likewise, it argues for the value of turning towards these emerging cultural practices, which might have not ended up rooting, but still can help us understand the role envisioned for documentary film within the debates about visual education. This is, what documentary film could have been and could have done for the state and its citizens at this particular historical time. Yet rather than reading this moment as a sign of failure, or simply of the “what could have been”, this paper reconsiders the past of educational cinema as a point of entry into the discourses shaping film’s social intervention during periods of transformation, if not crises. Ultimately, it aims to acknowledge the importance of addressing the emergence of educational cinema in Spain and reconsider its place within the larger discourses shaping how film serves the state, particular political interests, and the public.
This paper contributes to this history by considering the work of José Val del Omar (thereafter VdO), a Spanish filmmaker, innovative theoretician and inventor. VdO’s ideas about film and education took shape during his collaboration with the Misiones Pedagógicas, a progressive educational program that sought to fight against high illiteracy rates in rural Spain during the Second Republic (1931-1939). Best exemplified in his text “Feelings on a Kinaesthetic Pedagogy,” his theorizations provide a novel and emancipatory way of overcoming traditional text-based education by shifting the learning process from reading and memorizing towards experience. He saw film as a medium that activates instincts, involving the whole body and allowing audiences to engage in a more direct relationship with the world at large and their own communities. VdO’s cinematic theories were certainly utopic but nonetheless participated in larger discussions about the revolutionary role of cinema as an educational tool for the masses. In this paper, I will discuss how VdO’s ideas speak to, as well as depart from, contemporary pedagogical models that conceived educational and instructional films in a more utilitarian and directed way. VdO’s technological interventions and understanding of cinema as a total sensorial experience with democratic potentialities, introduce an original perspective important to the larger history of educational film.
With this paper I will examine how the new creative synergies that arise from the convergence of these two powerful economic and cultural sectors - museum and corporate Hollywood - reinvent the blockbuster as a pedagogical tool through the development of new textual relationships and spatial arrangements. Indeed, expanding the film industry’s business into new creative scenarios.
I will therefore examine the association between the science museum and the film industry through a close analysis of two contemporary exhibitions: “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (2011) and “Star Wars: Identities” (2012). I will show how both exhibits, produced in collaboration between Lucasfilm Ltd. and the Montreal-based company X3 Productions, extend the film industry directly into the museum. As moving images became available, museums began to exhibit a technologized display of science; however, these two exhibitions use cinema not only as a medium but also as a source for scientific knowledge itself. Moreover, whereas cinema provides the science museum with the allure of popular icons and narratives, the blockbuster movie attains surplus cultural value. As a medium, the museum delivers a particular knowledge about science but, I will argue, it also constructs a particular knowledge about cinema.
Within the blurring lines between film industry, blockbuster cinema, and museum, lie a set of concerns that are linked with shifts in museum and cinema-going consumer practices and the circulation of media flows within late-capitalist societies. These exhibitions indeed take part in the iteration of the Lucasfilm franchises across varying media forms, from blockbuster film to toys to theme park attraction to museum display. As such, it is necessary to interrogate what kind of distinct knowledge the science museum brings about popular cinema, especially since the museum has been a key participant in the ontological discourse that aims to find possible answers to the questions: “What, when and where is cinema?”
Papers by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera
For this special issue Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera, and Papagena Robbins reached Prelinger virtually to talk about his work, bridging the distance between Montreal, Quebec, and Santa Cruz, California, where he currently works as an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California. The text that follows is an edited interview with Prelinger about his films, his work as an archivist, and the establishment of Prelinger Archives.
Following John T. Caldwell’s cultural-industrial methodology as well as Derek Johnson’s study of the management of media franchises and their cultures of production, my project combines archival research in museum institutions with interviews to exhibition developers and technical providers to analyze the ideas, creativity, labor, and social relations that shape the networked production and circulation of blockbuster movie themed-exhibitions. Questions driving this presentation will include: How design companies and cultural workers negotiate in practice the sometimes conflicting interests of the film industry and the museum? How do these collaborations and networked practices shape both museum institution and film industrial activities today? And, in which ways are the tensions and questions around brand control and creativity dealt with and distributed among them? Overall, I will provide insights about the reliance of museums and the film industry on outsourcing practices, and the multiple production layers and daily operations that drive the development of blockbuster-movie themed exhibitions.
Departing from the encounter between museum and Star Wars, this paper aims to interrogate the historical, political, and economic significance of this hybrid form of exhibition to propose that it functions simultaneously as a transmedia marketing tool, a disciplinary apparatus, and a symptom of biopolitical techniques of control. In order to do so I will rely on museum studies' critique of the disciplinary regime that examines the institution as a site of knowledge and citizen formation (Bennett), to move on to discuss the exhibition in light of its use of visual databases and biometrics, which altogether present the organizational principles of the biological life of the exhibit's fictional populations. In any case this paper intends to argue that visitors are subjected to these forms of power, but rather to explore the frictions and pleasures of navigating through such an ideologically charged space. Thus, the premise for writing this paper is to discuss how the museological institution shapes the presentation of the media franchise into this particular form, and ultimately understand: how is life according to Star Wars.
Departing from Alvar’s propositions this paper considers the role of documentary film in the context of educational debates in Spain during the 30’s so as to reveal the complex web of expectations, desires, and concerns that collectively contributed to imagine a vision of the future and its possibilities for social change. Likewise, it argues for the value of turning towards these emerging cultural practices, which might have not ended up rooting, but still can help us understand the role envisioned for documentary film within the debates about visual education. This is, what documentary film could have been and could have done for the state and its citizens at this particular historical time. Yet rather than reading this moment as a sign of failure, or simply of the “what could have been”, this paper reconsiders the past of educational cinema as a point of entry into the discourses shaping film’s social intervention during periods of transformation, if not crises. Ultimately, it aims to acknowledge the importance of addressing the emergence of educational cinema in Spain and reconsider its place within the larger discourses shaping how film serves the state, particular political interests, and the public.
This paper contributes to this history by considering the work of José Val del Omar (thereafter VdO), a Spanish filmmaker, innovative theoretician and inventor. VdO’s ideas about film and education took shape during his collaboration with the Misiones Pedagógicas, a progressive educational program that sought to fight against high illiteracy rates in rural Spain during the Second Republic (1931-1939). Best exemplified in his text “Feelings on a Kinaesthetic Pedagogy,” his theorizations provide a novel and emancipatory way of overcoming traditional text-based education by shifting the learning process from reading and memorizing towards experience. He saw film as a medium that activates instincts, involving the whole body and allowing audiences to engage in a more direct relationship with the world at large and their own communities. VdO’s cinematic theories were certainly utopic but nonetheless participated in larger discussions about the revolutionary role of cinema as an educational tool for the masses. In this paper, I will discuss how VdO’s ideas speak to, as well as depart from, contemporary pedagogical models that conceived educational and instructional films in a more utilitarian and directed way. VdO’s technological interventions and understanding of cinema as a total sensorial experience with democratic potentialities, introduce an original perspective important to the larger history of educational film.
With this paper I will examine how the new creative synergies that arise from the convergence of these two powerful economic and cultural sectors - museum and corporate Hollywood - reinvent the blockbuster as a pedagogical tool through the development of new textual relationships and spatial arrangements. Indeed, expanding the film industry’s business into new creative scenarios.
I will therefore examine the association between the science museum and the film industry through a close analysis of two contemporary exhibitions: “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (2011) and “Star Wars: Identities” (2012). I will show how both exhibits, produced in collaboration between Lucasfilm Ltd. and the Montreal-based company X3 Productions, extend the film industry directly into the museum. As moving images became available, museums began to exhibit a technologized display of science; however, these two exhibitions use cinema not only as a medium but also as a source for scientific knowledge itself. Moreover, whereas cinema provides the science museum with the allure of popular icons and narratives, the blockbuster movie attains surplus cultural value. As a medium, the museum delivers a particular knowledge about science but, I will argue, it also constructs a particular knowledge about cinema.
Within the blurring lines between film industry, blockbuster cinema, and museum, lie a set of concerns that are linked with shifts in museum and cinema-going consumer practices and the circulation of media flows within late-capitalist societies. These exhibitions indeed take part in the iteration of the Lucasfilm franchises across varying media forms, from blockbuster film to toys to theme park attraction to museum display. As such, it is necessary to interrogate what kind of distinct knowledge the science museum brings about popular cinema, especially since the museum has been a key participant in the ontological discourse that aims to find possible answers to the questions: “What, when and where is cinema?”