Early Curatorial Practices, European Colonialism, and the Rise of “A-list” Film Festivals

Abstract

If one situates the earliest film festivals within a two-millennia history of practices of collecting, curating, and displaying objects in Europe, their participation in “the writing of specific colonial and national histories” and the “universalizing of bourgeois views and visions” (Morgan 2013: 23) becomes overwhelmingly apparent. In his history of the museum, Jeffrey Abt locates its etymology in mouseion, an ancient Greek word referencing cult sites dedicated to muses. The early museum was a site imbued with aura, the home of original objects that could not be found elsewhere. Aristotle was the first on record to start collecting specimens and, in this practice, he “formulated an empirical methodology requiring social and physical structures to bring into contiguity learned inquiry and the evidence necessary to pursue it” (Abt 2011: 116). This is an important point, conjuring as it does the will to create knowledge that was also one of the foundational motivations behind the construction of museums. However, collecting and curating practices have always exceeded the desire to pass on knowledge to others through the content of the exhibits themselves; they have at the same time been invested in teaching “curated ways of seeing and behaving” (Morgan 2013: 23), forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion.