Museum of cinema Goregaon filmcity, Mumbai

Abstract

The ability to create an experience and mould the very conscious by controlling the perception of an individual, would be considered as an immensely powerful ability by many. That is what architecture enables an architect to do. Architecture exists like cinema in the dimension of time and space. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage of spaces through which one passes. Spaces of modern day museums can best exemplify this in their relation to the artworks at display. But the whole purpose and function of art museums in the modern society has been left unexplored. At the heart of the problem of art museum is its institutional inability to define in simple terms what art might be for and why it should matter so much. While they expose us to objects of genuine importance, they seem unable to curate them in ways that link them powerfully to our inner needs. There is a need to give up on the idea of the art museums as a kind of dead storage space for the history of the subject that stays intimidatingly silent to its real purpose. Cinema is the most prestigious and widespread cultural activity in the modern world. It is what theatre was in the age of shakespeare or painting in the age of da vinci. If cinema enters the museum as a respite from the banalization and fragmentation it encounters in a digitizing mass culture, how does this integration produce a new conception of cinema? And how do the specific characteristics of the gallery space change cinematic spectatorship and open a space for a new kind of moving image practice? In this thesis I intend to inquire if spaces can truthfully reflect the screen, deepening our interest in individual films, reveal new meanings and perspectives, expand our sense of the medium, confronts our assumptions about value and sharpens our capacity to discriminate by parceling them out into fragments or representing them via a series of metonymic substitutes. Then we can attempt to define the art museum as “an institution that displays and arranges art in ways that can best reveal the essence of the art form, mold the perception of its audience thereby healing them.”