Museum and film, and museum film

Books, journal articles and manuscripts have long been the primary media used by historians of science. Taped or filmed presentations and oral-history interviews with scientists followed. As popular science and science culture came to the fore in the twentieth century, photographs, radio programmes and films received more attention and fitted well into the general identification of books, newspapers, magazines, film, radio and television as media. But science exhibits and museums also act as material extensions of the media concept.Footnote ⁸ However, from the point of view of a technical media concept, they are already intermedia, combining artefacts with textual, (audio)visual and hands-on mediation of phenomena of and practices with nature and human creations.

Still, the combination of museum and film has its apparent problems. Putting photographs and illustrations, models and visitor-operated interactives side by side with the artefacts did not change the overall mode of visiting museums. However, showing a film in a museum breaks its mostly spatial grammar by introducing time-based elements. Therefore even the integration of scientific film that, for example, shows natural phenomena in slow motion or time-lapse photography becomes problematic. Frank Oppenheimer, the director of the Exploratorium, hence welcomed the display of interactive video art; scientific film, however, was not part of the Exploratorium’s exhibits.

Interestingly, it was primarily art museums that were using film in the 1920s and 1930s. Why? Fighting museum fatigue by bringing motion into the museum was one reason, while screening films in separate rooms was a common trend in all museums of art, science or natural history at the time. Industry exhibits and World’s Fairs concurrently became major venues for useful film and industrial film.Footnote ⁹ It was rather the overwhelmed (and in this way fatigued) visitor who had difficulty making sense of, for example, several hundred paintings or handicraft objects; so, even if only in black and white, ‘the museum in a can … alleviated museum fatigue by instructing the eye and also relieving the eye with a new simplified screened environment’.Footnote ¹⁰ On the other hand, science museums had already incorporated motion in the nineteenth century and employed many ways to create interactive environments within their artefact-based exhibition halls.Footnote ¹¹ As long as new media would not impede the self-governed pace of the visitor to choose, view and often operate the exhibits, medial innovation was feasible.

Further film genres can be added: the educational film for films that were also screened in museums occasionally, without, however, directly relating to or competing with the exhibits; the newsfilm mainly for communicating events and statements from museums; and reportage for a more journalistic coverage of museums, their popularity with visitors and the people running them. As all these genres deal in some way with the museum, I suggest reserving the term museum film for films that are about museums, and not using it for those that served as exhibits in the museum or as a replacement thereof.Footnote ¹² At its best, such a museum film in this definition captures the experience that the museum provides, and amounts to a medial representation of how the museum medium communicates its topic. In this, it is more a medium of experience than a medium of information. However, as I discuss below, it may also, in Eamesian language, become an ‘idea film’.

A good example to illustrate what a museum film may look like and what aims it may serve is known from the 1920s, produced after an American film team had visited major European science museums. After letters, reports and exchange of photographs apparently did not suffice to explain the need to create similar institutions in the US, the films Museums of the New Age (1927) and The Building and Operation of Industrial Museums (1928) captured the main exhibits and operational ideas – particularly the philosophy of the ‘museum in motion’ – at Paris, London, Munich and Vienna. In this way, these were brought to New York, Washington and Chicago. Used for fundraising, and in various cut versions for newsreel and within the museums, these motion pictures became a means of conveying the museum in motion, and they contributed to the transfer to the United Staes of aspects of the European model of the industrial museum.Footnote ¹³

Museum film analysis

Museum film is about conveying the experiences an exhibit, a museum or a science centre can provide, and these experiences are at the heart of the questions about public scientific culture. But how do we analyse museum film? First of all, film can be used as an archival source. Like the papers and photographs in the archives and the objects in the collections, films are sources, sometimes the only ones, for answering historical questions. However, unlike text or photographs, film is much harder to handle as one cannot quote or reproduce it easily, at least in written work.

Second, film relies on technology which was and is constantly changing. What can be captured on film depends on camera size, film sensitivity, lenses, shutters, lights, dollies, blimps and so on. These determine the richness of the grammar of filmic language that includes focus and blur to emphasize or de-emphasize an object or person, camera shots and angles from long shot to close-up, the ability to move the camera and change perspective, but also timing, rhythm and more. Film can capture motion and suggest cause and effect.

Jon Boorstin, who came from a background in architecture before joining the Eames Office to work on film projects, later identified the ‘fundamental weakness’ of film: it does ‘a poor job of communicating information’. This is because the performance of a commentary text for a film is slow compared to reading it on the page, making it necessary either to signal when important ideas are introduced or to repeat them, and words in a film can never prevail over pictures. However, ‘Bad as film is for expressing facts or ideas, it is unparalleled for conveying emotion’.Footnote ¹⁴

Drawing on his experience from the Eames Office, from his film-making as director or writer for both documentary and fictional films, and from teaching film at USC in Los Angeles, Boorstin has suggested analysing film in general and documentary film in particular in terms of three ways of seeing, which I will draw on in this paper. There is the ‘voyeur’s eye’, which celebrates the joy of seeing. In a different mode, however, there is also the ‘vicarious eye’, which sees with the heart. And finally there also exists the ‘visceral eye’, which perceives thrill and feelings first-hand.Footnote ¹⁵ I will use his analysis – a set of actor’s categories – in what follows.

For documentary film, the voyeur’s eye means that, at the most basic level, watching moving images can be a pleasure in itself. Boorstin learned this lesson from Ray and Charles Eames, whose object or toy films – for example Toccata for a Toy Train (1957) or Tops (1969) – bothered him initially ‘because they weren’t trying to do anything: they had no story, no characters, no apparent point, and for structure only a precisely felt visual logic threading through the images’.Footnote ¹⁶ Making a film work for the voyeur’s eye required the film to keep surprising the viewer with novelties or the magic of motion. However, the voyeur’s eye is a sceptical one and demands plausibility; it is the ‘mind’s eye’ and satisfies human curiosity, and it ‘loves to be outwitted, but can’t stand being duped’.Footnote ¹⁷

Boorstin did not discuss the Eameses’ concept of information overload in his book, although he knew it well and would use it in his Exploratorium film. He was practised with their ‘history’ and ‘image walls’ in exhibitions and, particularly, with their multiple-screen films for political exhibitions and World’s Fairs. These bombarded ‘the consciousness with a rich superabundance of information in visually interesting ways … Recognizing the limits of human attention spans, Charles and Ray aimed to create an intensity of feeling and “fun”’.Footnote ¹⁸ The voyeur’s eye, one might paraphrase, hates to be understimulated, but does not mind being overwhelmed. The latter transforms or can even manipulate the voyeur’s eye to accept general concepts and generalizations, be it the American way of life (Glimpses of the U.S.A., Moscow, 1959), science as an artistic or philosophical enterprise (The House of Science, Seattle, 1962) or the computer as a (universal) information machine (Think, New York, 1964).Footnote ¹⁹ Therefore the contemporary film critic (and later renowned director and screenwriter) Paul Schrader distinguished between the Eameses’ toy films and idea films, the latter carrying an implicit message while satisfying the voyeur’s eye.Footnote ²⁰

However, even a documentary film is seen with the heart, too, when people appear, because the response to human emotion is automatic: ‘we feel what the actor feels, but we judge it for ourselves’.Footnote ²¹ Then we watch the film (also) with a vicarious eye. And this is what generally brings us to the movies, which thrive on our interest in and empathy with the actions and feelings of the protagonists. But it extends also to all film that involves people shown to have agency. Empathy with the persons depicted creates emotions about the film sequence, and what keeps the viewer and their vicarious eye hooked is authenticity rather than plausibility. Therefore, while a technically perfect film recorded in an empty museum might put the object in the best light, it cannot satisfy the vicarious eye, and also a staged-looking presentation will not do. This also distinguishes a good museum film from an educational film. On the one hand, few will connect emotionally with a professor demonstrating a scientific phenomenon in the same way as with an excited visitor manipulating a hands-on exhibit. On the other hand, watching an experience that is not part of a curriculum or a well-defined story is much more appealing at this emotionally defined level of seeing through the vicarious eye.

And third, while the voyeur’s eye is about ‘the thing’ and the vicarious eye about ‘the other’, the visceral eye is about ‘I’. That is, the viewer’s own gut feeling: being thrilled oneself or experiencing joy or fear first-hand. Though documentaries and museum film rarely live up to visceral scenes like the shower sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), some filmic means of expression extend to non-fiction film.

For example, first-hand experiences can be conveyed through point-of-view shots that let us see the world through the eyes of someone present at the place of interest. First focusing on the person looking through the microscope, or indeed visiting an Ames room, the camera then shifts to that person’s own perspective, thus potentially creating visceral experiences for the audiences.

Among the relevant technical innovations that have facilitated offering these three ways of seeing are, in particular, the technologies of immersion. Cinerama domes and IMAX cinemas have created new viewing experiences since the 1950s and 1970s respectively, and both used surround sound in addition.Footnote ²² With immersion and thus spatial experiences as well as the mimicking of self-experiences from the three-dimensional world – just think of a filmed rollercoaster ride – film tried to break out into the real world. How far can this be pursued for museum film?

The first Exploratorium films

Among attempts to find new ways of displaying science in the post-war period, and especially during the 1960s in the US, the Exploratorium in San Francisco had a particularly strong impact and is often regarded as the first science centre.Footnote ²³ The project to create it was led by physicist Frank Oppenheimer, who was the brother of J. Robert, and well connected within the ‘atomic gang’ of Manhattan Project scientists, of which he had been part. He too was hampered by Senator McCarthy. The Exploratorium project was to transform the 1915 Palace of Fine Arts into, as they said, ‘An “exploratorium” of science, technology and human perception’.Footnote ²⁴ At its inception in 1967, it was neither fully conceived nor well financed.

My suggestion is that by paying close attention to the grammars of surviving films about the Exploratorium, we can understand how the intermediality of filmic representation of display has worked in practice and shed some new light on this new kind of museum. The five Exploratorium films that were shot between 1969 and 1982 are part of its history of establishment and success. When, for example, the last NOVA film by John Else was broadcast on PBS in 1982, the Exploratorium was on the brink of collapse with excessive visitor numbers (four thousand in one afternoon), and it had to extend its opening hours.Footnote ²⁵ Else’s film, as influential and attractive as it was, used a triple institutional biography structure: narrating the inner life of the Exploratorium during a day of operation, the life – i.e. the creation and evolution – of an exhibit, and Frank Oppenheimer’s life.Footnote ²⁶ However, at that time, the Exploratorium was already well established and had spread its model throughout the US and all the way to Europe.Footnote ²⁷ For this reason, I will focus on the first five years and the films from 1969, 1972 and 1974 (when two films were made).

Boorstin’s Exploratorium: an exemplary museum film

Publicity and recognition were vital for the Exploratorium, an idealistic venture always short of funds that wanted to serve the community for free (similar to a public beach, it was said).Footnote ³⁵ Film was one means to promote it, but there were many others. On 1 February 1974, Frank Oppenheimer explained the situation to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as follows:

Therefore a film would be ideal. Without any mention of the three previous films, Oppenheimer wrote that he had already found the right director: Jon Boorstin. ‘I am confident that he can produce a film which does reproduce the learning experience … and which illustrates the underlying approach of the Exploratorium’. The NEA had supported the museum’s development ‘because of the universality’ of its work, and therefore should be ‘interested in the dissemination of our successes’.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) also received a letter on the same matter a few weeks later, arguing that the Exploratorium was much more than a local resource: ‘it is a prototype for institutions in other communities and on university campuses’. Hence, Oppenheimer concluded, ‘We need a better way to show people what can be done and I believe the Jon Boorstin film will be invaluable in this regard’.Footnote ³⁷

Why was Oppenheimer so confident that he had found both the right medium and a good film-maker? From the board minutes, one can learn that Charles Eames had visited the Exploratorium in late 1972 or early 1973.Footnote ³⁸ Around that time, Eames was involved with the NEA’s activities on restructuring its film projects and proposed film programming at the Exploratorium.Footnote ³⁹ Boorstin, who had graduated from Harvard in history and studied architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, worked for the Eames Office in the previous years. He had become a versatile film-maker, first with some educational films on manufacturing and computer history and then with the documentary Kid City about an innovative educational project in Los Angeles (1972). This involved the architect Frank Gehry and his sister Doreen, who had developed a method of design-based learning, also funded by the NEA.Footnote ⁴⁰ John Culkin, founder of the Center for Understanding Media in New York and also a consultant for the NEA on the film programme, agreed about Boorstin’s abilities (and a year later he would order ten copies of the film for his centre).Footnote ⁴¹

After Boorstin had visited Oppenheimer at the Exploratorium in December 1973, he started writing the NEA proposal for their Alternative Education programme. The idea was not only ‘to create on film an educational experience analogous to that of the Exploratorium itself’, capturing or mapping it on film, but moreover ‘a film which people will react to as they would react to a visit to the museum’. This, however, amounts to carrying over the identical experience to another medium, and such a downright transmedial project equates the vicarious eye of the museum visitor with that of the film viewer:

Implicitly, it is promised that transmedial transfer should work and that the viewer (and the NEA?) would be tricked into accepting two messages: first, as Boorstin writes, ‘that the work of the scientist and the artist are a unity’, and second, that ‘the film will perpetuate Dr. Oppenheimer’s special philosophy of learning’.Footnote ⁴³ Clearly, with film – as distinct from the museum experience where the visitor is free to move and to select or omit exhibits – the viewer’s eye is guided, and the experience is scripted. For a film-maker, that is no disadvantage, but rather shows the power that film possesses. Even if museum film can indeed produce the same reactions as the museum itself, the media are far from isomorphic, and the mapping cannot be perfect. Therefore the transmedial question looms large: in which cases and to what extent can analytical frameworks of one medium inform us about those of another?

Upon receiving the application written from the film-maker’s vista, the NEA still had questions, and Oppenheimer had to expand the argument beyond filmic and transmedial promise. He argued that many people had expressed their interest in developing an Exploratorium-like institution in their community and asked for something that would show boards, staff and sponsors what the place was like in a compelling way. However,

From this argument we can draw conclusions, regarding both a transformation of the Exploratorium’s role and the inability of traditional media to communicate its very idea. For the museum, it meant that it was prepared to abandon the usual business model based on the exclusivity of the exhibits and to start to support replication. The museum is (now) understood to be a model institution for a new approach to science display and communication, and spreading the approach is part of its mission. Regarding media, we learn, first, that film is a medium capable of extending the museum’s message. Second, museum experience is hard to communicate, and when media like text, photographs, slide shows and so on failed, film was the only resort. Third, the medium must serve an aim, here convincing ‘boards, staff and sponsors’. And last, through his mastery of film, Boorstin was expected to mobilize not only the vicarious but also the visceral eye: ‘recreating the experience of the visitor as though the camera itself were experiencing the exhibits’, thus giving viewers first-hand sensations, which should combine with ‘filming the ways in which people become involved’ so that viewers could empathize.

Boorstin’s film, eventually made possible by NEA and NSF grants, was all that Oppenheimer wanted – and even more. For it not only captured the unique arrangement and re-created the museum visit, it also evoked (syn)aesthetic filmic experiences. It was a museum film presenting the exhibits, the visitor’s experiences of them and the staff’s work, without any interference or commentary from the film-maker; and it was an art and idea film that employed elaborate filmic techniques to communicate a powerful message.Footnote ⁴⁵

As for a good movie, the director first casts the best actors. In this case, Boorstin selected some eighty exhibits to feature in the film. Next, a detailed storyboard was drawn that included the kinds of shots, their transitions, the light and the changes in focussing, and in this way created an abstract story with changing speed and suspense (Figure 1). Lastly, the production board told Eric Saarinen that the film would be composed of three types of camera work – staged exhibits, exhibit montage and people – requiring very different shooting techniques.Footnote ⁴⁶

Figure 1.

Detail of the storyboard for the film Exploratorium (1974) by Jon Boorstin, scenes 30 to 33 (8:00–8:35). Reproduced from the advertising flyer for the screening of the film at the San Francisco Museum of Art on 29 December 1974. Image courtesy of the Exploratorium, San Francisco.

Shot at night when the museum was closed, the staged exhibits and actors interacting with them – including a woman experiencing eye jitter when watching a rotating pattern (8:23, 31A in Figure 1) and a man observing his heartbeat on an oscilloscope while he pedalled a bike (6:46 and Figure 2) – were filmed mostly as close-ups and under professional lighting conditions different from those available to the regular visitor by day. The much greater number of items selected for the exhibit montage were similarly staged to appear as pure phenomena. They were meant to become ‘a fast-paced barrage of about seventy exhibits, hopefully producing some kind of sensory overload’, in this way adapting the Eamesian method of information overload for the communication of scientific concepts and ideas. Roughly half the film would bombard the viewer with brilliantly filmed colourful and pure phenomena at such a fast pace that it would be impossible to figure out many surprising effects such as the hollow portrait, the impossible triangle, the polarized fish or the Chladni patterns. As with political communication or the creation of a new picture of the scientist, the filmic technique of information overload is not employed here to communicate scientific phenomena, but to convey the essence of the phenomenality celebrated at the Exploratorium.

Figure 2.

The Heartbeat exhibit with lighting equipment during the night-time filming (left) and respective stills from the film Exploratorium (1974) by John Boorstin (right). Reproduction from the Journal American Cinematographer and film stills. Eric Saarinen, ‘Exploratorium’, American Cinematographer (1975) 1975(3), pp. 278–9, 312–15, 360, 312. Image courtesy of the American Society of Cinematographers and the Exploratorium, San Francisco, resp.

Most of the middle part of the final film (3:20–10:40) combines the fast sequence of exhibits with, at first, acceleration and dramatization, even supported by the sound of swelling and straining noise, ambient and from the exhibits, then deceleration to a complete standstill. Abstracting from the suspense lines of feature film, Boorstin turns from satisfying the voyeur’s eye to providing a more and more exciting and visceral experience.

The following section allows the audience to relax, showing most of the candid people shots filmed with the elaborate camera set-up detailed in the introduction. The idealized phenomena now appear at hand’s reach, and so does the message: everybody who can make it to the Exploratorium (or a similar museum) can get the experience. The vicarious eye has opened fully here, as the overheard dialogue and witnessing of little mishaps draw the viewer into empathizing with the people shown. While this part, according to Saarinen, was considered by Boorstin ‘a good climax for the film’, a seemingly candid camera sequence follows observing and overhearing an evening staff discussion on exhibit improvement. It reveals the intricate process of making an interactive exhibit work and, at the same time, introduces Frank Oppenheimer as the centre of creativity and perspective, as he told a staff member that the place was not about finding out the true laws of nature, but rather what it is like to investigate things oneself.Footnote ⁴⁷

Against the backdrop of earlier and later films, Boorstin’s stands out in many ways – first of all, with respect to picture, shot and plot. It is outstanding in the quality of picture. The cinematographic view focuses on detail and masks all surroundings or exhibit space. Mostly, close-ups depict scientific phenomena – sunlight split and remixed into colourful hues, flashlight illumination maintained by fluorescent walls, optical illusions and the like – as well as the visitor’s experiences. The plot is that there is no plot, and thus no story and no linear learning, but still – and this appears to be the key message – there is insight and satisfaction. Second, there is no narrator, but only what appears to be ambient sound, which was nonetheless a ‘composed score’ and some seemingly overheard pieces of conversation selected from material filmed using the hidden camera.Footnote ⁴⁸ The overall experience of the film was to convey immersion in the riches of scientific phenomena while simultaneously letting all traditional characteristics of the museum space disappear.

In this sense, it was as exemplary a museum film as it was an idea film. It showed the museum floor and its goings-on, though in a purified version. With its storytelling, photography and visual language that was markedly different from other films, it cinematographically reflected the difference between traditional science museums and the new science centre. And it persuaded the viewer into accepting that the latter can educate you informally about science and perception. It was an art film as well: after Boorstin’s film was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art it earned an Academy Award nomination for short documentaries in 1975 (but lost to a film about butterflies).Footnote ⁴⁹

After six years, however, which may have changed the expectations in the film’s rhetoric, Frank Oppenheimer concluded, ‘The film does not tell much about the ideas behind the Exploratorium, but it does convey, as it was commissioned to do, what it is like to be there’. He felt that the ‘salient features’ of the Exploratorium had to be explained before a screening of the film in 1980.Footnote ⁵⁰ At that time, Boorstin had gained some fame as co-producer of All the President’s Men (1976); he had also explored (with Eric Saarinen) the extension of filmic means in Merlin and the Time Mobile (1978), a film simulation of an interactive game on videodisc, which the Eames Office had created for IBM.Footnote ⁵¹

Film and the science centre

Despite Oppenheimer’s clear objective for Boorstin’s film, the overall response was praise for its beauty. While the Exploratorium’s board of directors was divided on the result, ‘the consensus was that it is a beautiful film’.Footnote ⁵² When the board’s chairman, industrialist and Stanford University trustee Palmer Fuller III, had asked earlier what they should be doing with the film when it was finished, Oppenheimer responded only by suggesting they ask McGraw-Hill, one of the biggest educational publishers (who ran their own educational film division), about possible distribution and also television stations.Footnote ⁵³ Now, after showing the film to the board and pointing to its uses ‘to tell other people designing museums what a good museum can be like’ and for fundraising, board members still voiced unease about the lack of explanation, or at least about their perception of the need for an explanatory introduction to facilitate its use in schools.Footnote ⁵⁴

Oppenheimer tried to promote the museum film qualities, for example to the Rockefeller Foundation’s director for arts, Howard Klein. He had shown him the museum in early 1974 to secure continued funding (especially for its education director post from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund), and he reiterated that the film gives ‘a feeling for those parts [of the Exploratorium] that cannot readily be expressed in words or slides’.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, his coordinator for special programmes, Leni Isaacs, was trying to promote the film’s ‘potential as educational film or distribution to schools, particularly as an introductory film for grade-school science classes’. Moreover, as a package with ‘a wealth of back-up material’, they felt that companies for educational films like Doubleday Multimedia or BFA International Media should be interested, as well as the Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., whose executive producer for science had just reviewed the film.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the museum ‘has influenced both development of new museums and innovative science curriculum in schools’, Issacs argued, ‘It is our feeling that the film, perhaps packaged with instructional material related to concepts of perception shown in the exhibits included in the film, would be of national and international interest. Our “Cookbook” of how to build museum exhibits could be included as well.’Footnote ⁵⁷

It seems that nothing came of the effort to create such kinds of multimedia Exploratorium kits. However, the very idea that this might work hints at an assumed compatibility or complementarity of the media involved. This, however, did not become particularly effective for visitors or in education, but for communicating the concept or idea of a new museum with a different type of science display: the science centre.

As Rob Semper, another physicist who joined the staff of the Exploratorium in 1977, remembered, ‘This film was circulated by the Exploratorium to countless developing projects where it was shown to potential staff members, funders, board members, and community officials of these fledgling enterprise’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Semper’s job was to help universities and museums related to universities to set up new science displays. Among others, in Detroit at the Michigan Science Center a place emerged that catered more to children; in Charlotte, North Carolina the ‘Discovery Place’ nature centre was expanded into a large museum; and in Oklahoma City the Science and Arts Foundation became the Omniplex Science Museum.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus the circulated museum film became the first step that opened the way to disseminating the new ideas of science display. In a second step, people came by to help and organize the supply of exhibits that reinforced that influence. To this extent, the film became a medial dissemination tool of the new gospel of the science centre. Another was the Exploratorium ‘cookbooks’ that formulated a canon of essential hands-on exhibits, which helped define the science centre once the idea was planted.

It is instructive to compare the two dissemination media of the science centre: museum film and cookbook. It is print versus moving image; linear, but allowing jumps and navigation with index and contents, versus fixed flow; matter-of-factly, black-and-white, reduced and schematic representation versus visually pleasing, emotional and entertaining rendering. This is an expression of their different and complementary roles; a cookbook would not convince a board, nor would one be able to build an Exploratorium exhibit from the film. But obviously the film has to come first, while the cookbooks become essential once the decision has been made to start a science centre. Eventually, the Exploratorium started to build single objects or even larger exhibits for other museums on demand.

While the earlier films may have disappeared into the ether, the Boorstin reel was kept available to all those interested in reinventing the science museum (as were the cookbooks), and it was a major propellant for the science centre movement, if not its instigation. It had taken the Exploratorium some years to develop a consistent exhibit programme, which became more clearly visible just when Boorstin arrived. This is why one can say that this film stabilized – if not co-created – the concept of a science centre, and it helped start the ‘science centre movement’ that the Association of Science and Technology Centers would then promote.