Paper short abstract:

We shall discuss what kinds of knowledge film can communicate in ethnographic exhibitions, giving also examples where new knowledge is produced via audiovisual medium in object-oriented exhibition in Danish National Museum, and inside people-oriented exhibition of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum.

Paper long abstract:

French anthropologist Felix-Louis Regnault who was the first to use film to record ethnographic data in spring 1895 has in 1900 proposed a museum of man, where objects would be contextualised by films. However, it took several decades and the development of analogue video and later digital technologies that avail to reproduce moving pictures inside exhibitions either automatically or on demand.

What kinds of data can film communicate in the exhibitions? In collection oriented ethnographic exhibitions film is still nowadays very successfully used to contextualise and humanise the exhibits/collections. In new millennium it is very modern to interpret the exhibition theme with artistic or sensorial films; a counterpart to aesthetic approach is an ethical one. In Copenhagen they made a film on a Dine weaver who was invited to the museum so that he would provide more data on patterns, materials, techniques and functions of their carpet collection; the Dines, on the other hand, got data on their heritage that was long ago transferred to the museum, as a digital restitution.

Hilde Hain (2000: 6) observes that lately exhibitions do not focus so much on objects but rather on subjects. In the exhibition on varied and multi-layered identities of an individual, we invited visitors to participate in discovering their identities in audiovisual medium. Thus we provided "multiple viewpoints" and included representatives of sensory, physically or socially deprived persons and minorities of all kinds.