International Symposium: Museums of Film – Film in the Museum (MFFM)

organised by the Museum Documentation Centre, Ilica 44/II, Zagreb, Croatia

time November 5 – November 6, 2015

venue Museum of Contemporary Art,  Av. Dubrovnik 17, Gorgona Hall, Zagreb, Croatia

project manager and contact person Lada Dražin-Trbuljak,  ldrazin@mdc.hr

call for paper application form for participation in the symposium (.doc) (.pdf)

the latest date for application and delivery of lecture summaries is July 1, 2015.

more about symposium  http://mdc.hr/en/mdc/projects/congresses-symposia-workshops/museums_film/

purpose

Although at the current moment we can monitor the activities of numerous establishments, associations and festivals in Croatia that have not only managed to preserve more than a century’s worth of the national film heritage but are even today taking part in the active creation and preservation of the film medium, the idea of founding a film museum in the country exists only as a pious wish of museum and film professionals and people who are passionately in love with the film.  And at the same time we are witness to the quiet and almost invisible but in fact alarming process of the disappearance of the material cinematographic heritage, in addition to the unsatisfactory presentation of objects related to the film and the insufficient popularisation of stories about films and people who make them.

The extent to which a possible film museum might become a generator of rather more dynamic initiatives attending in a more focused way to these problems, or whether solutions might be found in the context of some other possibilities, are some of the unsettled questions that might be answered by the film theorists, historians artists and film industry professionals, curators, archivists and conservators who will meet at an international symposium in November 2015.

The objective of the international symposium would lie not only in consideration of the possibilities of and preconditions for encouraging initiatives for the founding of a film museum in Croatia; at the same time this interdisciplinary meeting of experts should set off discussions about issues that arise in this domain: the definition of terminology, challenges in the encounter of the analogue world and the new digital paradigm, taking up issues of professional and scholarly historical and artistic research, facing up to the accelerating changes of technologies and the problems of preserving the audio-visual heritage, and expectations and experiences of visitors to and/or users of the film museum.

Taking part in the symposium, in addition to museum professionals would be those from the domain of the film, practitioners and theorists, film history researchers, film-makers, visual anthropologists and architects as well as invited curators of celebrated world film museums who have both practical and theoretical experience in this area.

We plan for the programme to consists of lectures of about twenty speakers, divided into several panels.