Apollo and the Warburg Institute present ‘Cinema and the Museum’

On Thursday 4 March at 6pm (GMT), Apollo and the Warburg Institute present ‘Cinema and the Museum’, in its ‘Museums of the Mind’ discussion series. The artist John Akomfrah, the critic and screenwriter Emilie Bickerton and Deborah N. Landis, director of the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA, will be in conversation with Fatema Ahmed, deputy editor of Apollo.

Over the course of a year in which many museums have been closed for months, it has become clear that they continue to give us much to think about even when we cannot visit them. Apollo, in partnership with the Warburg Institute, presents ‘Museums of the Mind’ – a series of discussions about how museums reflect and refract art forms and other fields that may not traditionally have been considered their preserve. What happens when poetry, cinema or dance enter a museum? How do these encounters ask us to reimagine both the museum and the discipline on display?

For ‘Cinema and the Museum’ we ask – given the existence of cinemas and dedicated film museums – what it means to make exhibitions about cinema in art museums. Would auteurs like Eisenstein and Tarkovsky be horrified by exhibitions that present fragments of their works – or would they be flattered? Is video art in black box galleries a type of cinema? And how have films of all kinds, from nouvelle vague classics to Hollywood heist movies, shaped how we expect museums to present the past and how we react to those displays?

‘Cinema and the Museum’ is on 4 March at 6pm. Register here for a free place.