AN5450 Museums and Material Culture 2009 Film Series Guide

Moore Hall 1111, Tuesdays 4 p.m. WMU Visitors Welcome.

Sept. 22. Journey. museums and community collaboration. 1996. 30 min. Addresses issues of diversity and the status of communities of color in museums today--and prospects for the future. Highlights the controversy surrounding "First encounters: Spanish exploration in the Caribbean and United States, 1492-1570," a traveling exhibition produced by the Florida Museum of Natural History. Reveals the process used by the Science Museum of Minnesota in creating "From the heart of Turtle Island: native views, 1992" and the impact this exhibition had on the community and museum professionals.

Sept. 29. Ruins. A fake documentary = Una pelicula documental falsificada. 1999. 78 min. Counterfeiting is a practice with broad implications, from the merest of fake objects to entire histories shaped as facsimile. Here filmmaker Lerner collates early colonial misconceptions of the Mexican populace, a jumble of ethnographic and political distortions. From there he charts the process that recontextualizes archeological objects as art. At the center of the film is master forger Brigido Lara, whose pre-columbian objects have been exhibited in major museums throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Sept. 29. Fang an epic journey. 2001. 8 min. Too much info would be telling.

Oct. 13. The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey. 1993. One videocassette. 31 min. Too much description would be telling.

Oct. 13. On cannibalism. 1994. 7 min. King Kong meets the family photograph in this provocatively ironic video which explores the West's insatiable appetite for native bodies in museums, world's fairs and early films. A personal narrative about race and identity by an Indonesian-American videographer of Batak- Palembang descent.

Nov. 17. Bones of contention. 1998. 49 min. This program provides an even-handed examination of the conflict between Native American groups and scientists, historians, and museum curators concerning the issue of the remains of more than 10,000 Native Americans unearthed at archaeological sites across the U.S. In doing so, it also provides an excellent survey of American Indian archaeology in the U.S.

Nov. 24. Cracks in the mask. 1997. 58 min. "The mysterious and elaborate turtleshell masks collected last century in Torres Strait in far north Australia are unique and irreplaceable, yet there are now none left in Torres Strait. They are all in foreign museums. Ephraim Bani, a witty and knowledgeable Torres Strait Islander and an expert on his people's myths and legends, set out on a voyage of discovery to the great museums of Europe where his cultural heritage now lies. Going beyond the overly familiar arguments about pillage and art-theft, three avant-garde curators provide thought-provoking and sometimes surprising challenges to museums in the West and how they reflect our cultural proclivities. This film show how museums decontextualize--the so-called 'poetics of detachment'--and exclude the very people whose ancestors created the objects in the first place."