ABSTRACT
Housing valuables, images, meanings and symbols, art museums and art galleries are attractive places for lmmakers.1 Moreover, museums and galleries are not only physical spaces, they are also institutions that embody specic economic, social and cultural values. Associated with high culture and education, museums emanate a gravity that lends itself easily to both glamour and mockery. In addition, museums are often presented as cultural shrines that celebrate and construct national identities and collective memories. Often, they are seen as treasure chambers displaying objects of exotic and extinct cultures. Consequently, both lucid temples of enlightenment and dark cabinets of curiosities, cinematic museums are often presented as realms outside the ordinary world. They are a kind of heterotopias for their visitors, who, to a large extent, can be categorized into specic types. Apart from the evident category of artists and connoisseurs, rather tourists, snobs, dandies, iconoclasts, thieves, secret lovers, spies and haunted or cursed characters are the eminent museum visitors in cinema. In lms, apparently, museums provide a kind of harbour to people who are haunted, hiding or in transit: tourists searching for the commodied strangeness of the exotic; snobs, dandies and iconoclasts in-between high culture and mass culture; thieves and spies transgressing laws; secret lovers between moral codes and hedonistic pleasure; and characters haunted by mummies, wax gures or mesmerizing painted portraits between life and death. In lms, therefore, the otherness or strangeness of museums often involves a state of transgression and a certain in-betweenness.
