ABSTRACT
‘Programming allows works to contaminate one another’ 34 – this quotation by Dominique Paini (1992: 25), former director of the Cinémathèque française, sums up the following chapter in a nutshell: namely, the way films ‘contaminate’ one another when shown together in the same programme. A similar phenomenon occurs in museum displays and exhibitions. In the field of museology, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) has coined the phrase ‘incontext presentation’ to describe how contagion works in these settings. An in-context presentation is created by means of a number of different strategies. The first entails positioning objects adjacent to one another, connecting them spatially; this spatial relationship then produces a semantic connection between the objects. However, film museums do not usually align their archival offerings spatially but temporally when they screen them as part of their film programmes. Jean-Luc Godard (1980: 130) was an exception – the director was a great advocate for film museum presentations that would literally show films side by side. The most common way of presenting films ‘in context’ with each other, however, is by screening them on the same evening.
