ABSTRACT
Each film museum is embedded in a history of performances. Sometimes they attempt to deny this history, showing their films in screening rooms stripped of any historical reference. In other cases, however, they choose to show films in a ‘historically accurate’ way, which often results in hybrid forms of display, a mixture of historical reconstruction and modern experimentation. What seems central to the choice of display at the Filmmuseum is the way it defined its films – as individual works of art, to be displayed and viewed in isolation, or as examples of the way films were presented in the past and, hence, as performance art.
