ABSTRACT
The book’s introduction places the phenomenon of film’s museumification within the context of the digital turn and the debates about its impact on the medium’s specificity, its historicization, the circulation of archival footage, and archival workflows. Building on previous readings of Jean-Louis Baudry’s notion of dispositif, the chapter examines the curatorial discourses and historical narratives that shape our understanding of early and silent cinema today, positioning film museums at the intersection of film archiving and film historiography. Against the limits of poststructuralist conceptualizations of the archive, this introduction theorizes archival film curatorship as a space of temporal and historical mediation within the framework of Hayden White’s metahistory and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.
