Capturing Colour: public heritage and Screen Archive South East

Public museums are now vital to the work of film archives as they offer a valuable environment for the discovery of screen heritage. This is a space that is so different from the paradigm of the commercial cinema where programmes are changed continuously and a single archive film programme is usually only seen once. Instead of fixed seating designed for the sustained consumption of narrative cinema, the museum offers a very different environment. Within the museum gallery, the visitor can ambulate through a designed space dedicated to screen work and complementary material. This extra-cinema experience of meeting either looped single works or looped compilations delivered by either single or multiple screens has the potential to create a rich, engaging and immersive viewing experience. For here films can be placed within a particular conceptual context, drawing attention to the histories and ideas that they represent through juxtaposition with other screen and non-screen materials. Often this is also a public space as it can be entered free of charge: a public space for the contemplative discovery of screen history and contemporary screen practice. It’s the entry into a new polysensuous space (physical, visual, audio, potentially haptic), a type of heterotopia that is removed from the everyday world. It doesn’t replace the cinema, as it is not a viewing environment suitable for a feature length film, but it creates an innovative and important complement.