Related resources
Search for item elsewhere
University researcher(s)
Academic department(s)
Film and the Production of Knowledge at the Manchester Museum: A practice-based study
[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2018.
Access to files
- Â FULL-TEXT.PDFÂ (pdf)
Abstract
Non-fiction film shares a long and relatively uncharted history with the museum. Today, filmmaking is a widespread yet critically neglected area of modern museological practice. This practice-based PhD situates itself within these critical gaps to examine the knowledge producing potential of film archives and film practice at the Manchester Museum. Its primary historical sources are a group of taxidermy objects at the Manchester Museum, an archive of 16mm acetate films at the North West Film Archive and a collection of travel journals at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies. These diverse collections were generated by Maurice Egerton, the 4th Baron of Tatton in Cheshire during his travels in Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. This thesis brings all three together for the first time since their moment of production. These collections recur throughout the thesis as I ask how film archives can complicate and enrich our understanding of collections and how filmmaking practice might continue to bring new types of knowledge into the museum and archive. Two research films are submitted with and discussed within the thesis. The first, âLiving Worlds at the Manchester Museumâ, adapts observational methods from visual anthropology to record objects and staff during the re-display of the mammal gallery at the Manchester Museum in 2011. The second, âArticulating Archivesâ is the result of a creative collaboration in 2014 with Year 8 secondary school students and the institutions and archives named above. Within the production and analyses of these films I draw on diverse critical sources to suggest that film can illuminate properties of materiality, embodied knowledge and performed engagement that textual accounts fall short of capturing.
Additional content not available electronically
USB disk featuring two research films and three research clips
Keyword(s)
Actor-Network Theory; Amateur filmmaking; Co-production; Colonial Collections; Embodied knowledge; Film; Knowledge production; Museums; Natural history; Practice-based research; Taxidermy