Museums and urban life in the cinema: On the ordinary and extraordinary architectural experiences

Abstract

Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema is an art that is not based solely on the visual and which, like architecture, is connected to physicality, to movement and touching; both actions require a sense of direction, attention and intention. This article concentrates on the relationship between museum and cinema through the enactive and emotive perception of architectural representations. I hone in on the role of the museum in film and its derived meaning as sensuous-emotion space. The cinematic representations of the city and the museum are used to examine their role in establishing everyday life in the cinema. The unique experience of the protagonist is constituted upon triangulating the subject's kinesthesis, the architectural space of the museum and the city's everyday life routine. To this end, I present a theoretical model for describing the experience of the cinematic visit to the museum, that is based on three mechanisms, which I call ordinary, out-of-the-ordinary, and extraordinary. I show how each of these modes of experience establishes a different relationship between the protagonist, the viewer, the museum and urban space. The combination of the three can also teach us about the dynamic continuum that engenders everyday lived experience.