Fascinating museological audiences, or the cinematic appeal

This review of Elisa Mandelli’s book The Museum as a Cinematic Space: The Display of Moving Images in Exhibitions (2019) explains how, according to the author, several viewing dispositifs, understood as a rather flexible assemblage of elements, are increasingly being used in museums to combine education with entertainment. Thus, museums are becoming “cinematic spaces” with an ideological perspective. Mandelli’s approach to the projection technologies of moving images in museological venues is not only chronological but also phenomenological. A three-way interest is recognizable in the alignment of chapters, encompassing the educational value of the dispositifs, their artistic nature, and the experiential factor. As the book provides an interesting overview of two fields that usually are not taken together and contains an assortment of case studies described in detail, it should make a good addition to the fields of Museum and Film Studies.