Sentient Relics

Janice Baker is a lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Introduction

1 Museum Trouble: Complicating the ‘new’ inclusion

Reading the gallery in silent film

The inclusion dilemma

A difficult heritage

The ‘new’ museology

Demanding objects

Museum ‘blockbusters’

2 Fissures and Cracks: Unfettering identity from the ‘new’ inclusion

Object autopoeisis

‘The crack’

Institutional autotelicity and rhizomatic objects

Re-invigorating the fetish

Actually, virtually becoming-animal

Curiously resistant

3 Outcasting Oedipus: The autonomy of affecting experience

The sublime as a discourse of loss

Ekstasis: From Longinus to Lyotard

What about the body!

Affectus: One unfolding substance

Cultural objects and the transmission of affect

The duality of affect

4 Show Time! Psychoanalysing the museum to death

Ghostbusters: Green slime and a dangerous portrait

Viewing pleasures: Phantasy or lines of flight

The Topkapi imaginary: The museum as phallic (m)other

Night at the Museum: The museum as object a

Horror museums: Beyond abjection

Post Lacan: Restoring affect to cinema

5 Dangerous Identity: Museums in Vertigo and the ‘truth’ of false objects

The mental-image: Inside the deceived self

The abyss or the power of eternal return

Signs of time: Escaping dusty semiology

The fatal spiral: Identity and obsession

6 Museums and cinematic time

Mischievous dream worlds: musicals in the gallery

Moving stillness: A thinking cinema

Marking time in La Jetée

Night and Fog: Difficult heritage and the time-image

Russian Ark: In any moment

The storm we call progress

Filmography

Bibliography

Index