Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017

ARTICLE

Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions,

Limitations, and Possibilities
JIHOON KIM

Abstract This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program
dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post-cinematic’
conditions. Since the mid-1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century
have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new
technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content
consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered
to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post-
cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the
‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black
box and the art museum’s exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two
institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the
viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying
three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence
demonstrates that while the museum’s exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological
essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.

INTRODUCTION corridor, I became immersed in a darkened

Entering the “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibi-
tion” hosted by Seoul Museum of Art (29
November 2015–13 March 2016), I encoun-
tered a corridor presenting a collection of clap-
boards and film camera lenses that Stanley
Kubrick used in his film production displayed
inside a glass cabinet mounted on the wall to my
right, opposite a large-scale portrait of Kubrick
printed on the left wall. The cabinet’s fluores-
cent light gave the impression that the artifacts
were not simply objects of Kubrick’s idiosyn-
cratic technical mastery, but also as treasures or
relics that any museum of art could preserve and
valorize (Figure 1). After passing through the
room displaying a looping projection of the
famous Stargate sequence from Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968). The loop highlighted
the sequence’s beam of rainbow-colored lights
as the culmination of Kubrick’s meticulous
visual effects (Figure 2). The interplay of
brightness and darkness, or of the ‘white cube’
and the ‘black box,’ functioned as a building
block for the rest of the exhibition, a key exhibi-
tion scheme for exploring the arrangement of
Kubrick’s objects and the audiovisual excerpts
from his films in a career production chronol-
ogy. This exhibition contained over one thou-
sand items from the Stanley Kubrick Archive
(operated by the University of Arts London),

Jihoon Kim (jihoonfelix@gmail.com) is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University,
South Korea. He is the author of Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Currently he is working on a book manuscript that examines the various intersections
of cinema and the museum in the 21st century.

© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 467

Figure 1. Collection of the clapboards and film camera lenses that Kubrick used and collected throughout his
career, “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibition,” Seoul Museum of Arts (SEMA), South Korea, November 29, 2015 to March
13, 2016; Photo: Seoul Museum of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

including snapshots and photo cameras from
Kubrick’s early career as a photographer at
LOOK magazine, original drafts and com-
pleted scripts that Kubrick rewrote and revised
repeatedly during his lifetime, letters that he
sent to supporters and censorship organiza-
tions, materials that he collected for his films
(books, magazines, and location photographs),
production documents (call sheets, shooting
schedules, budgets and continuity reports, and
detailed storyboards), publicity materials, pro-
duction designs. Highlight artifacts included
extraordinarily detailed miniatures (including
the war room model from Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb [1964] and the topiary maze from Shin-
ing [1980]), props, costumes, and wardrobes
used for Spartacus (1960), Barry Lyndon
(1975), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and the innova-
tive details required to achieve the visual
effects for 2001. These items were grouped in
separate sections, each titled according to the
film, and each accompanied by a host of pro-
jectors and monitors that played key visual sce-
nes and soundtracks, and each section
displaying a short and feature-length docu-
mentary on his films and life. Taken together,
the exhibition’s curatorial and institutional
framing offered ideal conditions for exploring
how today’s museum has embraced the history
of cinema, its great figures, and their achieve-
ments as cultural artifacts of the past. It also
illustrates the techniques needed to help cin-
ema migrate into the exhibition space as both
precious objects and moving images (Figures 1
and 2).

468 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
Figure 2. High-definition video projection of the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at the
entrance to the “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibition,” Photo: Seoul Museum of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
The Cinema and the Museum Experience
The most pressing question about museum
experience and cinema since the 1990s in film
criticism and cinema studies asks “where is cin-
ema?” The context of this question responds to
the growing dominance of electronic and digital
technologies used in film production and
exhibition. The ‘filmic’ moving image had been
based on film technology, both the camera used
to capture the action or object, and the material
used to preserve the final cut images. But cellu-
loid film has been replaced for most major films
by digital cameras and projection systems, with
digital imaging restructuring manipulation of
images and the production of a “final” cut or edi-
ted film(s). This material and technological
advance has resulted in aesthetic changes to the
Jihoon Kim
image, dismantling the traditional ‘cinematic
experience’ as the movie theater, a consumption
format that guaranteed an experience with a lar-
ger-than-life screen and a fixed point of view for
spectators. Today, these spectators are increas-
ingly devoted to a variety of small, mobile digital
devices (laptops, smartphones, and tablets) with
fragmented windows, flexible viewing time
management, and portability. These ‘post-cine-
matic conditions’ have thrown cinema into
deconstruction and reconstruction based on the
growing influences of post-filmic arts and media
technologies that have largely excluded from
traditional cinema. This has propelled many
film and media scholars and film critics to pro-
pose the ‘death of cinema’ discourse or the ‘post-
cinema’ era, both of which imply that cinema’s
media ecology in the digital age transcends both
469
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
the film-based ontology of cinema and the cine-
matic experience that was anchored to presenta-
tion in a cinema.1 In these post-cinematic
conditions, the museum has provided a notable
answer to the question – ”where is cinema?”.
This paper uses the Stanley Kubrick exhibi-
tion (hereafter abbreviated as ‘Kubrick exhibi-
tion’), a worldwide exhibition tour program
organized by the Deutsches Filmmuseum and
the Stanley Kubrick Archive since 2004 and
hosted in Berlin, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Tor-
onto, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Seoul, and San
Francisco, and many more, all employing post-
cinematic strategies. In each case, I suggest that
the Kubrick exhibition is emblematic of the two
notable changes since the mid-1990s: that the
apparatus and experience of cinema as devel-
oped in the 20th century have been displaced
from their original formation and foundation,
and that they have been repositioned within
new technological, institutional, and discursive
platforms like museums.
Kubrick exhibition offers insight as a con-
temporary example of the migration of cinema
into the museum, a process by which what was
originally the equipment and materials required
for storytelling and spectacle was given new life
in contemporary visual culture that is trans-
formed into a cultural object that deserves
preservation and contemplation for its elements
and structures. By investigating its thematic,
technical, curatorial and institutional dimen-
sions, the Kubrick exhibition offers insight into
contemporary exhibition forms that commemo-
rate the history of cinema and its great auteurs.
The exhibition elevates the auteurs, their cre-
ativity, and their film oeuvre to the status of art
that the traditional museum has long conserved
and venerated. This migration of cinema into
the white cube changes the perspective of its vis-
itor, making as the salient phenomena a post-
cinematic condition rather than appreciation of
470 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
the artists work itself. It becomes a story of the
artist told through his artifacts rather than the
representational work that was the original
work.
This limitations and possibilities of the
Kubrick exhibition can be witnessed through
its two key purposes: (1) restructuring the
museum as a site for the cinephile’s apprecia-
tion of film history under post-cinematic con-
ditions, and (2) valorizing great directors as
geniuses by elevating their craft to art produc-
tion in the name of filmmaking and their films
to the precious artworks. These authorizing
techniques are derived from multiple negotia-
tions that occur as the assets of cinema are
adapted to suit the museum experience. The
Kubrick exhibition offers three ways of pre-
serving and self-reflexively revivifying
Kubrick’s idea and cinematic practice, and cin-
ema in the broader sense. It offers productive
inquiry into the space between cinema and the
museum by concretizing three of Kubrick’s
cinematic innovations evident in his work,
namely: centrality of the film auteur, cinematic
apparatus, and cinema’s intermediality.
In order to elucidate how the limitations
and possibilities of the Kubrick exhibition are
visible in the museum experience with film clips
and artifacts, I develop the idea of the apparatus
through two distinct meanings (appareil and
dispositif in French), that can be applied to both
the museum and the film theater. Following
Foucault (1980), I interpret apparatus as an
array of various institutional, discursive, techni-
cal, and administrative mechanisms that
enhance and maintain the exercise of power
within individual and collective subjectivities.
Extending Foucault’s idea of apparatus, Bennett
(1998) coined the concept of the ‘exhibitionary
complex’ referencing the format for arranging
objects in the exhibition and its viewers, and
determining how objects are seen and how

viewers see them. In this light, the Kubrick
exhibition is not simply a neutral container of
films and objects: rather, its strategies of activat-
ing the relations between the films and objects
and their viewers, endows the films and objects
with cultural or artistic value. Using Bennett’s
approach, it is also necessary to consider the role
the exhibition form plays in constructing the
viewers’ position and governing how the films
and objects fit into the structure and value of
museum display. Second, drawing on a key
assumption of the ‘apparatus theory’ as a major
tenet of film theories in the 1970s (see Heath
1981; Wollen 1978), I consider the idea of cine-
matic apparatus as a systematic arrangement of
the material, technical, institutional, and dis-
cursive elements (such as the fixity of the viewer,
the projector’s setup behind audiences, the
viewer’s frontal relationship to the screen, and
the darkness of the movie theater) for producing
the cinematic effect and mode of spectatorship.
Balsom (2013) has pointed out the correspon-
dence between the idea of cinematic apparatus
and that of the museum as apparatus, in that the
latter produces “a new cinematic dispositif [ap-
paratus] through its particular discursive and
institutional framing and the various practices
associated with it” (40). With this correspon-
dence and negotiation between the two in mind,
I want to illuminate which material, technical,
and aesthetic elements of Kubrick’s filmmaking
are lost or recuperated in the Kubrick exhibi-
tion’s technical, curatorial, and architectural
arrangements of his films and objects.
THE ‘EXHIBITION OF CINEMA’ AND
FILM’S VIRTUAL LIFE
The Kubrick exhibition is placed within a
larger context that film in the post-cinematic
conditions beyond the movie theater has found
a new home in the museum experience. The
Jihoon Kim
Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017
major museums and galleries in North America
and Europe have contributed to shaping this
context since the 1990s with a series of events
that showcased cinema in various ways. Those
events can be called the ‘exhibitions of cinema,’
that spotlight a particular moment of the history
of cinema, film’s relationships with the develop-
ments of 20th century art that encompass paint-
ing, sculpture, photography, performance, and
video art, the idea of cinema as art, or a retro-
spective of an individual film auteur. In 1996,
just after the 1995 symbolic centenary of cin-
ema, two large-scale exhibitions were held in
the UK and the US –“Spellbound: Art and Film
in Britain (Hayward Gallery in collaboration
with the British Film Institute)” and “Art and
Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (LACMA).”
These were historic events that signaled cin-
ema’s move from theater-based mass media to
‘art’ and ‘culture,’ sparking ‘exhibitions of cin-
ema’ in major museums and galleries world-
wide. These events took their curatorial
assumption that cinema was and is a distinct art
that rivaled and had a strong influence upon its
neighboring arts: that is, the idea of ‘cinema as
art’ that goes beyond that of ‘art cinema’ in the
standard institutional practice of cinema.
The ‘exhibitions of cinema’ since the 2000s
have separated into two types of presentation.
The first is an array of exhibitions that shed new
light on avant-garde filmmakers and their works
by repositioning them within the contemporary
proliferation of artists’ film and video, while the
second set of retrospective exhibitions tend to
focus on an individual film auteur.
The former strategy, the focus on the
avant-garde, came into maturity with the exhi-
bition “Into the Light: The Projected Images in
American Art, 1964–1977 (Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2001).” That exhibition ree-
valuated the anti-illusionist impulse of the film
and video installations in the 1960s and 1970s.
471
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
That exhibition’s focus became a foundation for
other museums that sought to present an explo-
ration into film’s materiality and process-based
nature, and a desire to offer viewers an embod-
ied spectatorship as an alternative to the passive
spectatorship of mainstream cinema and televi-
sion. Since that exhibition at the Whitney, the
canonical works of structural and structural/ma-
terialist films, as well as those in the broader his-
tory of avant-garde cinema, were showcased in
other similar large-scale exhibitions, such as “X-
Screen: Film Installation and Actions in the
1960s and 70s (Museum Moderner Kunst Stif-
tung Ludwig Wien, 2003–2004)” and “Le Mou-
vement des Images (Centre Georges Pompidou,
2006).”
The auteur series of retrospective exhibi-
tions were focused on the canon of an estab-
lished filmmaker. Undoubtedly, Alfred
Hitchcock was the first mainstream, popular
director to receive a major museum’s accolade,
with “Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock and Con-
temporary Art (Museum of Modern Art in
Oxford, 1999)” and “Hitchcock et l’Art: co€ınci-
dences fatales (Pompidou, 2000–2001),” both of
which predated the international boom of that
type of exhibitions by showcasing both docu-
ments and objects related to Hitchcock’s oeu-
vre and the video works of the artists inspired
by him. These exhibitions of Hitchcock were
followed by those of Jean-Luc Godard (“God-
ard: Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, 1946–2006,”
Pompidou, 2006), Ingmar Berman (“Ingmar
Bergman: Truths and Lies,” Deutsch Kine-
matek, 2010), and Martin Scorsese
(Cin
ematheque Francßaise, 2014–2015). Mean-
while, two exhibitions on commercially suc-
cessful directors David Lynch and Tim Burton
seemed more focused on an attempt to validate
that the two directors are more than film
auteur. Lynch and Burton were cast by the
exhibit developers as multimedia artists with
472 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
an extended creative output in painting or
fairy-tale illustrations.
One could argue that the Kubrick exhibi-
tion is representative of the ways that the ‘exhi-
bitions of cinema’ in public museums have
shifted since the 1990s. These shifts include the
emergence of postmodern focus on spectacular,
blockbuster exhibitions. These spectacular exhi-
bitions foreground the reproducible, readymade
and fleeting cinematic images and confer on
both the work and its creators (directors) the
authority of intrinsic artistic value. This autho-
rizing might demonstrate the dissolution of the
modernist values of autonomy and preciousness
that were sanctioned by traditional museums
(Crimp 1980; O’Doherty 2000). Moreover, this
type of exhibition might be symptomatic of
what Huyssen (1995, 13–35) and Krauss (1990)
have both referred to as the museum’s transfor-
mation in the postmodern or late capitalist age.
Both Huyssen and Krauss describe this as tran-
sition from the museum as the guardian of trea-
sures and artifacts to an enterprise that is
infiltrated by increasingly embracing the world
of spectacle and mass entertainment. Stallabrass
(2007) expanded on Huyssen’s and Krauss’ cri-
tiques in the neoliberal age, by characterizing
the rise of installation as a key characteristic of
the contemporary museums and large-scale
exhibitions. Stallabrass reasoned that the spec-
tacular and expensive are tied to the corporate
involvement and commercialization of the arts.
Stallabrass’s criticism seems well-supported
by two aspects of the Kubrick exhibition, corpo-
ratization and commercial entertainment. The
Kubrick exhibition garnered substantial corpo-
rate sponsorship in some host cities including
the Seoul tour introduced as the 19th event in
the ‘Hyundai Card Culture Project,’ a series of
exhibitions, theatrical performances, and rock
concerts sponsored by the Hyundai Card Com-
pany. In this context, the exhibition’s Seoul

version attests to the increasing bond between
the public museum and the corporate support of
arts and culture, which corresponds to the
blurred boundaries between high art and mass
culture. More significantly, the Kubrick exhibi-
tion employed projected film clips and stills
from Kubrick’s films in a variety of scales, from
small to monumental. The projected images
associated with the Kubrick exhibition are typi-
cal of the current state of high-definition video
projection, a technology employed in many
blockbuster exhibitions, biennales, and other
spectacular museum events. These projections
have the ability to meld seamlessly with the sur-
rounding architecture and offer visitors an illu-
sory, often monumental, world. Seen in this
light, the Kubrick exhibition validates Balsom’s
view that the possibility of cinema’s acceptance
within the contemporary museum “depends on
the very motions of cultural and technological
convergence” (2013, 44).
Kubrick exhibition might also be distin-
guished from other ‘exhibitions of cinema’ that
gained global popularity in the early 20100 s:
notably, exhibitions on the films and artworks of
Tim Burton (“Tim Burton” [2009 at MOMA]
and “The World of Tim Burton” [2016–17 at
Taikoo Place, Hong Kong])” and those devoted
to the characters and production processes of the
Pixar Studio (“The Science Behind Pixar”
[2016–17 at California Science Center] and
“Pixar Animation’s 30th Anniversary” [2017 at
Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul]). These
world-tour exhibitions have capitalized on new
technological advances in exhibition design:
MOMA installed an interactive website for visi-
tors’ navigation through Burton’s different artis-
tic achievements. The Burton exhibit focused on
drawings, paintings, sketchbooks, sculptures,
polaroids, and other materials in digitized
objects, offering the visitors an immersive and
intimate experience of them. Both Pixar
Jihoon Kim
Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017
exhibitions employed character artifacts and clips
from its animated films alongside interactive
video consoles, smart kiosks, and virtual reality
(VR) interfaces through which visitors could
gain an immersive experience of the studio’s
production pipeline. The Pixar exhibit included
features on character modeling, virtual cine-
matography and lighting, and rendering (Solo-
mon 2016). Unlike these two exhibitions that are
in line with the “contemporary embrace of
immersion and interactivity” (Griffiths 2008;
281) across different range of museums from art,
design, natural history, and science. In contrast,
the Kubrick exhibition offered only a few experi-
ence-friendly opportunities like the photo zones
that recreate the door set in Shining and the space-
ship’s interior in 2001. The Kubrick exhibition
was structured around the basis of his creative
product, the projections of Kubrick’s films in the
‘black box’ of the darkened rooms and the display
of the various objects related to Kubrick’s film-
making process inside the ‘white cube.’
This technological and spatial framing of
the Kubrick exhibition also heralds a different
value to the museum than either the Burton or
the Pixar spectacles. While the Burton exhibi-
tion is partially intended to trace Burton’s rein-
vention of Hollywood genre filmmaking, its
primary attraction was the display focused on
his drawings, paintings, photographs, puppets,
and other rarely seen artifacts by the filmmaker.
These products were deployed with an apparent
aim to evaluate Burton as multimedia artist
working in “the spirit of Pop Surrealism.”2 By
foregrounding the objects that were created
based on the various characters in Pixar anima-
tions and the interactive opportunities that
could reveal the studio’s production process, the
Pixar exhibition celebrates Hollywood’s innova-
tive convergence of art and technology, which
lays the groundwork for creating the widely
appealing products of mass culture.
473
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
The relevance of the Kubrick exhibition is
revealed in its technical and curatorial
approaches to Kubrick’s cinematic career and
achievement as emblematic of other ‘exhibitions
of cinema’ (i.e., the retrospectives of Hitchcock,
Bergman, and Scorsese). These exhibitions
were dedicated to the extensive overview of an
individual film auteur whose technical and aes-
thetic achievements were widely acknowledged
by film history and world cinephilia alike.
Throughout its world tours, the Kubrick exhibi-
tion has drawn on the coincident evolution of
two technical-curatorial apparatuses. The first
uses advances in projection technology to pre-
sent images in darkened rooms to bring “signifi-
cant scenes from Kubrick’s films to life” and to
illustrate the “backgrounds of [his] film produc-
tion.”3 The second apparatus is the display of
selected objects from the Stanley Kubrick
Archive – as Mermelstein (2016) said in his cri-
tique – as “an auteur’s relics” (Mermelstein
2016). The first setup strives to offer visitors a
sense of continuity with viewing Kubrick’s
audiovisual worlds in the film theater, while the
second offers visitors the opportunity to take a
closer look at their production process while
simultaneously conferring upon the displayed
objects an aura of being an artwork rather than
an instrument necessary to the production of a
film.
The combination of large projections to
transport the visitor into Kubrick’s films along-
side the display of relics has been consistently
used in the various stagings of the Kubrick exhi-
bition since 2004. It is this use that makes the
exhibition both paradigmatic and timely. These
strategies were also employed to some degree in
the retrospective exhibitions of Hitchcock,
Bergman, and Scorsese. Balsom notes that the
“Hitchcock et l’Art: co€ıncidences fatales” exhibition
employed storyboards, props, posters, and pro-
duction stills and clips from Hitchcock’s films in
474 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
ways that endowed these artifacts with life or
elevated their importance “due to their status as
relics of a Hitchcock production” (2013, 27).4
The fact the Kubrick exhibition’s merger of
projection (inside the ‘black box’) and display
(inside the ‘white cube’) establishes Kubrick’s
films and their related artifacts as the ‘relics’ sal-
vaged from his filmmaking and career echoes
the public awareness of the demise of classical
cinema that enjoyed its heyday in the 20th cen-
tury as both supreme art and mass culture. The
Kubrick exhibition triggers recognition of the
crisis of cinema based on the materiality of cel-
luloid and the photographic image as a window
into the world. It eulogizes cinema led by the
great auteurs of the previous century, and classi-
cal cinema as the collective experience on the
larger-than-life screen. The centennial anniver-
sary of cinema paradoxically evoked the lamen-
tation that the century of cinema had come to
an end, which was shared by both film scholars
and critics. For example, critic Sontag (1996)
declared the end of the “age of cinephilia” faced
with “the reduction of cinema to assaultive
images”5 at a time when the museum began to
rise as a place for film preservation and the
archive for the medium increasingly recognized
as obsolete after the sweeping influx of CGI and
broad expansion of digital entertainment forms.
Film scholar Rodowick (2007) remarks that as
our experience of filmic duration is increasingly
replaced by digital capture and information,
film’s reappearance in the museum signals its
“seeking out a new virtual life” (163).
If we focus on the ‘exhibition of cinema,’
what Rodowick calls film’s ‘virtual life’ in the
museum is the conscious acknowledgement of
the death of cinema and a nostalgia-driven
revival of cinephilia; then that transition can
also be described as cinema’s new relationship
with the art world and its associated business
enterprise. Cinema, hitherto considered to be

a world different from the art world, has been
conferred new value as a heritage and culture
of the past that museums now embrace as part
of their cultural service to society. Pa€ıni
(2002) describes this new status of cinema in
the post-cinematic conditions: “Since the
1990s, after having been the curiosity of the
century, the leisure of the century, the art of
the century, the culture of the century, cinema
becomes the patrimony of the century. Each
film is now also a document, testimony, trace,
[and] memory” (78, author translation). The
value of Kubrick that the visitors of the
Kubrick exhibition experience, that is,
Kubrick’s films as the culmination of the cine-
matic art that evokes cinephilia, becomes the
“document, testimony, trace, [and] memory”
that the museum is capable of preserving and
supporting, beyond the confines of the movie
theater.
CINEMA AND THE MUSEUM: FAR AWAY,
SO CLOSE
The migration of cinema into the gallery as
a post-cinematic phenomenon, represented by
the ‘exhibition of cinema,’ taps into what Case-
tti (2015, 2012) labels the ‘relocation of cinema.’
For Casetti, this concept refers to the double
movement of cinema in the post-media condi-
tion, wherein cinema maintains some elements
of the traditional filmic experience while simul-
taneously involving a variety of new formal and
experiential elements. The relocation of cinema
employs new places, platforms, and interfaces to
extend the form of traditional cinema into a new
experience. Like other experiences, the cine-
matic experience is reactivated in other sites and
screens than the traditional film theater’s larger-
than-life single screen. In these cases, the ‘relo-
cated’ cinematic experiences allow traditional
cinema to retain its communicative value. For
Jihoon Kim
Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017
although they are certainly not the same as the
traditional cinematic experience, Casetti (2012)
suggests these experiences maintain many of the
film’s characteristic traits.
By applying the interpretation of double
movement to the ‘exhibitions of cinema,’
including those composed of a film director’s
documents and artifacts like the Kubrick exhibi-
tion, the events are predicated upon the encoun-
ter between the movie theater and the gallery as
two spatiotemporally distinct places. The dou-
ble movement migrates between cinema as
black box and the museum as white cube, two
different, if overlapping, institutional appara-
tuses. The ‘exhibition of cinema’ maintains
some elements of the traditional film and the fil-
mic experience, while simultaneously inviting
curatorial principles and an array of experiences
unique to the white cube. In this encounter,
other elements of cinema are necessarily omit-
ted, demonstrating the conflicts between the
two ontologically distinct apparatuses.
The first conflict between cinema and the
museum is that film does not consent to the
objecthood of the artifact or artwork traditional
to the white cube. The most conspicuous of
museum elements that contribute to recon-
structing the world of Kubrick in the Kubrick
exhibition are the range of artifacts associated
with his work, including documents, cameras,
lenses, wardrobes, etc., rather than a focus on
film clips (Figure 3). The white cube as the
Kubrick exhibition’s display construes the arti-
facts as stable objects worthy of preservation,
and thereby endowing them with both tangibil-
ity and distance (O’Doherty 2000). This object-
hood of the museum is not cinema as it was
known. Film as medium and cinema as experi-
ence are not precisely reduced to artifacts (film-
strips, film stills, etc.). Their original existence
can only be known when the film is projected on
the screen for an audience sitting in a specially
475
Figure 3. Wardrobes used for Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibition,” Photo: Seoul
Museum of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

designed environment such as the movie theater
based on the traditional proscenium shape with
the screen replacing the stage. The inherent
impossibility of reducing film to an object or a
limited set of objects is the reason Bellour
(1975) called film as an ‘unattainable text.’ For
this reason, the museum should go beyond the
objecthood of artifacts and construct the condi-
tion for filmic experience, or film as a working
system, to preserve film as an ‘unattainable text.’
In a similar vein as Bellour’s term, Horwath
(2008) argues that if a museum is expected to
make film fully appear to its viewers, it needs to
investigate and realize the concept of its ‘system’
rather than that of ‘the artifact-as-object (film-
strip)’ (86). Following Horwath’s assertion, we
may conclude that the ‘exhibition of cinema’
that showcases a film director’s artifacts as its
main object of display cannot fully capture the
idea of ‘cinema as system,’ of which the Kubrick
exhibition is not an exception (Figure 3).
Another conflict between cinema and the
museum can be found in the viewing experience.
Cinema and the museum operate differently
based on their unique temporal economies. The
temporal frame of filmic experience in cinema is
screen time: spectators concentrate upon the
duration of images on the screen in viewing a
film, and screen time is a prerequisite for that
concentration. In contrast, there is no a priori
criterion in the gallery for determining how
much time a visitor should spend viewing an
individual artwork, a set of entire artworks, or
an exhibition. An exhibition cannot impose on
its visitors a standardized time that replicates
how a film is viewed. According to Osborne
(2013, 184–190), it is for these reasons that the
gallery visitors’ spectatorship is ‘distraction in

476 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities

perception’ characterized by their pace and free-
dom to choose where to go and how much time
to invest in an artwork or object. This self-direc-
tion is a direct contrast to the attentive mode of
spectatorship in the movie theater. While this
spectatorship as distraction might relieve con-
temporary audiences of the anxiety required
from concentration, it necessarily contradicts
film spectatorship as concentration, a spectator-
ship that the avant-garde cinema since the
1960s has sought to preserve by cultivating its
forms and its own culture of screening and view-
ing. Seen in this light, Pantenburg’s (2014)
insight into the limitations of film installation
in an art gallery recognizes viewers’ difficulty of
maintaining their engagement with the installa-
tion’s duration in the same way as they do in the
movie theater. Drawing on some exhibitions of
the early 2010s that included projections of
DVD copies of experimental films by Len Lye,
Stan Brakhage, and Harry Smith, he contends
that these examples validate limitations to a
now prevalent ideology that the museum’s
incorporation of black boxes in its exhibition
design can host every form of moving images
regardless of their different materials and tech-
nical formats (2014, 49). Pantenburg’s hypothe-
sis is clearly evident in the Kubrick exhibition
where clips are extracted and presented in sev-
eral projection spaces in a fragmented manner
to support a curatorial point about production
and auteur mastery.
FILM AUTEUR, CINEMATIC APPARATUS,
AND INTERMEDIALITY
Despite the two conflicts outlined in the
preceding section, objecthood and temporal
economy, as two contradictions between the
experience of cinema and the museum experi-
ence, I argue that the Kubrick exhibition suc-
ceeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying
Jihoon Kim
Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017
three ideas of cinema: film auteur, cinematic
apparatus, and intermediality. Through these
three ideas, it is possible envision productive
intersections between the two institutional
apparatuses in post-cinematic conditions.
Film Auteur as Museum Artist
The entrance of Kubrick’s oeuvre from
institutional cinema into the museum, like
Bergman and Scorsese, developed without a
foundation in work product that might pertain
to the ‘exhibition of cinema.’ Kubrick has gener-
ally been authorized as a distinctive film auteur
in film criticism and the culture of cinephilia. By
presenting his work as the product of a film
auteur, the curatorial approach is able to satisfy
the need to establish an identity of the artist that
aligns with traditional museum’s discursive
practices. To demonstrate this point, it is neces-
sary to briefly summarize the ideas of ‘film
auteur’ and of ‘auteurist film criticism’ that were
initially proposed and developed in post-war
French film criticism and cinephile culture.
Auteurism, or ‘auteur theory’ in film theory and
criticism, held three assumptions:
1. A film director is the primary creative
source of the film as art despite the collab-
orative nature of its production;
2. The director’s films express her creative
vision of film and the world; and
3. The films, then, are seen as consistent in
style and themes, although there may be
deviations, innovations, or changes.
To borrow the axiom of Sarris (1962
[1999]), film directors are authorized as auteurs
when their films meet all of the three criteria:
the directors’ ‘technical competence,’
477
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
‘distinguished personality,’ and ‘internal mean-
ings’ derived from the tension between their
personality and the constraints that surround
them.
Kubrick is believed to meet all these
assumptions of auteurist film criticism. Like
Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and
Vincent Minnelli, he enjoyed a high level of
artistic control throughout his career within
Hollywood’s system of production and genre.
As a result of this control, his films were capable
of satisfying a novel project of auteurist film
criticism: to challenge the dichotomy between
art and commerce by evaluating the genre films
directed by the studio filmmakers as expressing
their technical competence and distinguished
personality and thereby elevating the films,
albeit previously recognized as mass entertain-
ment, as artworks.6
Examination of scholarly study of Kubrick’s
films (Ciment 2001; Naremore 2007; Walker
et al. 1999) illustrates a series of their thematic
and stylistic consistencies that auteurist film
criticism generally demonstrates. These include
the technical innovations he was lauded for,
variations of camera movements and one-point
perspective that appear in many of his films,
conflicts between the controlling system and the
human being’s free will as subject matter used
for character development, lead character’s psy-
chic complexity, and the use of an aesthetic of
the grotesque. All these thematic and stylistic
consistencies seem to be maintained throughout
Kubrick’s work despite difference in genre rep-
resented by each film.
The idea of Kubrick as auteur is also sup-
ported by an array of popular views on his
personality and production process. He pro-
duced only thirteen feature-length films from
his debut feature Killer’s Kiss (1955) through
to his death in 1999. During that time, he
was known for exercising meticulous control
478 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
over all aspects of the filmmaking process
(Castle 2016; Philips 2001). He was also
described in the popular press and in scholarly
reviews of his work for being reclusive
(D’Alessandro and Ulivieri 2016; Philips
2001). His colleagues described him as a per-
fectionist, evoked by an often repeated anec-
dote that he would commonly shoot a single
scene with more than 100 takes (D’Alessandro
and Ulivieri 2016; Philips 2001). Lastly, he
was known for undertaking wide-ranging
research as he developed his films, including
the legacy he left for his unfinished film pro-
jects Napoleon, A. I. Artificial Intelligence, and
Aryan Papers (Figure 4). Taken together,
these reports on his work process support the
auteur criticism’s characterization of Kubrick
as a transcendental genius that evokes the
romantic idea of the artist.
Once defined as an auteur, the film director
provides the museum with a notable point of
attraction that reaches beyond the value of any
film. It defines for the museum curator an artist
working in a unique art form that emerged in
the 20th century. Based on this definition of
film auteur, 1000-square-meter space occupied
by the Kubrick exhibition becomes a discourse
on an artistic process, an examination of the idea
of film auteur.
The exhibition, however, also appears to be
driven by another late 20th century curatorial
trend. Since the 1990s, art museums have
embraced film auteurs in much the same way
they mounted exhibitions on seminal artists of
the modern movement, from van Gogh or
Kandinsky to Warhol. In the same way, curators
can apply the same scholarly process to the film
auteur, surrounding their work with the aura of
a romantic artist authorized by the public insti-
tution worthy of curatorial inquiry and public
presentation. Thus, the film auteur is trans-
formed into a museum artist (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Section for the books and documents that Kubrick amassed and studied for his unfinished project
Napoleon, “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibition,” Photo: Seoul Museum of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonline-
library.com]
Once conferred the status of a museum
artist, the artifacts that Kubrick amassed
become elevated by the curatorial presentation,
giving them a sense of authenticity. The exhibi-
tion displays selections from his archives in
same manner as relics or artworks of the past. In
the museum setting, the value placed on these
artifacts could be considered both as homage
and simultaneously, as ironic. As Benjamin
(1938 [2003]) reasons, film emblemized the ‘de-
struction of aura;’ a new mechanical mode of
perception and collective reception in the audi-
ence’s experience of art. In the late 20th century,
film as the medium Benjamin claimed destroyed
the aura of the traditional arts in the early 20th
century, is now transformed back into an ‘au-
ratic’ object itself after its heyday has ended.
The prominent mass media is now relocated
into the museum and recontextualized.
Jihoon Kim
The museum focus on the film auteur may
now be viewed as demonstrating how museums
are now assimilating film into traditional prac-
tices. The curators have done so by constructing
a new definition for originality, authenticity,
and an aura of artwork created through decon-
struction of the artist’s output. In this case, the
transformation of Kubrick’s artifacts and docu-
ments into auratic objects validates their cul-
tural status in what Pa€ıni (2002) calls cinema’s
‘patrimonial value’ in the post-cinematic condi-
tion.
Cinematic Apparatus: Aggregate Condition
and Differential Specificity
The Kubrick exhibition also offers visitors a
valuable opportunity for viewing and examining
the idea of the cinematic apparatus though
479
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
consideration of his production process and evi-
dence from his films. Krauss (1999) argues that
film is distinct from the mediums of traditional
arts such as painting or sculpture because it can-
not be reduced to a physical substance or a limited
set of techniques. For Krauss, film’s particular
medium specificity derives from its ‘aggregate
condition’ grounded in the layering of materials,
technologies, and conventions of how to use
these components. She states that the medium of
film cannot be reduced to a single component,
whether the celluloid strip, the camera, the
projector, the beam of light, or the screen.
Rather, Krauss argues that the medium of film is
the model for producing a single, sustained
experience of viewing predicated on “the utter
interdependence of all these things” (1999, 25).
Krauss’ description of the ‘aggregate’ condi-
tion of the cinematic apparatus was a dominant
film theory in the 1970s. Heath (1981) concep-
tualized the specificity of cinema as internal
heterogeneity of its components and their par-
ticular arrangement (223), a condition consis-
tent with Wollen’s (1978) explanation of the
cinematic apparatus as the interlocking of the
camera, its recording process, projection, and
the position of the spectator (21). Taken
together as emblematic of the prevailing
approach to film theory at the time, Heath’s and
Wollen’s accounts suggest that the cinematic
apparatus is composed of the internal layering
of its materials (camera, filmstrip, projector,
screen) and the immaterial form and patterns of
production and consumption (cultural norms
associated with the theater setting, viewing
position, rules of cinematography, editing and
narrative conventions). Despite the internal
complexity of its apparatus, film maintains the
idea of medium specificity by assimilating the
differences between the components into “a sin-
gle, indivisible, experiential unit” or as Krauss
states, ‘differential specificity’ (1999, 30).
480 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
The Kubrick exhibition examines the cine-
matic apparatus as ‘aggregate’ and takes on its
‘differential specificity’ in self-reflexive manner.
The exhibition’s entrance spotlights a mass of
the cameras and lenses that he used or updated
during his life, as well as his experience as a
photographer before his filmmaking career.
Then both categories give visitors a sense of
Kubrick’s mastery of the technical means of
production of images. Visitors are able to expe-
rience an array of literary conventions underly-
ing the mainstream cinema from the original
novels adapted by Kubrick. They can also see
Kubrick’s original scripts, witness elements of
mise-en-scene from still photos, set designs,
and wardrobes, and explore how he achieved
the aesthetic and technical details of his inno-
vative visual effects in the production of 2001:
A Space Odyssey (Figure 5), including his slit-
scan photography used for the Stargate
sequence. The visitors’ museum experience of
this work stands in contrast to the visual and
sensory experience in a movie theater. While
cinema has traditionally been regarded as the
triumph of the disembodied gaze, the museum
experience is better characterized as an embod-
ied vision interlocking the visitors’ haptic mode
of perception and their movements through
the gallery. The Kubrick exhibition presents
the composite idea of the cinematic apparatus,
projecting Kubrick’s film practices onto a visi-
tor’s embodied vision. In one instance, on
entering the reconstruction of the room and
corridor from one scene in The Shining (1980),
the visitor is drawn into Kubrick’s signature
tracking shots that navigate the spaces in the
film. In this reconstruction, the exhibit config-
uration both conserves and reconstructs the
memory of cinema experience and the appara-
tus used to construct the experience, a concept
that has been explored in greater detail by
Bruno (2002, 236) (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Section for demonstrating visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Stanley Kubrick: An Exhibition,”
SEMA; Photo: Seoul Museum of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Dialectic of Specificity and Impurity: Film’s
Intermediality
From another perspective, the cinematic
apparatus is dialectical, uniting its components
into a single viewing experience. The compo-
nents of film, however, register an affiliation
with its neighboring media and the arts that
existed before its invention. In this sense, cin-
ema has its own form and also a dialectical rela-
tion to the idea of impurity because of that
affiliation. This can be called cinema’s interme-
diality, a concept that refers to cinema’s inclu-
sion of the material, technical, and aesthetic
registers of other arts and media.
The arguments of defining the essence of
cinema in comparison to – or by drawing upon
the analogies with – its neighboring arts (paint-
ing, architecture, music, theater, etc.) can be
Jihoon Kim
found in the classical film theory of the early
20th century. As early as the 19200 s avant-garde
film was characterized as ‘sculpture in motion’
or ‘painting in motion’ (see, for example, Abel
1993) or as Eisenstein suggested, the art of
montage (Eisenstein 1991). In his reflection on
the ontology of cinema, philosopher Badiou
(2005) argues that cinema’s establishment as
modern art lies in turning its inherent impurity
into the idea of art for art’s sake. “In cinema,
nothing is pure. Cinema is internally and inte-
grally contaminated by its situation as the “plus-
one” of arts” (86). This view is consistent with a
similar argument proposed by Stam (2004) in
his description of cinema’s intermediality, argu-
ing that the image of cinema incorporates the
tradition of painting and the visual arts while its
soundtrack inherits the history of music, dia-
logue, and sound experimentation (5). As
481
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
cinema matured in the mid-twentieth century,
directors were driven by a self-reflexive impulse
to expose and investigate film’s multilayered
and rich alliances with other arts. For example,
Bergman often referenced theatrical forms or
proto-cinematic devices while Godard explored
his fascination with painting that encompassed
classicism, impressionism, and pop art.
In reconsidering this history with a view to
exploring the cinema as it enters the museum
context, I argue that the Kubrick exhibition
takes a self-reflexive approach to expose how
film’s intermediality is reflected in his films.
Kubrick disavowed the idea of cinema as pure
art. In several interviews he stated that montage
is the only domain unique to cinema, while cin-
ematography is derived from photography and
mise-en-scene from the conventions of painting
and theater.7 As noted earlier, the Kubrick exhi-
bition spotlights the filmmaker’s early career as
a photographer by focusing on his constant
upgrading of lenses and cameras to indicate the
salience of each image. In addition, one of the
most notable artifacts in the exhibition was
Kubrick’s draft and annotated completed scripts
of Lolita (1962), A Clockwork Orange (1971),
Barry Lyndon, and The Shining (all based on an
original novel), revealing traces of his revision
and adaptations.
The set designs and props for A Clockwork
Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Eyes Wide Shut
demonstrate that Kubrick considered them as
key elements of his mise-en-scene in those films
(Figure 6). The publicity poster for A Clockwork
Orange and the lenses used for Barry Lyndon
remind visitors of the relationships that
Kubrick’s mise-en-scene has with the history of
painting (specifically, A Clockwork Orange’s rela-
tion to contemporary pop art, while Barry Lyn-
don drew heavily on the romantic painting
traditions of the late 18th century typified by
landscape paintings by Constable and Turner).
482 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
These references to the intermedial nature of
film are punctuated by curatorial reminders that
the final cinema production is an assemblage of
other art forms. It also makes the point about an
intermedial link between cinema and music by
punctuating the visitors’ exploration with
soundtracks from the key films in his oeuvre
played in loop in a separate room, as if the music
appreciation is a stand alone art form, not sim-
ply part of the final work.
In summary, a key curatorial strategy of the
Kubrick exhibition is to deconstruct the ele-
ments of literature, theater, painting, photogra-
phy, and music from Kubrick’s films to offer the
visitor a walk through the many art forms that
constitute film. In his discussion on the implica-
tions of Ingmar Bergman’s entrance into the
museum, Elsaesser (2009) writes: “These appar-
ent incompatibilities. . .that can be itemized or
‘problematized’ between these respective dis-
positifs [apparatuses], are precisely among the
theoretically most fruitful and in practice most
productive factors about the fine arts and visual
culture today” (5). This strategy for activating
the visitor’s awareness of cinema’s intermedial-
ity is a useful way of preserving Kubrick’s films,
and the sense that cinema triggers, despite the
contradictory – even antagonistic – institutional
and ontological differences between a cinema
experience and a visit to a museum (Figure 6).
DISCUSSION
The ‘exhibitions of cinema,’ of which the
Kubrick exhibition is exemplary, have recon-
figured and revivified the three ideas of cinema
– film auteur, exploration of the cinematic
apparatus, and film’s intermediality with other
more pure art forms. Despite the clarity of
auteur and intermediality, ‘exhibitions of
cinema’ fail to fully realize the technical and
material complexity of the cinematic apparatus
Figure 6. Set design and props for A Clockwork Orange (1971), “Stanley Kubrick” exhibition; Photo: Seoul Museum
of Art. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
in the museum’s temporal economy. The per-
spective taken by a viewer of this deconstructed
approach to an actual film contradicts concepts
of cinematic time. It disrupts the concept of
narrative as seen through the duration or a film
and its experience in the theater. The common
aspect of their apparatus has largely been
grounded in the uncomfortable cohabitation of
the fragmentary film projections inside the
‘black box’ and the display of the objects asso-
ciated with film directors and their filmmaking
inside the ‘white cube.’
I would argue that, based on the three con-
ditions explored above, ‘exhibitions of cinema’
should provide their visitors with a separate the-
atrical platform, whether in the form of the
museum’s own screening space or in collabora-
tion with the museum’s neighboring theater, in
order to minimize their inherent limitations
Jihoon Kim
and allow the cinematic experience to be fully
satisfied. The form of cinema based on the tra-
ditional proscenium film theater and its speci-
ficity of seating and territory has been mutated
through communication with neighboring arts
and coping with media changes since its inven-
tion.8 It is the specific form of traditional cin-
ema that makes possible the ‘exhibitions of
cinema,’ mutating the form.
In his proposal for the film program of
Documenta 12 in 2007, Horwath (2007) has
declared, “The location of film at Documenta
12 is the movie theatre.”9 His declaration pro-
vides an ideal model for the ‘exhibitions of cin-
ema,’ because Documenta 12 offered its visitors
not simply a variety of moving image installa-
tions variously transforming and repurposing
the forms, techniques, and histories of cinema,
but also the rich outputs of the ‘only cinema’
483
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
that encompass art cinema and experimental
film. It is worth noting that the Kubrick exhibi-
tion exemplifies Horwath’s model. Each city
that hosted the Kubrick exhibition since open-
ing in Frankfurt, including Berlin, Paris, Los
Angeles, Amsterdam, and Seoul, simultane-
ously opened a retrospective screening of
Kubrick’s films at the museum’s movie theater
during the exhibition.
The Documenta 12 model further suggests
two points concerning the coexistence of the
‘exhibition of cinema’ and the film theater. On
the one hand, the museum gallery and the movie
theater produce divergent faces of the past, pre-
sent, and future of cinema in their convergence.
On the other hand, the ineluctable limitations
of exhibiting cinema inside the white cube sug-
gest that the art institution and film culture
should run parallel to each other while main-
taining their own territories and missions.
CONCLUSION
The coexistence of limitations and possibil-
ities suggests that both apparatuses, cinema and
the museum, are in flux. Just as the postmodern
transformations of the museum have propelled
it to dissolve established boundaries between its
traditional objects (treasures, relics, and art-
works) and cinema, so the crises of the tradi-
tional filmic image, medium, and experience
have created conditions that allow these arti-
facts to be ‘relocated’ within the museum walls.
The result is a commitment to preserve the rich
history of film as an art form for cinephiles’ re-
enchantment.
I have sought to emphasize the possibilities
for reviving the three ideas of cinema by stress-
ing that despite the fundamental differences
between the experience of cinema and the
museum visit, the ‘exhibition of cinema’ offers
visitors provocative opportunities to explore
484 Article: Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities
both two apparatuses, an experience that is a key
consequence of the post-cinematic conditions.
Considering Elsaesser’s insight into the “pro-
ductive factors” that enable and necessitate new
kinds of encounter between cinema and the
museum, I argue that the Kubrick exhibition –
more broadly, the ‘exhibition of cinema’ –
provides contemporary museum visitors and
cinephiles with a rich space of possibilities for
rethinking the status of the museum and that of
its objects in the context of the museum’s tech-
nological, curatorial, and institutional transfor-
mations. What we witness from this post-
cinematic phenomenon in the museum is the
dynamic archive of cinema’s past, a continual
reminder of what and where cinema is. As such,
the museum becomes its own apparatus for sav-
ing and reconstructing the film medium and the
idea of cinema as art, in ways that may also shift
understanding of the future of cinema. END
NOTES
1. For an excellent summary of the discourse on the
“death of cinema,” see Jovanonic (2003). For the
most recent and systematic studies on the ‘post-
cinema’ discourse, see Casetti (2015) and Gau-
dreault and Marion (2015).
2. Quoted in MOMA’s “Tim Burton” exhibition
(22 November 2009 to 26 April 2010) website,
information page. https://www.moma.org/cale
ndar/exhibitions/313 (Accessed 31 May 2017).
3. Quoted in the Stanley Kubrick exhibition web-
site, introduction page. http://www.stanleykubric
k.de/en/ausstellung-exhibition/(Accessed 31
May 2017).
4. This observation is similar to Mermelsein’s view
on the merging of the objects and audiovisual
fragments in the San Francisco event of the
Kubrick exhibition in 2016. He writes that these
seemingly disparate items “achieved their contin-
uing resonance through the vision and persever-
ance of one man” (2016).

5. Sontag’s (1996) now-famous lamentation of the
‘decay of cinema’ goes as follows: “The reduction
of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprinci-
pled manipulation of images (faster and faster
cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing,
has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema
that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.
Images now appear in any size and on a variety of
surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls
and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas.
The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily
undermined the standards people once had both
for cinema as art and for cinema as popular enter-
tainment.”
6. Stam (2000) summarizes this project of the auteur
theory as follows: “Filmmakers like Eisenstein,
Renoir, and Welles had always been regarded as
auteurs because they were known to have enjoyed
artistic control over their own productions. The
novelty of auteur theory was to suggest that studio
directors like Hawks and Minnelli were also
auteurs” (87).
7. Kubrick’s own words on editing as the only hall-
mark of cinematic medium specificity are as fol-
lows: “Editing is the only aspect of the cinematic
art that is unique. It shares no connection with
any other art form: writing, acting, photography,
things that are major aspects of the cinema, are
still not unique to it, but editing is” (Strick and
Houston 2001, 135).
8. The term ‘only cinema’ was originally coined by
French film critic Serge Daney. In his recent dis-
cussion, Bellour (2013) reinterprets this term to
stress the rich history of the diverse forms of tradi-
tional cinema and the specificity of cinematic
experience grounded in the film theater.
9. Horwarth’s full remark is as follows: “The loca-
tion of film at Documenta 12 is the movie theatre.
This is a very simple answer to the recent debates
on how to adequately present moving images in
the context of art. In the course of its existence,
the film medium has not only given proof of its
capacity to function as art (besides several other
capacities) but has also developed a strong presen-
tation format and a strong social space: the cin-
ema. This format and space are based on the
Jihoon Kim
Volume 60 Number 4 October 2017
physical and technical characteristics of the med-
ium. They allow film to be perceived on a specific
level of intensity to which it owes its historical
success.”
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