The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford narrative

Elegiac western, beautifully shot and acted. The film is narrated from the viewpoint of the author of the novel on which the book is based. The title makes it clear what is going to happen, giving the film a sense that it is one long flashback. However, the film tells the story chronologically, - the starting point is towards the end of Jesse James life. The James Gang are forced to recruit less reliable members and after a brutal train robbery Frank James gives up. This leaves Jesse (Pitt) under stress and relying on, a new generation of criminal such as the hero-worshipping Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). The focus of the story is on how the relationship between Ford and James changes from worshipper to murderer.


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

For Profit Museums

The Berkshire Conference

has a short piece on the For Profit model for museums and touring exhibitions

Blockbuster For Profit Exhibitions

Interesting piece on the new phenomena of Blockbuster exhibitions undertaken for profit.

The Tutankhamun exhibition charges something like $5m dollars per city. It was created using 120 objects from Egypt and the touring group gave Egypt £20m dollars plus $2m dollars donation to a museum in return for the rights to set up the tour. Each venue can charge $20-$30 dollars per person, and Egypt, the entrepreneurs and the hosting institution all make a reasonable profit.



Los Angeles Times piece by Mike Bloehn 22 May 2005

Travelling Exhibitions - how to make money with them

I am doing some research to create a business case for a museum project - I'm looking for any Museum project that might justify itself to business investment. First thoughts are that, in London at least, making money is the province of tacky attractions of the London Dungeon, Madame Tussaud's and London Bridge Experience type.

12_Successful traveling exhibition_West.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Christopher Wren by Downes, Kerry

A little book in the Very Interesting People series. All the essential information is here, and gives some space to Wren's non-architectural contributions, which are quite impressive. Competent but not an exciting read.

Narrative Structure: Modern day preface, then straight into a chronological description of his life. As Wren was working on many different projects at once there is a hybrid between chronological and thematic organisation, so chapter on St Pauls appears in right chronological sequence for its beginning but then deals with City Churches and St Paul's before moving on to other projects.

Friendly expert authorial voice with single focus.

OUP: UK General Catalogue

Shettles Exhibition Design Evaluation

In :

Miles, R.S. (ed.) 'The Design Of Education Exhibits' BM (Natural History Museum), 2nd Ed 1988
I came across the Shettles Exhibition Categories which is a system of evaluating exhibitions -

the categories are:

Shettles Exhibition Categories

Attractivenes of Exhibit


Object Choice
number
Size
Attractiveness

Ease of Comprehension

Ability to attract attention

Attention on Exhibit
Size
Layout
Colour
Light
Contrast


Ability to hold attention

Appropriateness of presentation

Communication Techniques
Sound
Motion
Film
Demonstration
Visitor Participation
Charts
Text

Location & Crowd Flow
Focus of Attention
Visitor Charateristics

Walter Gropius and Exhibition Design

I came across an interesting book in the CSM Library:

Miles, R.S. (ed.) 'The Design Of Education Exhibits' BM (Natural History Museum), 2nd Ed 1988

It is now rather an interesting historical resource rather than a text book on education design but does have some useful insights, and it is fascinating in that it is written towards the beginning of the use of Computer interactives when the Science museums were the only people doing interactivity.

Anyway, in the introduction he pinpoints Gropius Bauhaus Baugewerkschafts Austellung (Building Workers Union Exhibition)., 1931

as being the point at which exhibitions begin to be visitor friendly - i.e. purposely design with the ebb and flow of the visitor in mind. He talks of the space being divided into areas, giving a logical sequence, with a smooth flow,curved walls and a bridge built to provide drama.

The method he presents is one in which the Gallery has to be designed from the top down, while the message needs to be written from the bottom up and these two things have to be keep in mind (and presumably) in balance the whole way through the process.

He also refers to Otto Neurath and his 'Vienna Method' a system of creating diagrams to explain complex issues which were used in his Social and Economic Museum in Vienna.

See here for information on Otto Neurath

and here to see some Isotype diagrams.

The book refers to the Shettles Exhibition Categories which is a system of evaluating exhibitions - see next post. and he describes the advantages of dividing up a room into areas to make the exhibition more directed. He describes these systems as being regimented. Object emphasis can be by Size, Colur, isolation, shape or by lighting or background texture.

He refers to the use of numbering to make sure people know which way around an exhibition to proceed (used in Horniman Museum) .

The section on interactives is quite interesting - he is very keen to make sure that button pressing devices are not truly interactive they are simply dymamic as there is no real interaction between the action and the people. so exhibition can be divided into:

Static
Dynamic
Interactive

Understanding the Curator's World

Definition: Curator:manager, superintendent, supervisor, overseer; keeper; guardian (Latin)

Close to the heart of a Museum Curator, even a thoroughly modern one, is the love of the collection – our store of 'our' precious things. We love them, we spend out time looking after them, writing about them, talking about them, showing them off, we handle them with loving care, cradling them carefully in gloved hands, storing them in pristine tissue-paper, in specially made, contamination-free containers, publishing them in beautifully designed catalogues. We place them on pedestals lit by spotlights, on colour coordinated backgrounds. We almost worship them echoing our origins as custodians of the Temple's treasures.

At the same time most of us are equally devoted to our Museum's subject matter. We want to be academics of history, scientists of nature, critics of art history or sociologists of society and we can find that house-keeping the objects gets in the way of our subject love. Sometimes the Museum curator is parachuted into looking after an alien collection – a collection they know nothing about. At first, it is an alarming feeling – often the Curator is dealing with subject experts on a day to day basis without the necessary intellectual armoury. But soon the intimacy the Curator has with their objects gives them the tools to hold their own amongst the experts, armed with secret knowledge even the most distinguished academic is not normally privy to.

The modern curator is likely to be more orientated to serving the public - the Museum as a customer focussed industry. Their challenge is to increase the public enjoyment of the collection, to maximise the learning potential inherent in the Museum. Alongside the desire to provide a lively visiting experience the Curator has also to focus on maintaining the Museums as a sustainable entity. Visitor Surveys, focus groups, exhibition design, marketing, and business planning are the nuts and bolts to this new type of Curator. The service focussed Curator is the one most in tune with current Government thinking. They increasingly see Museum Curators as deliverers of policy (the current emphasis is in challenging social exclusion, encouraging multi-culturalism) and sometimes they see Museums as engines of civic regeneration rather than custodians of collections.

These then are the three pillars which define the Curator's World. Objects are what makes a museum distinct from any other sort of organisation – without authentic artefacts we would be exhibitions, theme parks, or colleges, think tanks, societies, pressure groups, with them we are a unique type of organisation. Our subjects give us our sense of purpose as we engage with the outside world. Our visitors give us both focus and our legitimacy – it is them that provide us with the justification for filling our cellars with other people's cast-offs, and which allows us us to demand finance from Governments and Trusts.

Being by nature a clumsy person I've never been good with tripods and not being religious I'm not keen on trinities so we need a fourth pillar - most often this is the Museum building. Often it is a valuable piece of architecture in its own right – either an historic building or an iconic piece of architecture. What the Curator can do, and the vision the Curator hopes to impose are circumscribed as much by the building as by the Collections, the subject, or the visitors. The building is the stage on which we present our visions. But the building is not just a physical entity it houses an institution with its own history and practices sanctioned by time. The founder, the range of his collection, who are and who selects the Trustees, the very institutional history these are also vital factors that shape the destiny of the modern Museum.

To understand a Museum the student needs to get to grips with these 4 pillars that define the Museum. Collections, Subject Matter, Public, Institutional setup. Museums themselves use them to shape their own mission statements – the key to the understanding any modern museum.

This was the prologue to my book on Museums - but I have now completely revised the idea so it is now a piece looking for a home.

cost of membership to International Bodies

On Radio 4 just heard a retiring member of the Commonwealth cite the following per person costs per year of membership to various international bodies for British people

European Union £53
United Nations £10
Nato £2
Commonwealth 18p

His point was what good value we get out of the Commonwealth.

Narrative and the Museum of London

Having turned up at the wrong Museum for the Lamas Conference (!) I was able to spend a few minutes double checking my analysis of the Museum's narrative structure.

Previously, I have written: 'The Museum of London building opened in 1976,by Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, was one of the first museums in Britain that was purpose built with the demands of museum narrative in mind. They designed the Museum with a single route way through the system – starting with the prehistoric gallery, which lead to the Roman Gallery, a dark passage led through the Dark Ages to the Medieval section. A Tudor gate led into the Tudor and Stuart period rooms, while a modern glass vaulted roof lead down to the modern period. The visitors were lead by the hand and by the architectural metaphor to enjoy the transition from the primitive rural pre-London prehistory to the joys of modern London. It was a model of clarity. Non-stop development has obscured the clarity now as introductory displays, and a temporary exhibition space has interposed the Great Fire of London between the prehistoric and the Roman periods ....'

However, the museum still begins at the beginning with the Palaeolithic and ends in the early modern period (as the modern galleries are being refurbished).

Each gallery is basically chronological with thematic areas. The Museum has, in recent exhibitions, adopted a particular method, which is typified by the Prehistoric Gallery and was used in the World Gallery). This uses tall thin panels which give each section its overview of the period or theme, large angled panels giving further details, and each case has long thin overview panels with labels below the objects. Inside or near the objects are neat TFL Flat panels with short video sequences. Hands on activities are restricted to the ability to stroke some prehistoric objects. There are occasional large set piece panels and they are making a practice of creating some cases with displays with a high aesthetic value.

The prehistoric gallery, which has large set piece wooden display boards on one side, with archaeological plans carved out of wood. by contrast the other side of the room has large blue coloured vitrines full of objects discovered in the River Thames, with the objects seemingly floating down to the bottom of the river Thames. A cynic might suggest the blue should be replaced by a murky brown!

A narrative innovation is the use of fictional texts displayed on the large wooden panels which read as if written by a native American or a shaman but actually, if I identify Jonathan Cotton's name correctly, are written by Museum of London archaeologists.

Most are quite evocative and are identified as pastiche by the date and name, although I would have preferred if the public were informed who they were, and they do seem to be tinted with rose water. The display includes small dioramas and a section of reconstructed wattle and daub wall. The route through most Museum of London galleries is fairly clear, the leave a little freedom of movement by the planned route is fairly clear if not compulsory.

The next gallery is out of sequence and has been put here to mop up school children studying the Great Fire as part of the National Curriculum. Again, it is laid out in the traditional abc structure. It has a booth for a fire experience narrated by 3 different contemporary witness (Pepys, Vincent and another). The design idea here is to make everything red!

The Roman Gallery is now the second oldest gallery in the Museum, and begins at 43AD and ends at 410 AD, with a broad chronological flow in between although the main organising principle is thematic - trade, transport, games, home life, religion etc. Readings from Seneca and other contemporary writers are broadcast near the Temple of Mithras displays. Largely the objects are left to talk for themselves but the museum also has invested in several very high quality models of Roman London and reconstruction drawings (1 of which I own!) They also have a large reconstruction of Roman living, dining and kitchen rooms using original objects where they exist.


The new Medieval Gallery has diverged a little from the methods previously described, although the same thin panels mark the transitions. The gallery opens with a very good map basic video sequence which tells the essential story so that the visitor can enjoy the objects. The exhibition is chronological, but being a large rectangular space the visitor could miss the chronological route around the exhibition. This route goes around the outside, anticlockwise, punctuated by these tall thin panels, however, much of the narrative is done thematically with sections on dining, plague, clothing, armour, Vikings etc. etc. The simple design template used in the Prehistoric Gallery is not used quite so regularl and the large variety of different sized cases, and labelling techniques makes the displays a little less soothing to walk around. There are many more hands on interactives of various styles, and another booth in which to enjoy the horrors of the plague.

The next and at present the last gallery is the Tudor and Stuart Gallery which is the only one of the designs to survive from the museum's opening in the 1970's. It is much more book on the wall with vast reams of readable text, but is well laid out with well chosen objects and models.

I'm sure they will not be at present the Museum is an interesting case study in the evolving design of exhibitions, with the 1970's Tudor and Stewart Gallery, 80's Roman London gallery, turn of the century London before London, and the 2006/7 Medieval and Great Fire Galleries.



Museum of London

Beowulf - the movie

Bob Zemeckis" 2007 I wish I'd seen this in 3D! Much better than I feared it would be, and quite an interesting narrative device to excuse the liberties they took with the story.

The structure of the story telling is straightforward - it begins with the slaughter in the hall, and ends with the death of Beowulf. However, the narrative is turned from an epic warrior poem into a tragedy - of the frailty of male chauvinism. The way they achieve this is to tell the 'true' story of Beowulf, and make it clear that the poem is simply the mythical/politically corrected version constructed after the event to the glory of the protagonists.

The kings of the Danes (Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone) in turn are both snared by the beauties of Grendel's mother (an enhanced (?) Angelina Jolie), the offspring of the unnatural unions are warped monsters that try to wreak revenge on their fathers. Beowulf does not kill Grendel's mother he sleeps with her - he lives an unhappy life as a consequence of his failure to live up to his reputation, until he redeems his life at the end.


Beowulf: 'It blew me away' - Features, Film & TV - The Independent:

Catch a Fire Movie

2006 and Directed by Philip Noyse (Rabbit proof fence) is the straight forward telling of the tale of Apartheid through the eyes of 2 opponents.

The structure is to play the story straight from beginning to end, but balancing the narrative between the lives of the two protagonists - there is just one narrative, not two equal and opposing viewpoints, but roughly equal time is given to both. Each person is also seen in the context of their own lives, the Boer Colonel is shown to be a reasonable man in his home context while the ANC member is a man with some character faults.

Tim Robbins plays the calm, authoritative Nic Vos who adopts the same attitude while chatting to his kids as when torturing his victims. Derek Luke plays Patrick Chamusso, based on the real life story of an ordinary African who just want to get on with his life, until he is radicalised by a false accusation of involvement in ANC sabotage.

Catch a Fire Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

Narrative and the Museum in Docklands

The Museum has a reassuringly traditional narrative structure - except they send you up to the 3rd floor to begin the story of London's Docklands, and thereafter it is a descent through time, from the beginning of London's story to the present day. Within each section there are, of course, thematic as well as chronological narratives. But by and large reassuringly from once upon a time, to nowadays.

As with most factual stories the story does start in the present day with an introduction by Tony Robinson, setting the scene. But we are then taken straight away to the origins of London. The first gallery, although modernised by the use of digital labels with further video footage of Mr TV Archaeologist, feels like many other local history museum, and there is a feeling that this museum is in direct competition with its own mother museum, the Museum of London, both telling essentially the same story, and the sense of disappointment, and the feeling that there is alack of editorial focus does not disappear until the HLF funded Slavery exhibition, where a bit of money, a compelling tale and some multimedia raise the Museum to a higher level.

There are a couple of interesting narrative devices that diverge from the standard. The first is the use 'filmed' fictional drama to bring the past to life, with a few ham actors pretending to be in Edward Lloyds Coffeehouse discussing the state of shipping in the pipe smoking, wig wearing, smug 18th Century. It fails both to be authentic or dramatic enough.

More successfully, is the multimedia in the Slavery section where meaningful words are spoken by a cast of ordinary (but very multi-cultural) Londoners. As a narrative tells a parallel story of the past and the present at the same time, and the use of one voice with many faces, at least makes the viewer think, and for once departs from the traditional narrative structure.

Physically, mostly the displays are of the directed serpentine system whereby there is definitely a right way to go around the Museum, in places there is a mixture of pinball and the serpentine system, but the visitor can usually detect the way they are meant to go around.

Post modern elements are restricted to the multimedia as mentioned above and the use of various post-it notes and pin up your opinion participative devices.

Narrative and Museums

I am currently working on an article about narrative structure in Museums.

This is a snippet:

'There is a sense, however, in which Museum exhibitions have led the way in breaking down the shackles of authorial dominance – whereby the visitor/reader has to follow the structure imposed by the author/curator. Originally, virtually all Museums were housed in buildings with rectangular rooms, normally with 4 doors in the centre of each wall, and with display cases and wall hangings scattered around each room. This structure made it hard for the curator to imposed a fixed route, and allowed the visitor the ability to override the given structure and create their own narrative experience. In addition, the visitor can skip, linger, jump and can construct their own learning experience. This may or may not be analogous to leafing through a coffee table book or picking particular articles in an encyclopaedia at random but it is a particular feature of the museum as a medium, which in effect means that most museum visits do not consist of a traditional narrative at all but are user orientated, participative and thoroughly post-modern. The curatorial authorial voice, which is the normal mode of transmission of the Museum message, can thus often be subverted by the physicality of the museum experience and, in this sense is most un-literary.

The Museum of London building opened in 1976,by Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, was one of the first museums in Britain that was purpose built with the demands of museum narrative in mind. They designed the Museum with a single route way through the system – starting with the prehistoric gallery, which lead to the Roman Gallery, a dark passage led through the Dark Ages to the Medieval section. A Tudor gate led into the Tudor and Stuart period rooms, while a modern glass vaulted roof lead down to the modern period. The visitors were lead by the hand and by the architectural metaphor to enjoy the transition from the primitive rural pre-London prehistory to the joys of modern London. It was a model of clarity. Non-stop development has obscured the clarity now as introductory displays, and a temporary exhibition space has interposed the Great Fire of London between the prehistoric and the Roman periods ....'


Anyway, I am resolved to consider the narrative structure of all Museums I visit in the near future.

Medicine Through Time and the Science Museum

This is a letter I wrote to the London Museums of Health and Medicine in relation to a request by the Science Museum for helping in locating teachers to comment on their new Medicine Through Time web site.

'When this project was first mentioned at a LMHM meeting by the Science Museum I did express an opinion at the Meeting that it should have been a joint project between the Museums in the London Museums of Health and Medicine group as Medicine through Time is one of the programmes that is of major importance to our visitor numbers.

I am hoping that the web site will not be designed to Hoover up all school visits to the Science Museum but might be a resource that could benefit all of our museums as cooperation can have great mutual benefits - in fact quite a few schools go to two LMHM Museums.

The London Hub for example has pioneered web resources shared between participating Museums - such as Untold Century and the 20th Century site - and I would have hoped that the Science Museum would follow this route. If it cannot be jointly 'owned' will the content will, at least, be set up to have links to our web sites and resources where appropriate?'

Cutty Sark - only 2% destroyed

Apparently, less that 2% of the Cutty Sark's original fabric was lost in the fire. This seems quite amazing, and one wonders if this is not because so little of the original fabric survived in the first place that the fire could not destroy much of it.

I'm probably being too cynical because the good thing was that much of the original material was already off site with the fire broke out,

to see the Conservation project diary - follow this link: Cutty Sark - Diary

Cycle ride Kings Cross to Paddington (Stoke newington to Worcester)

As First Great Western Railways have cancelled yet more trains from Paddington to Worcester I have the choice of an impossible dash from Worcester University to the train station or waiting for 2 hours for the next train. So, I had to deploy the bicycle. This is the Route.

Clapton to Canonbury
Islington Park Street, straight across junction to
Bewdley Road straight across the junction and follow the road down the hill towards Caledonian road but before you get there turn left into:
Hemingford Road (this makes the crossing of Caledonian Road easier)
Copenhagen Street
cross Caledonia Road
cycle 200 yards or so and turn left into
York Way, right into
Goodsway to back of Kings Cross Left into
Midland Road Between St Pancras and British Library
Straight across junction into Judd Street
Then turn right when you come to the main green bike route which runs East West and is separated from traffic - you can feel the Taxi's hating the delay crossing the two line bike lane
Tavistock Place, Torrington Place and takes you to
Tottenham Court Road, Turn Right Then Left into
Howland Street, where the protected and marked cycle route begins to give up - occasionally a bit of green tarmac reappears, but it is well signposted and takes you to Paddington.

given that this route links two of London's main stations and we have a Mayor who says he supports cycling - why, you may ask, is the standard set in the University District not kept up along the entire route?

Train to Worcester accepts bikes at the front of the train, and from the Station takes 15 minutes to get to the University.

route back from Paddington to Kings Cross is much more difficult at first as it is not really sign posted, and I ended up too far south and took the Wigmore Street route which is just north of Oxford Street and takes you safely to Pentonville.

Pearly kings and queens depicted on St Thomas' Street hoarding [28 March 2008]

Details of the artist used for the Hoardings outside St Thomas Church.

Pearly kings and queens depicted on St Thomas' Street hoarding [28 March 2008]