AT THE MUSEUM: A PILGRIMAGE OF VANQUISHED OBJECTS

by Jeanne C. Finley

Date: 1989    Running Time:  23:00   Sound: Kevin Deal
   Narration: Les Williams   Editor: Jeanne C. Finley and Larry Andrews
   Assistant Director: John Muse   Director of Photography: Jim Meek
   Production Assistant: Laura James   Original Musical Score: Kevin Deal

This tape, produced during the Artist-In-Residence at the Oakland Museum in California, is about archiving and documenting culture in the 20th century. The museum requested an artist interpretation of the museum's displays and collections including History, Natural Science and Art departments. It is not specific to the Oakland museum but explores how all types of archiving, including documentary filmmaking, eventually creates it's own history from the artifacts it collects, specific to the needs of the documentarian.

Using the Oakland Museum's diplays and collections as an environment, the narrator in At The Museum : A Pilgrimage of Vanquished Objects leads the viewer on a tour through a mythical museum during which displays and the individuals represented within them come alive and discuss how their role as an artifact and image contrasts with their actual lifes. For example, the tape looks at the famous Dorthea Lange photograph of "The Migrant Mother" included in the museum's archive. We then meet one of the children in the photograph, now almost 60 years old and she talks about the difference between her life as an image and her life as a women with children of her own.

The tour guide suggests a variety of interpretations of each display which challenge the authority of the educational museum, documentary filmmaking and the voice of the narrator itself. The tour ends in the National Science department, confronted by an environmental condition that maps the history of progress.