'"Animal innocence, the beauty of women, the certainty of death - everything that makes human life more than a weekend in hell is brought together in museums." – Chris Marker, Immemory, 1998


“We were born in the museum, it’s our mother house”, said Godard about his Histoire(s) du Cinéma. This statement is the motto for this programme, in which guests from different artistic fields will reflect on this enigmatic relationship between cinema and the museum, based on themes such as: the imaginary museum, memory and the past, the intersection of times and narratives, montage, reproduction (original and copy), conservation, guided tour, art history, exhibition, collection and archive. At the end of this programme, we hope to be able to draw a possible map of the territory of relations between cinema and the museum. After the first film cycle dedicated to bridging the gap between cinema and the visual arts, in this new programme we propose a kind of anthology of representations of the museum in cinema from different periods of its history right up to the present day. Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Straub and Huillet’s Une visite au Louvre (not included in this programme), Godard’s Bande à Part, or Sokurov’s Russian Ark are just a few examples of extraordinary films in which representations of the museum have been produced, inscribed with diverse meanings. Designed for the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira – where a museum and a cinema converge – we are interested in questioning the museographic dimension of cinema and the cinematographic dimension of the museum, asking, among others, the following question: how does cinema and its introduction into exhibition spaces force the museum to rethink itself and to reflect on the way it carries out its functions? And also: in what way does cinema, by bringing the museum to the big screen and meddling in the history of art, making it its object, represent itself as a form of the imaginary museum (Malraux), as we believe Godard wanted to show in his Histoire(s) du Cinéma