'Putting a Garbo costume next to the skull from Psycho is a gimmick for tourists,' the celebrated French film-maker François Truffaut once said of the Musée du Cinéma in Paris.
But the museum has survived and, at the end of last month, opened in its new form in a building designed by Frank Gehry that formerly housed the American Cultural Institute. This grand project will unite the cinémathèque, library and museum collection in one national film centre of the kind envisaged for London.
Around Europe there is a hive of activity surrounding national museums of cinema. In 2000 Italy reopened its Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin's most spectacular neo-classical buildings, the 19th-century Mole Antonelliana.
And in Britain, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT) is exploring a new extension in London to showcase its historic photographic collection, part of a wider review of the museum that might include a name change to the National Media Museum to broaden its remit and appeal.
But what role can these museums play in the wider cinematic culture of a nation? Can they successfully combine the exhibition of pre-cinema and cinematographic artefacts with an introduction to the best of contemporary national and world cinema; and are they successful at attracting an audience beyond film buffs and schoolchildren?
The idea of a museological study of cinema has a history nearly as long as cinema itself. Many western countries established cinémathèques, that is, archives with viewing facilities and an ongoing screening programme, or national museums of cinema from the 1930s.
But from the beginning there were tensions around whether cinema heritage should even be placed in a museum and given the same status as art. This was based on a value system that considered cinema in the first instance a technology rather than a cultural process.
These tensions have determined the historical development of the institutions created to conserve and safeguard cinematographic heritage. Not surprisingly the first cinematographic display in the UK was housed in the Science Museum in London, which had a small collection as early as 1913.
Michael Harvey, the head of cinematography at the NMPFT, says that the technological-determined approach was sustained, at least in Britain, because the British Film Institute, established in 1933, had curatorial responsibility for films and the dissemination and promotion of film and its history.
Today there is a clear determination on the part of museums of cinema to move beyond the historical division that relegated cinematographic collections to science and technology museums - and prior to that to universal expositions.
Museums of cinema are becoming broader institutions, with responsibilities for national cinematographic collections and the dissemination of cinema culture through film festivals, thematic exhibitions and educational programmes.
But that does not mean all the old tensions have subsided. Claude Berri, the president of the new Musée du Cinéma in Paris, has been accused of being more interested in contemporary art than cinema.
He changed the original plans - to dedicate the entire fifth floor of the building to the former Musée du Cinéma - so that now a space originally envisaged as a permanent place 'entirely consecrated to cinema' will be used instead for exhibitions of painting and cinema.
And the permanent collection, which comprises the unique Will Day collection, is to be housed in a reduced form in the former temporary exhibition space on the second storey. Laurent Mannoni, the joint director of collections, says this move 'transforms, both practically and symbolically, the permanent museum into a temporary exhibition'.
The type of exhibition and programme chosen for the launch of the Musée du Cinéma gives an indication of the direction that the new president is taking.
In the pre-publicity brochure for Renoir/Renoir, its opening exhibition is described as 'the first large temporary exhibition dedicated to the Renoir family', comprising a complete retrospective of Jean Renoir's films, the activities of his brothers Pierre and Claude Junior, respectively actor and camera operator, and also material from his father Pierre-Auguste, the impressionist painter.
Inevitably a great deal of prominence will go to the impressionist painter rather than the film-maker.
In spite of the particular intrigues attached to the Paris museum, most museums of cinema have developed new environments for their public, with exhibition spaces designed to move away from glass cases and to use interactive displays.
At the NMPFT in Bradford the collection is very hands on, with visitors able to learn how television cameras and animation work.
Interactive displays are also central to the Turin museum, which houses an important collection of the 'archaeology of cinema' - optical boxes, magic lanterns, shadow theatre and so on - where some of these wonderful optical toys are set up so that they can be experienced as they would have been in the travelling shows of the 18th century.
Most museums of cinema have pursued a policy of digitisation of collections, creation of multimedia and interactive environments and online exhibitions. The NMPFT website gets about 800,000 hits per year, although these include the hits to three associated festival websites.
But digital developments are costly and in some cases the results have not lived up to expectations. For example the gallery Wired Worlds: Exploring the Digital Frontier, part of the NMPFT's flagship project Imaging Frontiers a £16m expansion programme, cost £2.2m to complete.
Although it aimed to 'address the challenges of an evolving field', six years down the line, staff at the museum believe the project delivered 'mixed results' and it clearly appears dated.
In Turin the 'multi-museum' project created in 2001 is entirely web-based and its purpose is to recreate the museum online in multi-dimensional form. But on entering the its online 'hypermuseum', it soon becomes apparent that it is effective mostly at the information level rather as a physical experience of the museum.
If digital developments do not always live up to expectations, other types of activities have been successful. All three museums have endeavoured over the years to exhibit and screen film material produced at an international level.
There now seems to be a consensus that the role of a national museum is to provide international resources and knowledge alongside the exhibition and screening of objects and films that have been created and produced by national cultures.
This has been achieved through specialist exhibitions. For example, the Turin museum had an exhibition dedicated to American stardom entitled Marilyn and Friends in 2004; the Musée du Cinéma has a retrospective on Korean cinema; and in the NMPFT has its annual Bite the Mango Festival, which is dedicated to world cinema, in September.
Museums of cinema play an important role in the promotion of cinematographic culture and provide a link between this culture and collections of pre-cinema and cinematography.
The three directors of the museums in Paris, Turin and Bradford have said that the collections, and especially the section categorised as 'archaeology of cinema', can be best served by being part of a wider museo-logical context, where links are forged with contemporary cinematic practices.
Donata Pesenti Compagnoni, the director of collections at the Turin museum, has tried to move beyond the historical split between film and cinematographic heritage. This process is also key to moving beyond the divide between cinema as 'leisure/technology' and cinema as 'aesthetics/art'.
Doing this has opened up cinematographic culture to many different audiences, and bridged the gap between the traditional function of the museum as repository of collections and the contemporary vibrancy of film and popular culture.
The NMPFT, for example, is home to more than 3 million objects and at the same time it also houses the first Imax theatre. It has two other cinemas that show arthouse and mainstream films, it runs three film festivals and is also home to the BBC in Bradford.
Museums of cinema are popular. In 2004-05 the NMPFT attracted more than 700,000 visitors and Turin followed closely behind with 500,000. The new museum in Paris expects to attract up to 600,000 visitors a year. Their popularity is ironic at a time when independent cinema houses are fast disappearing and home cinema is the perceived new medium, leaving behind even the multiplexes.
If the survival of cinema is dependent on public cultural spaces such as museums, then preserving cinema's cultural heritage is not only a worthwhile activity but also one that could reconcile the ideal of public access to cinematic cultural heritage in museums with the popular culture of cinemas.
In turn, maybe this could solve the surviving tensions about cinema as an aesthetic and educational experience compared with cinema as a leisure activity.
The programmes of activities, exhibitions and events at national museums of cinema show that it is possible to attract audiences to cinematographic heritage as well as to keep alive a public film culture. It is said 'cinema won't last forever', but the paradox of cinema in a museum may just mean they can.
Rinella Cere is a researcher in the history of cinema at Sheffield Hallam University
But the museum has survived and, at the end of last month, opened in its new form in a building designed by Frank Gehry that formerly housed the American Cultural Institute. This grand project will unite the cinémathèque, library and museum collection in one national film centre of the kind envisaged for London.
Around Europe there is a hive of activity surrounding national museums of cinema. In 2000 Italy reopened its Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin's most spectacular neo-classical buildings, the 19th-century Mole Antonelliana.
And in Britain, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT) is exploring a new extension in London to showcase its historic photographic collection, part of a wider review of the museum that might include a name change to the National Media Museum to broaden its remit and appeal.
But what role can these museums play in the wider cinematic culture of a nation? Can they successfully combine the exhibition of pre-cinema and cinematographic artefacts with an introduction to the best of contemporary national and world cinema; and are they successful at attracting an audience beyond film buffs and schoolchildren?
The idea of a museological study of cinema has a history nearly as long as cinema itself. Many western countries established cinémathèques, that is, archives with viewing facilities and an ongoing screening programme, or national museums of cinema from the 1930s.
But from the beginning there were tensions around whether cinema heritage should even be placed in a museum and given the same status as art. This was based on a value system that considered cinema in the first instance a technology rather than a cultural process.
These tensions have determined the historical development of the institutions created to conserve and safeguard cinematographic heritage. Not surprisingly the first cinematographic display in the UK was housed in the Science Museum in London, which had a small collection as early as 1913.
Michael Harvey, the head of cinematography at the NMPFT, says that the technological-determined approach was sustained, at least in Britain, because the British Film Institute, established in 1933, had curatorial responsibility for films and the dissemination and promotion of film and its history.
Today there is a clear determination on the part of museums of cinema to move beyond the historical division that relegated cinematographic collections to science and technology museums - and prior to that to universal expositions.
Museums of cinema are becoming broader institutions, with responsibilities for national cinematographic collections and the dissemination of cinema culture through film festivals, thematic exhibitions and educational programmes.
But that does not mean all the old tensions have subsided. Claude Berri, the president of the new Musée du Cinéma in Paris, has been accused of being more interested in contemporary art than cinema.
He changed the original plans - to dedicate the entire fifth floor of the building to the former Musée du Cinéma - so that now a space originally envisaged as a permanent place 'entirely consecrated to cinema' will be used instead for exhibitions of painting and cinema.
And the permanent collection, which comprises the unique Will Day collection, is to be housed in a reduced form in the former temporary exhibition space on the second storey. Laurent Mannoni, the joint director of collections, says this move 'transforms, both practically and symbolically, the permanent museum into a temporary exhibition'.
The type of exhibition and programme chosen for the launch of the Musée du Cinéma gives an indication of the direction that the new president is taking.
In the pre-publicity brochure for Renoir/Renoir, its opening exhibition is described as 'the first large temporary exhibition dedicated to the Renoir family', comprising a complete retrospective of Jean Renoir's films, the activities of his brothers Pierre and Claude Junior, respectively actor and camera operator, and also material from his father Pierre-Auguste, the impressionist painter.
Inevitably a great deal of prominence will go to the impressionist painter rather than the film-maker.
In spite of the particular intrigues attached to the Paris museum, most museums of cinema have developed new environments for their public, with exhibition spaces designed to move away from glass cases and to use interactive displays.
At the NMPFT in Bradford the collection is very hands on, with visitors able to learn how television cameras and animation work.
Interactive displays are also central to the Turin museum, which houses an important collection of the 'archaeology of cinema' - optical boxes, magic lanterns, shadow theatre and so on - where some of these wonderful optical toys are set up so that they can be experienced as they would have been in the travelling shows of the 18th century.
Most museums of cinema have pursued a policy of digitisation of collections, creation of multimedia and interactive environments and online exhibitions. The NMPFT website gets about 800,000 hits per year, although these include the hits to three associated festival websites.
But digital developments are costly and in some cases the results have not lived up to expectations. For example the gallery Wired Worlds: Exploring the Digital Frontier, part of the NMPFT's flagship project Imaging Frontiers a £16m expansion programme, cost £2.2m to complete.
Although it aimed to 'address the challenges of an evolving field', six years down the line, staff at the museum believe the project delivered 'mixed results' and it clearly appears dated.
In Turin the 'multi-museum' project created in 2001 is entirely web-based and its purpose is to recreate the museum online in multi-dimensional form. But on entering the its online 'hypermuseum', it soon becomes apparent that it is effective mostly at the information level rather as a physical experience of the museum.
If digital developments do not always live up to expectations, other types of activities have been successful. All three museums have endeavoured over the years to exhibit and screen film material produced at an international level.
There now seems to be a consensus that the role of a national museum is to provide international resources and knowledge alongside the exhibition and screening of objects and films that have been created and produced by national cultures.
This has been achieved through specialist exhibitions. For example, the Turin museum had an exhibition dedicated to American stardom entitled Marilyn and Friends in 2004; the Musée du Cinéma has a retrospective on Korean cinema; and in the NMPFT has its annual Bite the Mango Festival, which is dedicated to world cinema, in September.
Museums of cinema play an important role in the promotion of cinematographic culture and provide a link between this culture and collections of pre-cinema and cinematography.
The three directors of the museums in Paris, Turin and Bradford have said that the collections, and especially the section categorised as 'archaeology of cinema', can be best served by being part of a wider museo-logical context, where links are forged with contemporary cinematic practices.
Donata Pesenti Compagnoni, the director of collections at the Turin museum, has tried to move beyond the historical split between film and cinematographic heritage. This process is also key to moving beyond the divide between cinema as 'leisure/technology' and cinema as 'aesthetics/art'.
Doing this has opened up cinematographic culture to many different audiences, and bridged the gap between the traditional function of the museum as repository of collections and the contemporary vibrancy of film and popular culture.
The NMPFT, for example, is home to more than 3 million objects and at the same time it also houses the first Imax theatre. It has two other cinemas that show arthouse and mainstream films, it runs three film festivals and is also home to the BBC in Bradford.
Museums of cinema are popular. In 2004-05 the NMPFT attracted more than 700,000 visitors and Turin followed closely behind with 500,000. The new museum in Paris expects to attract up to 600,000 visitors a year. Their popularity is ironic at a time when independent cinema houses are fast disappearing and home cinema is the perceived new medium, leaving behind even the multiplexes.
If the survival of cinema is dependent on public cultural spaces such as museums, then preserving cinema's cultural heritage is not only a worthwhile activity but also one that could reconcile the ideal of public access to cinematic cultural heritage in museums with the popular culture of cinemas.
In turn, maybe this could solve the surviving tensions about cinema as an aesthetic and educational experience compared with cinema as a leisure activity.
The programmes of activities, exhibitions and events at national museums of cinema show that it is possible to attract audiences to cinematographic heritage as well as to keep alive a public film culture. It is said 'cinema won't last forever', but the paradox of cinema in a museum may just mean they can.
Rinella Cere is a researcher in the history of cinema at Sheffield Hallam University
