I'm used to these more in the context of gallery space - where a lot of thought has gone into designing the experience to be as full as possible. Sometimes there's a little viewing area, like in the Cornerhouse, in Manchester, with a little simple bench to sit on. At the Baltic, in Gateshead, at the moment, there's an installation by Steve McQueen where you need to get through a very large pitch black large room - one of the attendants has a torch - to enter a small space where there's a 16mm projector playing a film loop. One test of these installations are how long the images last in one's imagination and that comes down more to the power of the image rather than to the surroundings. (My lasting perception of McQueen's image of a dead horse was of being cheated - of my time and energy). We've been well trained to suspend reality, in a cinema, and can enter and leave that state quite easily. Dark spaces help to engage one more emotionally, certainly.
There was a shop in Newcastle, down a back lane, that had a blanked out window with circles cut out that people could peer through and watch short video loops. I was the only person that seemed to watch them - it was on the way to the bank - and I used to push postcards through the door telling them this. 'I am your viewer and it's crap'. The shop next door, where I've shopped for 35 years confirmed it and the Little Jewel Cinema has now closed. But it wasn't a museum - it was a video installation gallery.
In a museum there is less attention to control visitors' perceptions. The video images there are perhaps more decorative and less 'invasive'. I've never seen a prehistoric film show and the strongest moving images I can recall from a museum are in the Liverpool Maritime Museum. Are they in the lifts? Museums seem to be characterised by static exhibits - or at least those I visit. The centre for film and photography, in Bradford, is a museum, in some ways, and has a 70mm screen.
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